Casey (2020)

THE DURABILITY OF
CLIENT REGIMES
Foreign Sponsorship and Military Loyalty,
1946–2010
By ADAM E. CASEY
abstract
Conventional wisdom holds that great power patrons prop up client dictatorships. But
this is generally assumed rather than systematically analyzed. This article provides the
first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between foreign sponsorship and au-
thoritarian regime survival, using an original data set of all autocratic client regimes in
the postwar period. The results demonstrate that patronage from Western powers—the
United States, France, and the United Kingdom—is not associated with client regime
survival. Rather, it’s only Soviet sponsorship that reduced the risk of regime collapse.
The author explains this variation by considering the effects of foreign sponsorship on
the likelihood of military coups d’état. He argues that the Soviet Union directly aided its
clients by imposing a series of highly effective coup prevention strategies. By contrast, the
US and its allies didn’t provide such aid, leaving regimes vulnerable to military overthrow.
Introduction
C ONVENTIONAL wisdom holds that great power support helps

autocratic regimes remain in power. It has been argued that some
Cold War dictators “survived only with American support” and that
the United States installed “despots in their place abroad as a strategic
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000039 Published online by Cambridge University Press
weapon against the Soviet Union.”1 The same was apparently true of
America’s Soviet rivals,2 as well as of US allies like France, which had
“been keeping people in power, or putting them in power for some
time.”3 Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have often cited con-
tinued US patronage to explain the resilience of Arab autocracies.4 But
is it really the case that some regimes are propped up by a great power?5
The proposition that foreign support shores up the rule of client au-
1
Spanier 1991, 159; Klaas 2016, 192.
2
Goldstone 1986, 38.
3
Tullock 1987, 132.
4
Bellin 2004, 144.
5
Márquez 2017, 214.
World Politics 72, no. 3 ( July 2020) 411–47 Copyright © 2020 Trustees of Princeton University
doi: 10.1017/S0043887120000039
412 w o r l d p o li t i c s
tocracies is present in a variety of analyses of authoritarian survival,

but it has never been systematically investigated. Despite a large litera-
ture on the relationship between great power politics and regime type,6
and several excellent case studies,7 no study has systematically assessed
whether great power support affects the ability of particular autocratic
regimes to remain in power.
In this article, I provide the first cross-national, over time analysis of
the impact of foreign sponsorship on client regime survival in the post-
war period, using an original data set of autocratic client regimes from
1946 to 2010. I find that patronage from Western powers—the United
States, France, and the United Kingdom—is not associated with client
regime survival. Rather, only Soviet sponsorship reduced the risk of re-
gime collapse. I explain this divergence by considering the variable ef-
fects of foreign regime support strategies on military loyalty to client
regimes.
No Soviet-backed regime ever lost power to a military coup d’état.
This remarkable invulnerability was, to a large extent, the result of So-
viet support. The Soviet Union directly facilitated the creation or ex-
pansion of a series of institutions that limited the capacity of military
forces to oust incumbent regimes. Most important, Moscow helped to
create civilian control mechanisms in the form of political commissars
and security services that were embedded directly in the armed forces.
As members of the party apparatus, commissars and security service
officers weren’t beholden to their military counterparts; they could re-
port officer misbehavior up the party chain of command. These unpop-
ular changes were introduced with Soviet advisers and combat troops
defending regimes from any backlash from the armed forces. Security
services and commissars prevented coups by providing intelligence on

any plots emerging from the officer corps and by deterring others. And
since the security services maintained their own operational units, they
had the capacity and the motivation to resist coup attempts. As a result,
these practices increased the coordination dilemma inherent in launch-
ing a successful military coup and also empowered new security services
with incentives for resisting a coup attempt. Once imposed, commissars
and security services continued to function effectively even after Soviet
advisers departed.
By contrast, Western patrons didn’t protect their clients from coups.
In fact, US and European ambivalence toward the rule of their particu-
lar autocratic allies—and a primary focus on preventing communist and
6
Levitsky and Way 2010; Boix 2011; Gunitsky 2017.
7
Gasiorowski 1991; Brownlee 2012; Yom 2015.
d u r a b i li t y o f c li en t r e g i m es 413
Islamist takeover—rendered their clients vulnerable to military coups.

