Did the threat of war trigger the extraction-coercion cycle? In this chapter I use a panel of Latin America from 1830 to 1913 to test the effects of looming international threats on domestic taxation and internal conflict. It is believed that due to the availability of foreign loans and taxable imports, states in the region did not have to engage in extraction from the local population, nor did they have to coerce individuals to comply with such policies. I summarize this argument in the form of testable hypotheses and point to factors—naval blockades and sovereign debt defaults—that might have hindered access to such external resources. I then focus on militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and how they affected revenues, tariff levels, foreign loans, civil wars, coups, etc. My analyses show MIDs had a negative effect on tariffs and revenue and diminished the likelihood of a new loan—all results that contest the established conventional wisdom. Conversely, MIDs are associated to currency depreciation—a domestic-oriented inflationary tax—and domestic conflict—in particular, civil wars and coups. The chapter shows war did trigger the extraction-coercion cycle.

In this chapter, we are interested in two questions: (1) What domestic events are most likely to trigger the declaration of a state of emergency? (2) Given that any kind of domestic turmoil is observed and a state of emergency has been declared: what are the consequences for civil and political rights? We find that a general conflict index is highly correlated with the declaration of a state of emergency. The events most likely to trigger a state of emergency are major government crises, riots, and revolutions. With regard to coups – both successful and unsuccessful – we find a significant correlation with states of emergency in autocracies only. We do find that a coup followed by a state of emergency does lead to a (further) reduction in civil liberties.

This chapter takes the approach of quantitative analysis to test the book’s theory: It shows that there is a systematic connection between the domestic institutions and the US ability to attend to its double tasks of maintaining friendly relations while fostering good governance and more respect of human rights. The chapter shows that partner nations with domestic political institutions that allow for more open and competitive political processes of leadership turnover have closer foreign policy alignment with the United States, experience fewer coups, enjoy better governance, and have more respect for human rights than the ones that do not. That is the case both among democracies and autocracies: in parliamentary democracies more than in presidential democracies; in autocracies with multiparty legislatures than in autocracies with personalist leaders or single-party legislatures.

This chapter delves into US relations with the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq in the post-9/11 era. The chapter describes the idiosyncratic processes that led Afghanistan to have presidential institutions and Iraq to have parliamentary institutions. It then shows how the different constitutional arrangements in Afghanistan and Iraq changed the dynamics through which the United States interacted with incumbent leaders, and their potential successors, in the two countries. It analyzes the extent to which the United States was able to exercise leverage over the incumbent leaders in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, given their different constitutional frameworks.

This chapter places the book’s theory into a historical perspective: It describes several ways in which the United States has interacted with incumbent leaders, and their potential successors, in partner nations. From this, the chapter identifies and operationalizes the mechanisms of the book’s theory in respect to the domestic politics of partner countries, differentiating between democratic and authoritarian partners. The chapter also operationalizes four dimensions of the relations between the United States and its partners: (a) the alignment of the foreign policies of the United States and the partner nations’; (b) the likelihood of coups in the partner nations; (c) good governance through the provision of public goods; and (d) the respect of human rights. This chapter, therefore, sets the stage for the systematic empirical analysis of Chapters 4, 5, and 6.

Even at an abstract theoretical level, the power configuration in China after the 1969 9th Party Congress was highly unstable. On the one hand, Mao continued to be an active and powerful chairman of the party. On the other hand, Lin Biao, the anointed successor, had a great deal of control over the military. Without the possibility of other powerful factions in the party to check a potential fight between Mao and Lin, both sides had much temptation to eliminate the other if they believed they had sufficient power to do so (Acemoglu et al. 2008: 162). Fortunately for Mao, he had cultivated two disparate groups to help him govern China in the event of a purge of Lin Biao: the Fourth Front Army (FFA) and the surviving scribblers. Mao’s strategy of cultivating the tainted FFA paid off handsomely. Instead of having to concede to Lin Biao’s reluctance to carry out self-criticism or being forced to rely on Lin’s followers, Mao forced Lin’s hand, knowing that he could credibly threaten Lin with replacing the Lin Biao faction with FFA veterans. After Lin Biao fled, Mao carried out his threat and eradicated close associates of Lin Biao wholesale from the military, replacing them with veterans of the FFA. The Lin Biao incident on September 13, 1971, finally led to the full installation of the coalition of the weak.

