A military coup or coup d’état is an overthrow of a lawful government by members of the country’s armed forces. If force or violence are not used, the overthrow is sometimes called a “soft coup” or a “self-coup.” A successful coup d’état can be followed by civil war, as occurred in Guinea, or by a military-backed transition to democracy, as was the case in Thailand after the 2021 coup.
The coup phenomenon rose to prominence in the post-independence African landscape, with military overthrows becoming a regular occurrence in many countries. The earliest work on the subject placed coups d’état within a broader context of colonial legacies and emphasized the institutional peculiarities that predisposed civilian governments to military overthrow. Later, a stream of quantitative work broke new ground in quantifying and predicting coups.
As the phenomenon of coups d’état peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s, researchers focused their attention on understanding what made some countries more prone to overthrow than others. They identified a range of causes, from the structural conditions in a country (such as poor economic growth or poverty, suggested by Samuel Huntington’s “coup ceiling”) to the individual idiosyncrasies of a military officer corps.
The most recent wave of research focuses on factors that reduce the probability of coups, including higher income and democratization and military-backed transitions to democracy. However, much of this latest work relies on off-the-shelf data sets and coup catalogs whose accuracy is often questioned.