Unlike Soviet sponsorship, Western patronage had countervailing ef-
fects. On the one hand, foreign sponsorship lowered the external costs
of coup prevention strategies by reducing the costs of poor battlefield
effectiveness. Confident of foreign support if seriously challenged by
opposition emerging from outside their regime, clients felt it was safe to
attempt to weaken their militaries by purging officers and fragmenting
the coercive apparatus. On the other hand, Western sponsorship didn’t
reduce the internal costs of coup prevention because it didn’t protect
client regimes from their own military forces. Western clients received
no sponsor support for coup prevention strategies. Because client ef-
forts to reduce the capacity of their armed forces to launch a coup posed
a substantial threat to the personal and corporate interests of military
officers, those efforts often led to the very event they were intended
to forestall. When these coups against client autocrats succeeded, they
were accepted as faits accomplis by Western patrons.
I begin this article with a discussion of the literature linking foreign
support to authoritarian survival. Following that, I look at the differ-
ent strategies of client regime support used by Western and Soviet pa-
trons. I argue that the Soviet Union, fearing foreign policy setbacks if
client regimes were to be ousted by military forces, made significant ef-
forts to create and expand a series of party institutions meant to pene-
trate and dominate the armed forces of their client regimes. By contrast,
the United States and its allies, preoccupied with promoting autono-
mous military forces able to defeat Marxist (and Islamist) insurgents,
and confident that postcoup regimes would remain aligned, didn’t en-
courage any coup prevention strategies or provide direct cover for them.
I then turn to a systematic test of these arguments on the universe of

client autocracies. I conclude with a review of policy implications and
avenues for further research.
Foreign Sponsorship and Regime Survival

There are several reasons to expect that foreign sponsorship will
strengthen authoritarian regimes. To begin, economic resources that
come from a foreign patron may provide the means with which to co-
opt opposition both inside and outside the regime.8 This increase in
the means to co-opt could in turn reduce the need to engage in poten-
8
This has been by far the most common treatment in the literature regarding the effect of foreign
sponsorship. See, among others, Gasiorowski 1991, 17; Odom 1992, 64; Brownlee 2012, 10–11.
tially risky repression.9 Moreover, foreign patrons can directly engage

in repression themselves, reducing the need for the client regime to di-
rect costly political and economic capital to this end.10 Furthermore,
military aid presumably bolsters the regime’s coercive capacity, reduc-
ing the risk posed by challenges from below.11 Not only does foreign
support increase the material capacity of the coercive apparatus (that is,
more weapons and financial resources), but it also likely emboldens and
enables autocrats to engage in repression without fear of international
backlash.12 In addition, the perception that a great power backs the re-
gime may dissuade mass mobilization.13
There’s also reason to suspect that foreign support reduces the threat
posed by those within the regime. Some scholars have argued that for-
eign patrons prevent military coups.14 The logic is that as military forces
depend on material assistance from a great power patron, officers are
unwilling to oust a foreign-backed regime.15 A related line of argument
suggests that officers fear postcoup retribution by the foreign patron of
a client regime.16 So there are multiple reasons to believe that client dic-
tatorships should have considerable advantages relative to autocracies
devoid of foreign support.
Yet despite the arguments linking foreign support to regime sur-
vival—and much evidence for the importance of these mechanisms in
particular cases17—there are no systematic tests of the impact of foreign
sponsorship on regime durability. Where foreign support has entered
into cross-national analyses of regime survival, it has typically func-
tioned as a control variable and is approximated by either great power
military alliances or the Cold War period in general.18 In the analyses
that follow, I reassess the relationship between foreign sponsorship and
client regime survival. Rather than being uniformly advantageous for