After Mao’s passing in September 1976, the coalition that Mao had put in place at the end of his life, which was composed Cultural Revolution radicals with little revolutionary experience, even more junior officials like Wu De and mass representatives, the tainted Fourth Front Army (FFA) group, and a handful of trusted First Front Army veterans like Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing, took over the People’s Republic of China. An uneasy truce persisted for a very short time before the Gang of Four had alarmed Hua Guofeng by challenging his role as the anointed successor, which compelled him to seek more drastic solutions (Zhang 2008b: 263). In this decisive moment, the FFA swung behind Hua, thus sealing the Gang of Four’s fate, but Hua also became very dependent on FFA veterans. His dependence on military veterans with vastly more experience and greater networks ultimately also brought about his downfall. Within two years of Mao’s death, none of the potential successors Mao had put into place just prior to his death survived as powerful figures in the party. The Gang of Four had ended in jail, while Hua was sidelined at the third plenum in 1978. Even FFA veteran Li Desheng, who had served as vice chairman of the party for a short while, ended his career in the 1980s as the head of the National Defense University (Zhu 2007: 425). Except for key members of the FFA group, the vast majority of Mao’s coalition of the weak had ended in jail or in retirement by the early 1980s. His legacy of continuous revolution also was completely expunged from the party ideology in favor of a single-minded focus on economic development.

Although much of this book concerns political dynamics in the Mao Era, the tumults of the Cultural Revolution and the coalition rule that resulted from late-Mao politics indirectly led to an important political outcome by the 2010s, the survival of Xi Jinping as one of the few princelings among political leaders on the civilian side of the CCP. This created one of the preconditions for Xi to dominate the party soon after taking office as the head of the party in late 2012 – the relative absence of competition and oversight from other highly networked princelings. In the 1980s, two forces drove the selection of future leaders in the party. First, founding leaders such as Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping had a genuine desire to promote a new generation of well-educated, loyal potential successors as their health began to fail them. Second, as the rest of the book has argued, the top leadership and even mid-level officials at the ministerial level did not want serious competitors to their power bases, and each pursued a coalition of the weak strategy within his own jurisdiction. Thus, besides a few senior veterans who had placed their children on accelerated paths for promotion, the vast majority of revolutionary veterans resisted the promotion of princelings due to their Red Guard activism during the Cultural Revolution and to fear of interference by well-networked princelings.

Authoritarian regimes must grapple with a fundamental source of instability that a significant redistribution of power, often unseen or only partially observed, can radically alter the incentives of regime insiders and overturn initially stable equilibria (Acemoglu et al. 2008). Although institutional features such as authoritarian legislatures and a ruling party can alleviate the incentives to usurp the incumbent leader to some extent, especially among lower-level officials (Gandhi 2008; Svolik 2012), they cannot fundamentally remove the incentives to grab power forcefully in the top echelon of these regimes. For one, one-party states by design entrust enormous power in the hands of the top few officials or even in the hands of one person. For ambitious officials just one layer below the very top facing a low probability of ordinary promotion, the reward for achieving an extra step upward can be enormous and can justify a risky gamble, especially if an external shock leads to a significant redistribution of power. Even for those who are already in the top echelon of the ruling party, a gamble to break the existing power-sharing equilibrium can reap enormous rewards as the power and resources of authoritarian colleagues are consolidated into one’s hands. Knowing the dangers of these possibilities, authoritarian leaders also have the incentives to preempt potentially threatening colleagues by removing them from power with coercive measures. In the absence of credible constitutional frameworks or electoral pressure to stop the actions of the top leadership, the stable façade of authoritarian politics can quickly descend into coups, purges, and assassinations.

In mid-1975, a sickly Mao had one of the last meetings with the Politburo. During the meeting, Mao shook hands with the entire Politburo, probably for the last time in his life. When he greeted alternate Politburo member and Vice Premier Wu Guixian, Mao confessed, “I don’t know who you are.” An embarrassed Wu said, “Chairman, we met in 1964 during the national day parade.” Mao compounded her embarrassment by responding, “I didn’t know that” (Mao 1975).

