Appendix A : Coups and autocratic regime collapse : transitions to democracy and adverse regime change

This document includes details on the specifications that produce the plots in the main text, along with numerical summaries of the main results. It also provides results from alternative specifications and robustness checks. Acknowledgements: For comments, we thank Andreas Beger, Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne. ∗University of California at Los Angeles †Michigan State University ‡University of California at Los Angeles §Corresponding author. Pennsylvania State University, Department of Political Science, 203 Pond Lab, University Park, PA, USA 16802. Email: josephGwright@gmail.com. For comments, we thank Andreas Beger, Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne. All errors remain the authors’. Appendix A: Coups and autocratic regime collapse: transitions to democracy and adverse regime change This section discusses the statistical tests used to assess which regime transitions follow coups in dictatorships.1 Some of the tests discussed are reproduced from the manuscript for the reader’s convenience. Several additional tests are reported as robustness checks. To conduct our analysis, we begin with the latest coup data from Powell and Thyne (2011),2 and merge it with an updated version of Geddes et al. (2014) (henceforth GWF). Thus, we obtain a sample of all autocratic regimes that experienced at least one coup in the period 1950-2015. After structuring our data at the country-year level, we then construct our dependent variable: an indicator of whether the autocratic regime collapses in the current year or the subsequent two years. Before proceeding, though, we clarify what is meant by “regime”. An autocratic regime – or dictatorship – is a set of formal and/or informal rules for choosing leaders and policies (Geddes et al., 2014). The rule central to distinguishing one autocratic regime from another is the one that identifies the group from which leaders can be chosen and determines who influences personnel choice and policy—one autocratic regime replaces another when the group of elites who hold power changes. Autocratic regime collapse, in turn, occurs when the set of formal and informal rules for choosing leaders and policies changes. Crucially, this conceptualization of autocratic regimes affect the analysis of coup outcomes. Coups in autocratic regimes may, in some cases, lead to regime collapse: when the coup leaders oust the current elites from power and establish a new ruling group. However, in many cases coups in autocracies only replace the incumbent leader with another member of the ruling elite. In other words, when a successful coup occurs in an autocracy, one of two outcomes emerges: the ruling group retains its power (No change), or loses its power (Regime change). The latter outcome, in turn, can bring to power one of two sets of elites: a new autocratic regime (Autocratic transition), or a democratic government (Democratization). Descriptive patterns The top panel of Figure A-1 shows the frequency distribution of these potential outcomes.3 Prior to 1990, the most common outcome is Autocratic transition, the next most common is No change, and Democratization the least common. In the post-Cold War period, coups are more destabilizing, as 90% are followed by regime collapse within two years. While Democratization becomes more likely in this period, Autocratic transition is still the modal outcome. Therefore, the increasing We note that our study is not the first to address this question. See Miller (2011), Marinov and Goemans (2014), Thyne and Powell (2014), Beger (2015), and Noyes (2015) for additional analyses. This was downloaded from http://www.jonathanmpowell. com/coup-detat-dataset.html on May 18, 2015. We only include coups that target an incumbent autocratic regime after January 1 of its first year in power. We consider regime collapse in the year of an observed coup event or the subsequent two years.