regime survival,19 the effects of foreign sponsorship varied consider-
9
On the risks associated with repression, see Dragu and Przeworski 2019, 78.
10
Gasiorowski 1991, 18–19.
11
Bellin 2004, 143–44.
12
Bellin 2004, 144; Levitsky and Way 2010, 41–42; Yom 2015, 6, 34; Tolstrup, Seeberg, and Gla-
vind 2019, 515.
13
Tolstrup, Seeberg, and Glavind 2019, 515.
14
Luttwak 2016, 28–35. See also Brownlee 2012, 11; Albrecht 2015, 661.
15
Brownlee 2012, 11; Luttwak 2016, 30.
16
Thyne et al. 2018, 1407–408.
17
For excellent case studies, see Gasiorowski 1991; Brownlee 2012; Yom 2015.
18
For examples, see Boix 2011, 825–26; Svolik 2012, 114–15, 190; Boix and Svolik 2013, 308,
312. Alliances are an imprecise measure, as clients didn’t always maintain formal alliances with their
patrons (e.g., the Khmer Rouge and China) and not every autocracy received extensive foreign support
during the Cold War.
19
Use of the Cold War as a proxy variable assumes that the foreign support given during the Cold
War by each great power was advantageous to regime survival. For this logic as applied to coups, see
Singh 2014, 48.
ably between superpower blocs—variation that can largely be explained

by different strategies of sponsorship, which in turn had divergent in-
fluence on the loyalty of the armed forces. Because military support is
central to autocratic survival,20 this variation had a profound effect on
authoritarian regime durability.
Strategies of Foreign Sponsorship and the Military

Most existing studies of the relationship between foreign sponsorship,
military coups, and regime survival fail to integrate recent insights from
the comparative civil-military relations literature. There’s surprisingly
little research on how foreign patrons affect coup prevention strategies
instituted by authoritarian client regimes. Some recent scholarship does
posit an indirect relationship between foreign sponsorship and coup
prevention by clients. With the protection of a foreign patron, regimes
are free to destroy or weaken their military forces through coup pre-
vention efforts.21 But most scholars argue that foreign powers play lit-
tle direct role in coup prevention and the domination of armed forces
by security services.22 When looking only at US-backed regimes, this
conclusion is understandable. But even though the US and its West-
ern allies may not have aided their clients in the creation of new se-
curity services to penetrate and control the military, their superpower
rival did.
I argue that strategies of foreign sponsorship affect strategies of cli-
ent regime coup prevention. Autocrats have at their disposal a variety of
methods with which to limit the incentives of their armed forces from
launching a coup, including tying military officers to the regime by dis-
tributing spoils to the military, promoting political allies or coethnics