Between 1932 and 2018, there have been twelve successful – meaning the coup makers seized power – coups in Thailand. Each time, the coup makers have protected themselves by passing an amnesty, in the new constitution promulgated by the dictator or junta, in a stand-alone law, and sometimes both. Each amnesty article or law has retroactively legalized the coup in question and protected the coup-makers from possible prosecution or other sanction. In each instance, the amnesty has turned rebellion into an administrative action and legalized the extrajudicial seizure of power from the people. Over time, the repeated amnesties have institutionalized the dispossession of democracy and the people’s role in the Thai polity. This chapter traces the legal and political history of the repetition of the use of amnesty as a way to understand one aspect of the foreclosure of accountability and the production of impunity for the military. What legal and social political work does each amnesty perform individually, and how do they function as a history? What language and aspects of amnesty law have remained consistent over different iterations of the amnesties, and what new legal manoeuvres have been introduced? What legal and political challenges to amnesty have been made, and which remain unthinkable? Framed by comparison with legal amnesties for coups in other countries, this chapter reflects on what the history and repetition of coup amnesties means for the possibility of justice in Thailand. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the most recent coup, 22 May 2014 coup by the National Council for Peace and Order, the constitutional amnesty provisions passed, and the possibility of undoing them following a future democratic transition.

There are numerous political crises in Africa, albeit one needs to stress that they do not touch all African states. This chapter discusses four types of crises: secessions, coups, electoral violence, and terrorism. Despite their different shape, they all can potentially challenge or even undermine state institutions, dwarf the economy, and pose a threat to the population. Despite them being the children of the weakness of states, there is, however, also evidence showing that secessions, coups, and electoral violence might lead to more legitimate governments and advance democratization in the long run. Such news is missing with regard to terrorism.

Chapter 5 focuses on military coups. It begins by examining the root causes and the practice of such irregular takeovers, which featured so prominently in postcolonial politics. Data show significant cross-regional differences. West Africa displays a particularly high frequency of coups (a feature shared with Central Africa), an above-average number of leaders per country, and a correspondingly lower length of stay in office. Southern Africa, by contrast, has the highest incidence of multiparty elections and the lowest occurrence of military interventions and other violent takeovers. For some time, the continent appeared to stand out, among comparable world regions, in terms of the permanence of coups as relatively recurrent political events. Yet coups evolved from being a most common way of capturing office to a much less frequent phenomenon also in sub-Saharan Africa. Over the past two decades they were increasingly accompanied by immediate pledges, on the part of the soldiers seizing power, that political authority would be rapidly handed back to civilian rulers via the introduction, or reintroduction, of competitive elections. Some observers went as far as to suggest that coups may be "good" for democracy. But the democratic as well as the developmental performance of most golpistas remains disappointing

In this chapter, we show how changing budgets influence the mix of intervention strategies. A non-intuitive implication of our argument is that lack of funds may prompt a liberal intervener to switch to a less democratic intervention strategy. The logic is that money allows a liberal intervener a luxury of sorts: of being able to improve electoral conditions (and so make it harder for the favored government to win) while offsetting any disadvantages with massive aid, for their favored ticket. The case of Greece, in which the United States sponsored a change in electoral rules (in an undemocratic direction) in 1951–1952 conforms to this logic.Our discussion of coups provides scope condition for our argument, by showing how polarization and competitors influence the choice of electoral interventions over coups. We show that high polarization causes outsiders to prefer coups over elections. In that sense, we echo Dahl's central insight, about the conditions enabling democracy to exist. We also show that superpower competition heightens the risk of coups. The reason is that competing in elections becomes costly. The high prevalence of coups during the Cold War complies to this logic.

In this chapter, we take stock of how scholars of international relations and of elections have previously studied the issues we are interested in. Even if the most dramatic manifestations of outside influence, coups and invasions, are (largely) a thing of the past, without a doubt sustained investments by multiple powers in more (or less) competitive political processes impact polyarchy in a substantial and sustained way. Outsiders can help candidates directly, raising the question of how the who and how of elections figure in the calculus of interventions. Why such investments are made, and their effects, are important subjects to study.We agree with existing works that interest in democracy promotion depends on how many other democracies there are, and on competing geo-strategic objectives. Our contribution is a specific focus on elections, an emphasis on different types of interventions, for the rules, and for candidates, and strategic logic of intervention where opposing sides can battle for influence. We bring together anarchy, the international system, and polyarchy, the domestic fight for power, in a single framework.