Explaining Military Behavior During Self-Coups

Militaries often play supporting roles in self-coups when they obey orders to shut down parliaments, repress protests, or prosecute opponents. Yet, other militaries refuse to play these roles, often leading self-coup attempts to fail. I argue that certain types of militaries are more likely to facilitate self-coups than others. Politicized, praetorian militaries make self-coups more difficult, by adding another veto player to contend with. Apolitical professional militaries, paradoxically, make self-coups easier, with their instinct to obey orders and not challenge their commander-in-chief. To test this theory, this paper leverages a new, cross-national dataset of military behavior during self-coups.