to important positions, and enrolling officers in the ruling party.23 One
of the primary issues with a regime focusing only on incentives is that
it’s hard to buy loyalty, and doing so leaves it vulnerable to overthrow
should officer satisfaction decline.24 Moreover, interfering in military
promotions risks a countercoup or rebellion by demoted officers.25 Be-
yond curbing officer incentives to intervene, autocrats can also seek to
20
Since 1945, military coups d’état have been the most common manner by which autocracies lose
power (Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2018, 179). The picture is even bleaker for individual autocratic
leaders: more than two-thirds of ousted autocrats were removed by coups (Svolik 2012, 5).
21
Talmadge 2015, 42, 55; Greitens 2016, 139; Song and Wright 2018.
22
Greitens 2016, 40–41, 88–89, 109–10.
23
Geddes 1999, 126; Taylor 2003, 16; Brownlee 2012, 66; Leon 2014, 365; Greitens 2016, 27;
Harkness 2016, 593; Roessler 2016, 90.
24
Greitens 2016, 24.
25
Harkness 2016, 588–89, 594; Roessler 2016, 18–19; Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2018, 51, 53,
57, 166–7.
reduce the capacity of their military to launch a coup. The most fre-
quently studied method for reducing capacity is organizational prolif-
eration—often referred to as counterbalancing.26 Counterbalancing the
regular armed forces with new coercive organizations, such as praeto-
rian guards or militia, makes it harder for a successful coup to be coor-
dinated27 and generates incentives for the newly created organizations
to violently resist coup attempts for fear of postcoup purges.28
Although much is known about the coup prevention strategies out-
lined above, two institutions that have received relatively less scholarly
attention are political commissars and security services. Political com-
missars are party political workers imposed directly on the military to
ensure the loyalty and reliability of regular military officers.29 Unlike
counterbalancing, which involves creating new, operationally separate
coercive organizations, political commissars are embedded in the armed
forces.30 As a result, they’re a highly penetrative form of regime control.
Commissars perform a variety of tasks, including promoting party ide-
ology among soldiers.31 But their most important role involves mon-
itoring the professional officers.32 There are several ways commissars
prevent coups. Since they serve directly alongside officers, they can pro-
vide important intelligence to the regime. As party officers rather than
military officers, they can report misbehavior or disloyalty up the civil-
ian chain of command.33 And the fear that commissars might discover
a coup plot can prevent one from emerging.
Many regimes maintain coercive organizations that combine intel-
ligence functions and armed operational units outside the normal mil-
itary chain of command. I refer to such forces as security services.34
Prominent examples include organizations often called secret police,
such as the kgb in the Soviet Union and the Stasi in East Germany.
Lesser-known examples include the National People’s Security Ser-
vice (snasp) in Mozambique and the State Information Service (khad)
in Afghanistan. Like commissars, security services play critical roles in
providing information on coup plots.35 Pervasive spying makes it much
26
Quinlivan 1999, 135; Talmadge 2015; De Bruin 2018, 1434.
27
Tullock 1987, 23; Quinlivan 1999, 135; Little 2017, 206.
28
De Bruin 2018, 1437–38, 1448–51; Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2018, 164, 173.
29
Herspring 1996, 59, 71.
30
Greitens 2016, 98.
31
Taylor 2003, 141–42.
32
Kolkowicz 1967, 83.
33
Herspring 1996, 70.
34
My conceptualization of security services is thus basically analogous to what Geddes, Wright,
and Frantz 2018, 155, refer to as “security police” or “internal security agencies” and Greitens 2016, 21,
considers a subset of coercive institutions.
35
Sassoon 2012, 143.
harder for coup plotters to plan in secret or to identify other regime op-
ponents.36 In some regimes these agencies are imposed directly on the
military. In the Soviet Union, for example, the security service embed-
ded Special Departments (Osobiye otdeli) in the armed forces, starting
in December 1918 during the Russian Civil War.37 The Special Depart-
ments engaged in considerable political surveillance of the officer corps,
monitoring communication and maintaining a network of informers.38
In contrast to intelligence services engaged in signals surveillance, secu-
rity services embedded within the armed forces can provide important
information on and deterrence to coup plots. And because these secu-
rity services maintain armed operational units, they also have the capac-
ity to fight coup attempts.39
Yet reducing the capacity of military forces to launch coups is risky.
Creating new military organizations like militia or praetorian guards to
counterbalance the existing armed forces incentivizes army officers to
launch a coup before the new organizations can be established.40 Im-
posing commissars is also risky, as they’re highly unpopular with the
professional officers.41 In particular, officers value autonomy and dislike
having generally less-experienced political workers interfere in military
decisions.42 Little scholarly attention has been paid to the potential pit-
fall of triggering coups when establishing intelligence-oriented secu-
rity services.43 Although the advantages of large and pervasive security
services seem clear, we should expect officers to be dissatisfied when
such security services are established, given their penetrative nature.44
In addition, when coup prevention strategies that directly curb military
autonomy are successful, they’ve been shown to reduce battlefield effec-
tiveness and leave regimes vulnerable to external threats.45
Therefore, limiting officers’ ability to launch a coup often involves a

direct challenge to both the interests of officers as individuals and the
interests of the officer corps as a group. Such challenges can spur a re-
36
Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2018, 156, 155–58.
37
Khristoforov 2015, 33.
38
Knight 1991, 769, 776.
39
Taylor 2003, 142–43.
40
Sudduth 2017, 4; De Bruin 2018; Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2018, 160–61, 167.
41
Geddes, Frantz, and Wright 2014, 150; Greitens 2016, 98.
42
Kolkowicz 1967, 49; Herspring 1996, 60.
43
Instead, the literature has largely focused on the risks to battlefield effectiveness and selective
repression posed by poor intelligence provided by fragmented coercive organizations. See Talmadge
2015, 17; Greitens 2016, 42–49.
44
On officer disdain for security-service penetration of military units in Ethiopia, see Ayele 2014,
48. De Bruin 2018 does cover security services and officer backlash as part of a larger argument about
counterbalancing.
45
Quinlivan 1999; Talmadge 2015.
active or preemptive coup. By deploying their own forces in the form of

