The Enemy Gets a Vote: Military Coups as Instrument of Reform in the Electoral Cycle

This paper investigates the prevalence of military coups in proximity to constitutional reforms and elections since 1945 worldwide. Military coups that unfolded across the Sahel and Asia in the last decade went hand in hand with highly contested elections, electoral reforms and constitutional amendments. Yet, coups are typically studied as violent mode of regime change in the academic literature, which insulates the occurrence of coups from the electoral cycle they take place in. In practice the end game of military coups is rarely just a forced exit of a sitting incumbent. Moreover, successful coup attempts alone do not guarantee that coupists can entrench themselves unless reforms are undertaken in the immediate aftermath of a coup. Using new data on constitutional reforms worldwide, this paper will therefore analyze the co-occurrence of military coups, constitutional change and elections to proximity of coups to assess when and how coup leaders conduct, suspend or change constitutional reforms and electoral proceedures. The goal of this paper is to build on both, coup studies and authoritarianism research to shed light on an understudied nexus of political violence in the lifespan of autocratic regimes.