Will there be blood? Explaining violence during coups d’état

Abstract

Although just under half of all coup d’état attempts involve fatalities, there has been surprisingly little attention to the conditions under which coups turn violent. Existing research emphasizes the incentives coup plotters have to avoid bloodshed but does not explain the conditions under which violence nonetheless occurs. This article develops a theoretical framework that predicts that the extent of violence that occurs during coup attempts will vary systematically with central features of incumbent regimes and coup plotters. It then tests these predictions using new data on the fatalities associated with 377 coup attempts between 1950 and 2017. Coups against military regimes are found to be less violent than those against civilian dictatorships. This is because military rulers are better able to estimate the likelihood of the coup succeeding and more sensitive to the costs associated with using violence to suppress a coup. Since their post-coup fates tend to be better than those of other authoritarian leaders, they also have fewer incentives to hang on to power at any cost. The analysis also demonstrates that coups led by senior officers involve less bloodshed than those by junior officers and enlisted men. However, coups against rulers that counterbalance their militaries are no more violent than those against rulers that do not. The results shed new light on the dynamics of coup attempts.