Beyond the Coup D’état: Military Roles in Democratic Backsliding Since the Cold War

This paper presents first descriptive insights from a new research project on military roles in democratic backsliding since the end of the Cold War. Conceptualizing military roles as either perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders, or custodians, and drawing on a new, original dataset the paper documents their empirical prevalence across all episodes of democratic backsliding in electoral democracies from 1991 to 2025. The paper examines three interrelated dimensions of military behavior during democratic backsliding. First, it analyzes how military roles vary across different modes of backsliding and regime types, with particular attention to differences between incumbent-led erosion and breakdown episodes and to institutional contexts such as presidential systems and legacies of civilian control. Second, it explores regional patterns in military roles, identifying clusters of persistent military passivity as well as regions marked by more frequent active involvement in backsliding processes. Third, the paper investigates descriptive associations between military roles and the outcomes of backsliding episodes, comparing patterns of democratic erosion, breakdown, and re-equilibration across different forms of military behavior. By offering the first comprehensive assessment of military behavior in all post-Cold War episodes of democratic backsliding, the paper challenges prevailing assumptions about the military’s declining relevance and lays the groundwork for future explanatory and causal analyses