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.

At the end of the book, the conclusion revisits the current debate among world historians whether to favour comparative approaches or search for cultural connections. Based on the themes analyzed in the current volume, this chapter argues in conclusion that ancient world history will have to combine both. Macro- and micro-perspectives should be seen as complementary; the former makes it possible to identify broader patterns while the latter enables the study of cultural exchanges. The latter, however, has often been preoccupied with marginal phenomena while the former sometimes has been too teleological, subsuming everything to a developmental logic ending in Europe. The view of ancient world history developed here seeks to identify a set of global patterns that combine both the population majority and the most central social, political and cultural developments of the period into a unified whole while exploring how these phenomena interacted across ancient Afro-Eurasia. Roman historians can gain a lot from intensifying the dialogue with students of other premodern Afro-Eurasian societies.

This chapter introduces the growing field of world history and its intellectual predecessors to make the argument why Greco-Roman society needs to find its place within this fast evolving discourse. Recontextualizing the classical experience within a wider world history will allow Greco-Roman history to be aligned more closely with the global norm, rather than remain an anomaly in European history. But ancient history does not simply have to be at the receiving end of the putative dialogue. The field has a long prior record of engaging in a creative dialogue both with anthropology and historical sociology. The former favoured the study of culture; the latter promoted societal comparison. Currently, world history is torn between a focus on cultural connection and on historical comparison. Building on the past experience of classics, this chapter will equally show how a glance at Greco-Roman society may help the field of world history both to overcome this division. An Afro-Eurasian arena is identified as the context for parallel and interconnected developments of peasantries and slavery, universal empires, literary cultures, world trade in charismatic goods and rebellions.

Macedon and Qin are introduced, providing separate summary histories of these two polities, examining the differing types and quality of evidence for the study of each, examines the geographic and cultural location of these polities relative to their cores of their cultural networks, and argues for the usefulness of the center-periphery axiom in the study of these entities. Lastly, the nature of the Macedonian and Qin identity is explored, suggesting that prior attempts to define them as Greek/Zhou or not Greek/Zhou miss the clearer dynamic that they are frontier cultures. Their significant divergences from Greek and Zhou norms are explained by the same factors that cause colonial and frontier societies throughout human history to “deviate” from norms of a core culture. I also point out the significant ways in which their identities seek to preserve earlier cultural modes.

The conclusion brings together the themes that have emerged throughout the book, provides comparative perspectives, teases out some of the wider implications for the study of gender and suggests directions for future research. It also comes back to the multitude of animals that have appeared sporadically throughout the different chapters, discussing the role they played in gender construction and the potential of human/animal connections to decentre the man in the process of creating male subjectivities.