January 6, 2021
What are coups & auto-coups & where they’ve occurred in democracies
This post defines coups and auto-coups and identifies where they have occurred in democracies.
A coup is a swift and irregular transfer of power from one executive to another where either force or the threat of force is used to install the new leader into office. It implies that the perpetrator has the support of the armed forces or powerful factions within the military. While coups are the most typical manner historically in which one dictator succeeds another—rigged elections, revolutions, and civil wars are the others—it is rare to observe a coup displacing a freely and fairly elected government where citizens are fully enfranchised. The few prominent examples include Spain in 1923, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Greece in 1967, Chile in 1973, Pakistan in 1999, and Thailand in 2006. Three of those cases involved the CIA. If we stretch the definition of democracy, coups felled “elected governments” in Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Peru, and Turkey during the Cold War. If we really stretch the definition, we might also include episodes in countries where the military was the strongest political actor and elections were somewhat of a joke: Bolivia, Burma, Burundi, Comoros, Cuba, Ecuador, Ghana, Honduras, South Korea, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Suriname, and Uganda.
Autocoups occur when a duly elected executive suspends the legislature and judiciary or withdraws civil liberties and otherwise violates the constitution—sometimes with the intent of protracting their rule. But the number of autocoups that have occured in democracies again place us in the land of very few data points: Hitler in 1933, Uruguay in 1972, Peru in 1992 (and some argue, again in 2019), Turkey in 2015, Hungary this year, Bolivia before Morales was exiled to Mexico last year, and Maduro in Venezuela over the last few years. If we again stretch the definition of democracy we might include episodes in Pakistan, Panama, The Philippines, and Sri Lanka. The key to successful autocoups? An executive opportunistically declares a state of emergency and then uses extraordinary powers to arrogate more authority, the way Viktor Orban did in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The following table lists the modern cases of democratic breakdown using a narrow, electoral definition of democracy (see Albertus, Michael, and Victor Menaldo. 2018. “Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy,” Cambridge University Press):
Cases of Democratic Breakdown, 1950 to 2008.