advisers or combat troops, foreign patrons can provide the capacity to
implement these coup prevention strategies against officer opposition.
As discussed below, the Soviet Union gave direct assistance in and cover
for implementing penetrative coup prevention strategies that proved
highly effective in reducing the threat posed by coups to client regimes.
By contrast, the US and its allies only facilitated coup prevention indi-
rectly, by reducing the cost of poor battlefield effectiveness. As West-
ern patrons were unwilling to aid directly in coup prevention practices,
their clients remained highly vulnerable to a backlash from the officer
corps. In sum, the nature of foreign support shaped the domestic coup
prevention strategies attempted by clients, and this had important ef-
fects on regime survival. In the following sections I show how the So-
viet Union and its Western counterparts engaged in different strategies
of regime support, resulting in a series of intended and unintended con-
sequences for regime durability.
Soviet Sponsorship and Coup Prevention

The Soviet Union assisted in the direct organization of its clients’ do-
mestic security apparatus. In Mongolia, its first client, the Bolsheviks
organized the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Army and security
services beginning in 1921.46 In North Korea in 1945-1948, the So-
viet Union organized the new Korean People’s Army, purging all Jap-
anese-era officers and structuring the army along Soviet lines.47 After
the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Red Army’s occupation of East-
ern Europe, the Soviet Union oversaw the reorganization of military
forces, the purging of precommunist officer corps, and the embedding

of Soviet advisers in the armed forces and defense ministries of the new
regimes.48 Critically, the Soviet Union helped its allies subjugate the
military to the newly formed ruling parties.49
This preoccupation with penetrating and controlling military forces
to sustain the rule of client regimes was a result of domestic Soviet
views of ideal civil-military relations,50 and also a result of earlier Soviet
setbacks in the Third World suffered in West Africa. In the mid-1960s,
a rash of military coups overthrew pro-Soviet “radical” regimes in West
46
Roshchin 1999, 14, 106.
47
Armstrong 2003, 200, 217, 233.
48
US CIA 1951, 3; Johnson 1981, 2, 7–8.
49
Westad 2017, 77–88.
50
On Soviet domestic anxieties about military loyalty and the subordination of the army to the
party, see Herspring 1996, 55–56; Taylor 2003, 117.
Africa.51 Although none of these regimes had received enough assist-

