title: The Military and Autocratic Regime Crises: Soldiers in Coups and Mass Mobilization
creator: Eschenauer-Engler, Tanja
subject: ddc-320
subject: 320 Political science
subject: ddc-355
subject: 355 Military science
description: In autocratic regime crises such as coups and mass mobilization, soldiers determine the fate of political regimes and their leaders. Across the realm of autocracies, however, the military’s behavior varies starkly with regard to coups and mass mobilization: Some armed forces in autocracies stage no or very few coups, while others repeatedly intervene into the political process. And while some armed forces crack down on popular protests, others refuse to use military force against protesters and defect from the regime. The stark variation of military behavior in these two types of crises has prompted a large body of research, yet several conceptual, methodological, and empirical shortcomings have hampered a deeper understanding of the armed forces’ role in autocratic regime crises. The most important of these shortcomings is that the military has mainly been treated as a unitary actor and thus the preferences and varying behavior of different groups within the armed forces have not been taken adequately into account. Consisting of five papers, this cumulative dissertation enhances and refines our knowledge on autocratic regime crises by conceptualizing, theorizing, and testing the behavior of different intra-military groups in coups and during massive anti-regime mobilization.       The first paper introduces a novel hand-coded coup dataset on the identity of all leaders of the 474 coups from 1950 to 2020 and shows that successful and failed coups by senior, mid-ranking, and junior officers entail different prospects for post-coup democratization.    The second paper uses the data presented in the previous paper and distinguishes between senior-officer coups and junior-officer coups. It shows that nonviolent anti-regime mobilization encourages coup attempts by both senior and junior officers, but has a stronger effect on coups by junior officers. Conversely, violent mobilization only spurs coups by the military’s top brass and is not consistently linked to coups by junior officers.    In the third paper, employing a series of Heckman probit regressions, I show that autocracies exerting tight control over the media face a lower likelihood of both coup attempts and coup success. By disaggregating coups into regime-change and leader-reshuffling coups, the empirical analysis uncovers that the restraining effect of tight media control on coups particularly applies to regime-change coups.     The fourth paper studies military leaderships’ reactions to massive peaceful protests in autocracies from a set-theoretic perspective. Using a crisp-set QCA, I show that the military elites’ behavior amid massive revolutionary uprising results from a complex interplay of relevant factors and that different combinations of these factors are at work in different socio-political environments.     The fifth paper introduces a novel dataset to capture the military’s political role in regimes and underlines how the armed forces’ engagement in mass mobilization and coup-plotting shapes the military’s position in a polity for the years to come.    With democracy being increasingly under stress around the globe and autocratization processes taking root in many countries, it is important to enhance our knowledge on how non-democratic leaders organize their rule and how autocracies prevent and survive political crises. In light of these alarming developments, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of how dictators embed officers into their rule, retain the loyalty of soldiers, and set up measures to deter and survive threats originating in the military.
date: 2025
type: Dissertation
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/36061/1/Dissertation_TanjaEschenauerEngler.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00036061
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-360612
identifier:   Eschenauer-Engler, Tanja  (2025) The Military and Autocratic Regime Crises: Soldiers in Coups and Mass Mobilization.  [Dissertation]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/36061/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng