Chapter 8 examines political systems with the highest values of T, or time since the last successful coup. It explains how and why dictatorships as different as the PRIs in Mexico (1929–2000) and the Somoza family’s in Nicaragua (1936–79) effected an autocratic exit out of the coup trap. And it analyzes how the republics of Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay escaped from golpismo by constructing constitutional democracy. Successful transitions away from the Coup Trap, I find, occur if they survive what I call “trial by fire” – assaults on their authority – that allow them to purge the armed forces of sedition. Escapes from the Coup Trap are also a function of convincing the political opposition to desist from joining coup coalitions, which dictatorships and democracies accomplish in slightly different ways.

Chapter 6 examines five of the nine modal cases of political instability in the region (the seventh chapter examines the other four). These are the ones where T is neither below nor above one standard deviation of its mean. My model anticipates 77 percent of the years with successful military coups in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Peru, Panama, Brazil, and Venezuela. Unlike the highly unstable cases I analyze in Chapter 5, each of the modal cases stumbled into more liberalized political orders. Chapter 6 also explores why military coups ended democratic experiments or reformist interludes in Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, and Brazil.

The conclusions distill the key findings of this book’s encounter with theory, cross-national statistical models, and case studies. A prediction-centered multi-method approach demonstrates how case studies fill in the causal gaps of cross-national statistical models to explain the rise and fall of the Coup Trap. And the conclusions identify the mechanisms that kept most political systems submerged in chronic instability – and allowed half a dozen to consolidate stable democratic or authoritarian political orders.

Chapter 7 examines how a handful of incumbents managed to establish long-lasting dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Panama, and Venezuela, the four other political systems with modal levels of instability (Chapter 6 examines the five other such systems). This chapter also explains why, of the nine modal cases, only the Venezuelan political system managed to leave the Coup Trap by building a constitutional democracy. It is the ability to continue organizing coup coalitions, I argue, that ends democratic experiments; it takes time for a large enough coalition of interests to impose civilian solutions on acute political conflicts, that is, to punish and therefore prevent defection from its ranks.

Chapter 3 statistically tests implications of my theory of the coup trap. I try to disconfirm my hypotheses by using event history or duration models of instability on a database of military coups, economic variables, political system characteristics, and levels of instability for eighteen countries between 1900 and 2014. While controlling for economic and political variables, statistical models show that autocracies are more unstable than democracies and that instability breeds coups. The likelihood of a successful military coup, in other words, remains high in the wake of the overthrow of a president, especially in non-democratic political orders and during election years. Logit models comparing golpes that manage and do not manage to overthrow governments also confirm a key implication of my theory of the coup trap: that military conspiracies are much more likely to prosper if they count upon the support of the opposition. These findings cement my argument that the overthrow of governments is a function of military as well as civil coalitions that reflect the unstable nature of political competition in less institutionalized political systems.

The first of this chapter’s three goals is to unveil a new catalog of more than 320 military coups, slightly less than half of which succeeded in overthrowing the executive. A second goal is to remind ourselves that elections were an integral part of constitutional or quasi-constitutional political orders – regimes best described as electoral autocracies because their incumbents ran the risk of losing regularly scheduled elections. This chapter concludes by combining data on military coups and regimes to produce a typology of political trajectories – and whose origins and persistence the rest of this book explores, documents, and explains.

Chapter 5 of The Coup Trap in Latin America examines the political systems of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay, the three most unstable of the region. The model anticipates 89 percent of the years of instability in these systems. It presents qualitative evidence that false positive predictions tell us something important: that conditions can be ripe for a military coup for decades at a time. What I call an atmosphere of crisis – that conflicts between pro- and anti-government supporters are severe enough so that it is increasingly certain that the president’s survival is uncertain – can, in other words, persist for decades. To explain when assaults on the executive take place requires analyzing micro-political factors, which the statistical model cannot easily grasp. This chapter also begins to explain what makes T such a powerful predictor of instability; it turns out to be a proxy for factional strife, which, among other things, disseminates the practical knowledge necessary to organize and execute a military coup d’état.

Chapter 2 provides a political theory of the origins and dynamics of the coup trap. It does not infer the behavior of pro- and anti-forces from their economic interests or their social position but instead argues that structural features of political systems – their competitiveness, how often presidents fall to military coups, and the length of their electoral cycle – explain why instability persists. At its core, the theory argues that the monopolization of power incites the opposition to form coalitions with dissident officers (the “coup coalition”) to oust governments weakened by the recent overthrow of presidents. These structural properties also explain why some coalitions of officers and politicians manage to navigate out of the coup trap, either by forging an autocratic or democratic political order.

Chapter 4 presents and interprets the core results of the prediction-centered multi-method The Coup Trap in Latin America pioneers. It converts the statistical coefficients in Chapter 3 into probability estimates of successful military coups for every country-year, which accurately predict almost 80 percent of the years with such golpes in the region. This chapter reveals that almost 98 percent of its negative predictions – that the armed forces will stay in their barracks – are accurate. Only 2 percent of its negative predictions are false (type 2 errors), which this chapter identifies and begins to analyze. This chapter also begins to explore inaccurate positive predictions of successful golpes (or type 1 errors), showing that the model warns that conditions can be propitious for the unconstitutional seizure of power for years at a time. This chapter uses a key independent variable – T, or time since the last coup – to place political systems in one of three groups, each of which subsequent chapters examine. Chapter 4 is the pivot between the quantitative and qualitative chapters of The Coup Trap in Latin America.