ance from Moscow to reach the threshold of a client regime, Moscow
had invested considerable prestige and development aid, and the coups
brought about the expulsion of Soviet personnel and the realignment
of these African states to the West.52 The Soviets viewed the coups
in West Africa, as well as those that ousted pro-Soviet regimes else-
where, as part of a broader threat to left-wing governments posed by
US-inspired or directed counterrevolutionary forces.53 After these “so-
bering” reversals,54 Moscow returned to earlier regime-support strate-
gies, which viewed “regimes led by Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties”
as “the most reliable Soviet partners in the Third World.”55 In 1984,
the cia assessed that “the Soviets have learned from their own set-
backs … that they must try to institutionalize political influence. This
has caused them to give renewed attention to the goal of creating Le-
ninist-style police-state regimes in client countries where they can do
so.”56 To sustain the rule of pro-Soviet regimes and reduce the threat
of military coups, Moscow helped clients embed the party and intel-
ligence services in the armed forces, in line with its efforts in Eurasia.
First, the Soviet Union directly aided its clients in establishing polit-
ical commissars in the armed forces. For example, in Ethiopia (1974–
1991), the Soviet Union helped the regime embed an unpopular system
of political commissars in the military.57 Commissars and security offi-
cers were usually “much more junior in rank as well as in military expe-
rience” than the professional commanders. In addition, the commissars
and security officers didn’t answer to the military commander, often in-
terfered in tactical decisions, and could report officer behavior to their
respective superiors.58 In Afghanistan (1978–1992), Moscow helped to
“bring the army units under political control” and to strengthen the
presence of the party in the armed forces.59 When Soviet General Vas-
ily Zaplatin arrived in Kabul shortly after the coup that brought the re-
gime to power, Afghan Deputy Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin told
the Soviet official that the Afghan armed forces needed “political agen-
cies [politorgani] like you have. No need to change anything. Every-
51
Clapham 1996, 38, 139; Andrew and Mitrokhin 2005, 425–28.
52
Andrew and Mitrokhin 2005, 436–37; Mazov 2010, 253, 257.
53
Adamishin et al. 1981, 538.
54
Zubok 2009, 248.
55
Rubin 2002, 99.
56
US CIA 1984.
57
US CIA 1988b, 12.
58
Ayele 2014, 77–78.
59
Giustozzi 2015, 43.
thing as you have it.”60 The regime imported the Soviet model from its
patron, establishing political commissars in the army.61 Eventually, “in
every battalion of the Afghan army a party cell was created, and in reg-
iments and higher, a party committee.”62
Second, the Soviet Union helped to create large security services. In
Ethiopia, the Soviet kgb supported regime leader Mengistu Haile Mar-
iam in establishing the Public Security Organization (pso) to “prevent
coup attempts.”63 Under pso jurisdiction, the Military Security Main
Department (msmd) was set up with Soviet aid in 1980, and tasked
with monitoring the armed forces.64 The msmd penetrated all branches
of the military down to the platoon and squad level. Acting as “a kind of
secret police in the armed forces,” it was “very much disliked by the pro-
fessionally oriented officers.”65 The Ethiopian regime also used Soviet
military intelligence assistance to establish the Military Intelligence
Department (mid), which was also embedded within military units.66
In Afghanistan, Soviet kgb advisers helped the regime to create a
large new security service, known by its Dari acronym, khad.67 khad
was embedded directly in the general staff of the army, air defense,
air force, and border defense units, as well as in the main body of the
army, and quickly assumed military counterintelligence responsibili-
ties.68 The regime also set about organizing the Sarandoy, a security
service under the Ministry of Internal Affairs that took on counter-
intelligence functions.69 When combined, these security services were
slightly larger than the armed forces. By May 1988, the Afghan army
had some 40,000 soldiers, compared with 25,000 members in khad
and 20,000 in the Sarandoy.70 In addition, with Soviet assistance, “mil-
itary counterintelligence was embedded in the army and was engaged
mainly with controlling the mood of officers and investigating military

crimes.”71
Most important, the Soviet Union provided the cover necessary to
implement these coup prevention strategies that posed a direct chal-
lenge to officer autonomy. In November 1977, seventeen hundred So-
60
Quoted in Mlechin 2006, 444.
61
62
63
US CIA 1988b, 4; Mesfin 2010, 46–49.
64
Mesfin 2010, 48; Ayele 2014, 77, 95–96.
65
Mesfin 2010, 48–49.
66
Ayele 2014, 96.
67
Khadamat-e Etala’at-e Dawlati (KhAD), or State Information Service; Giustozzi 2015, 45–46.
68
69
Oliker 2011, 25, 28; Khristoforov 2016, 295.
70
US CIA 1988a. Soviet archival sources give similar size estimates. See Khristoforov 2016, 312.
71
Khristoforov 2016, 295; Khristoforov 2009, 171.
viet advisers and between twelve thousand and eighteen thousand

