Who Punishes the Leader? Leader Culpability and Coups during Civil War

Abstract

Who punishes leaders via coups during civil war? By distinguishing between different types of internal audiences within the government and their attempts to remove a leader forcefully, I illuminate the mechanisms that explain variation in who punishes the leader during wartime. I claim that whether leaders are culpable for the initiation of the war has an important implication for whether they are punished by members of the ruling coalition (i.e., those with access to decision-making and political power), or by those outside the ruling coalition. Empirical evidence supports my hypotheses: (i) culpable leaders are more likely to experience coup attempts led by those outside the leaders’ ruling coalition, should the war go poorly; and (ii) nonculpable leaders are more likely to experience coups executed by members of their ruling coalition. The findings have important implications for how leaders respond to audience pressures as they consider whether to fight or settle.

Mapping terrorism in the academic landscape of business field of study: a bibliometric study of the past 30 years

“…We then removed articles related to natural or human-made disasters (Momani, 2010;Yasuyuki et al, 2019), where terrorism was not the main research focus. Human-made disasters that were removed fell under the categories of war (Sudduth, 2021;Yi et al, 2020), political unrest (Al Khattab et al, 2007Saint Akadiri et al, 2020), economic (Alvarez-Galvez et al, 2019Bartz and Winkler, 2016;Huhtala et al, 2014), industrial (Bakota et al, 2020;Pek et al, 2018), technological (Choong et al, 2018;Shen and Hwang, 2018) and biological disasters (Ghuman and Olmstead, 2015;Harris and Powell, 2009). After undertaking these exclusion steps, 1,582 articles were excluded and 1,865 articles remained in the database for further consideration and analysis.…”

Regime security and transnational threat in post-Cold War Africa

“…Furthermore, it has been noted that civil wars increase the risk of coups as soldiers become more dissatisfied (Bell & Sudduth 2017). There are also different pathways for the effect of such civil wars on the occurrence of coups: leaders responsible for initiating the conflict are more likely to face coups by those outside the regime center as the number of deaths on the battlefield increases, while leaders not responsible for initiating the conflict are more likely to face coups by those within the regime (Sudduth 2021). In addition to this, different types of challenges to the regime are said to trigger coups through different pathways, with terrorism prompting the occurrence of reshuffling coups and protests and insurgencies prompting the occurrence of regime change coups (Aksoy et al 2015).…”

Political Institutions and Coups in Dictatorships

“…While existing frameworks help understand how institutions mitigate the risk of reshuffling coups led by members of the ruling coalition, they cannot explain whether and how institutions affect regime-changing coups. As the literature on coups highlights, there are important variations among coups regarding the types of plotters and their interests (e.g., Aksoy et al, 2015; Albrecht & Eibl, 2018; De Bruin, 2019; Singh, 2014; Sudduth, 2021). 4 Lumping together these actors with distinct interests within the state apparatus prevents us from fully understanding how institutions affect authoritarian regime survival.…”

“…4.Singh (2014), Albrecht and Eibl (2018), and De Bruin (2019) show that coups executed by high-ranking officers have different causes and outcomes than from those executed by lower-ranking officers. Similarly, Aksoy et al (2015) and Sudduth (2021) suggest the difference between coups conducted by members of the autocratic ruling coalition and those conducted by non-members.…”

“…Coalition outsiders who are outside the locus of power are more likely to want to transform the ruling coalition, compared to coalition insiders. See also Aksoy et al (2015), Singh (2014), Albrecht and Eibl (2018), and Sudduth (2021) for the assumption that different coup agents have different incentives for coups.…”