The introduction to The Coup Trap in Latin America outlines this book’s objectives, methods, and key conclusions. My theory, in a nutshell, suggests that the structure of political competition – its formal and informal rules – determines whether a political system sinks into or escapes from the Coup Trap. The introduction discusses the book’s two-pronged multi-method research design, which pioneers the use of statistical predictions to explain when military coups do and do not occur – and uses analytic narratives to assess their plausibility. The introduction also previews the implications of this book’s findings for theories of dictatorship and democracy, for the study of the military coup and instability more generally, and for explanations of regime development in modern Latin America.

Disaggregation has been an underappreciated tool for the formation and utilization of concepts. This chapter argues that disaggregating multidimensional concepts can be useful in four ways. It can (1) resolve dilemmas of “awkward fit,” where some empirical cases seem to fit in the categories established by a concept at best awkwardly, at worst inappropriately; (2) address the challenge of “middle cases”; (3) strengthen measurement validity; and (4) avoid a problem of tautology. The use of disaggregation will be examined with respect to important and complex concepts such as corporatism and democracy.

This chapter provides an overview of the core findings of the book. It outlines the key theoretical and methodological insights gained through a qualitative comparison of the politics of corporate regulation and liberalization in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, including the introduction of the theory of rent-conditional reforms. It further outlines the relevance of the rent-conditional reform theory to ongoing debates around the political and economic effects of natural resource wealth, particularly amid the potential global transition toward a less carbon-intensive economy.

Hostility towards parties has never ceased; revisiting Hans Kelsen’s ideas is particularly significant today when critiques of parties are meeting the revival of the myth of People as One, which Kelsen devoted much of his work as a legal scholar and political theorist to opposing. Kelsen addressed the issue of parties at two significant historical moments when the constitutional government was succumbing to the assault of autocracy (Fascism and Nazism) and revolutionary experimentations (Bolshevism) and when parties regained momentum with the Cold War. These were two very different circumstances: in the former, the issue was opposing and resisting monocratic dictatorship; in the latter, the issue was defending party pluralism within liberal democracy itself. Kelsen never resorted to ‘militant democracy’ to protect democracy. The reason was both theoretical and empirical. As a ‘formalist’, Kelsen kept substantive politics out of procedural politics, which he considered normative or ‘not metaphysical’ because its task was channelling public doing and not achieving certain specific goals; the sole purpose of the rules of the game was the exercise and reproduction over time of political freedom. Therefore, pluralism, legal equality, and individual liberties were non-negotiable norms of democracy, whose process was based on the spirit of compromise and majority rule.

This chapter introduces the arguments and structure of the book. It surveys how the liberalization of company creation regulations in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia across the first two decades of the twenty-first century defy the predictions of the existing resource curse literature. To explain the political constrains on economic liberalization in resource-wealthy, autocratic and hybrid regimes, the chapter introduces the rent-conditional reform theory. It also details the shortcomings of earlier quantitative studies of economic regulation and liberalization in contexts of resource wealth and outlines the methodological innovations of this book.

This chapter explores the relationship between Hans Kelsen’s philosophical relativism and his theory of democratic leadership. First, it argues that Kelsen’s theory of democratic leadership cannot be fully understood unless placed within his broader political thought, which includes a commitment to philosophical relativism. Second, it suggests that Kelsen provided an original answer to the puzzle of democratic leadership that is significant in its own right. Writing during the rise of fascism, Nazism, and Soviet communism, Kelsen made a crucial distinction between autocratic and democratic forms of leadership: while autocratic leaders are seen as possessing absolute knowledge and, therefore, hold unlimited power, democratic leaders are thought to carry only relative truths, and their power is consequently limited. Kelsen demonstrated that if we believe moral absolutes exist, it is logical to have an absolute leader with unfettered power. In contrast, if we hold that moral absolutes are inaccessible to human knowledge and only relative truths exist, it follows that leaders should have limited power and be subject to constant scrutiny and control. Contrary to the common characterisation of Kelsen as an abstract and idealist thinker, this chapter shows that his approach to political leadership was normative yet realist. Rather than eliminating leadership, Kelsen associated democracy with multiple, temporary leaders who have limited and relative political power.

This chapter presents a theoretical model of the conditions under which natural resource-wealthy, autocratic and hybrid regimes pursue or eschew the liberalization of domestic economic regulations in the twenty-first century. I term this the rent-conditional reform theory. This model focuses on three salient groups: political elites who devise and implement policy, economic elites who enjoy non-competitive privileges, and the non-elite citizenry who may or may not participate in private entrepreneurship. This model illustrates the demands and constraints both economic elites and the citizenry impose upon political elites amid the pursuit of economic liberalization.