Cuban combat troops arrived in Ethiopia.72 In 1988, the cia assessed
that the presence of Soviet advisers and Cuban soldiers discouraged
coup plotters.73 Though there is no direct evidence of plots that failed
to materialize due to fear of Soviet intervention, the unpopularity of
these coup prevention strategies makes the counterfactual of a reactive
coup plausible. Immediately after the coup in Afghanistan, the regime
sought Soviet assistance in reorganizing its domestic security services.74
An agreement on Soviet military assistance was signed as early as May
1978, and four hundred Soviet advisers were immediately deployed.75
Soviet advisers were present in the central ministries, in every division
and brigade, and even in a few battalions.76 Meanwhile, the regime
purged noncommunist officers from the officer corps and even from the
operational leadership of the coup itself.77 Therefore, by establishing a
large advisory presence and providing direct advice and assistance in the
implementation of coup prevention strategies, Moscow facilitated the
Afghan regime’s domination of the armed forces.
Once imposed, these institutions functioned independently of the
Soviet Union. In 1988, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev informed
Mengistu that Soviet support in Ethiopia would decrease.78 After a se-
ries of crushing military defeats, the Ethiopian military became even
more disgruntled with Mengistu’s rule.79 On May 16, 1989, Men-
gistu left for a state visit to East Germany. That day, several top gen-
erals launched a coup attempt. But the mid had uncovered the plot
and tipped off the praetorian guard, and these institutions successfully
launched a countercoup.80
In Afghanistan, a serious coup attempt challenged the communist
regime after the withdrawal of Soviet combat forces.81 In the summer
72
Ayele 2014, 210.
73
US CIA 1988b, 29.
74
Khristoforov 2016, 295–96.
75
76
77
US CIA 1978; Khristoforov 2016, 63.
78
Tiruneh 1993, 358–65.
79
Tiruneh 1993, 344–45.
80
Fitzgerald 1989, 53; Tiruneh 1993, 345, 355; Mesfin 2010, 50–51.
81
On December 27, 1979, increasingly fed up with Afghan communist ruler Hafizullah Amin,
Soviet special forces stormed the Presidential Palace and killed Amin, beginning the Red Army’s larg-
est military engagement since the Second World War; Sinno 2008, 123. The Soviet Union was quickly
bogged down and sought a viable exit from Afghanistan shortly into Gorbachev’s tenure. On February
15, 1989, the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan; Taubman 2017, 267, 376, 378. But Moscow retained
a very high level of material support until the August 1991 coup attempt in the USSR; Sinno 2008,
124; Kalinovsky 2011, 178–79.
of 1989, khad82 uncovered a coup plot and arrested 127 officers. On

March 6, 1990, Defense Minister Shahnawaz Tanai launched an at-
tempted coup before the scheduled trial of the plotters, but the prae-
torian guard fought to defend the regime and the coup was defeated.83
The regime’s coup prevention institutions had functioned effectively:
khad successfully unearthed a plot and the praetorian guard violently
resisted the coup attempt.84 Moreover, in both these examples the in-
stitutions that the Soviet Union helped the regime establish functioned
independently of the regime’s foreign sponsor. It wasn’t Soviet advisers
that prevented these coups, but rather the coup prevention institutions
that these advisers had helped to create and embed in the Ethiopian
and Afghan armed forces.
As this discussion makes clear, there’s considerable evidence that the
Soviet Union invested much effort in helping its client regimes pene-
trate and dominate the armed forces. Even in Ethiopia and Afghan-
istan, the two cases where Soviet clients themselves emerged out of
military coups, Moscow pressured and provided cover for clients to ci-
vilianize their regimes and dominate the armed forces through party
penetration.
Western Sponsorship and Military Coups

In contrast to the Soviet Union, the United States and its allies didn’t
seek to aid in the domination of the armed forces by civilian parties.85
Instead, because of their fundamentally ambivalent policy toward cli-
ent dictatorships, the US and its allies tried to promote Western-style
military organizations that emphasized autonomous armed forces. The
US wasn’t generally concerned about the particular constitution of the

authoritarian ruling coalitions among its clients and sponsored regimes
with a wide range of governing institutions. This openness to a range
of authoritarian regime types was a function of the strategic goals guid-
ing US support for dictatorships.
American policymakers were largely preoccupied with preventing
the seizure of power by Marxist-Leninist or Islamist rebels deemed
hostile to US geopolitical interests.86 A 1961 report by the US Army
82
KhAD was renamed the Ministry of State Security (WAD) in January 1986.
83
Rubin 2002, 151.
84
Giustozzi 2015, 42, 45.
85
Although the dynamics discussed here apply broadly to France and Great Britain, due to space
considerations I focus most of my attention on the United States. I also focus mostly on the Cold War,
as the bulk of client regimes were in that era. But the dynamics discussed here also apply to US policy
toward regimes facing Islamist opposition groups.
86
Westad 2005, 111.
stated that American interests in areas targeted by communist opposi-

tion groups lie “primarily in preventing further communist expansion by
maintaining stable popularly supported non-communist governments
in power in the countries of allies, friends and the so-called neutral or
uncommitted nations.”87 But this goal led Washington to support re-
gimes “that were considered repugnant to its basic ideals.”88 Although
the US generally preferred liberal political regimes, during the Cold
War (and in geostrategically important regions after the Cold War)
this preference was secondary to geopolitical alignment.89 As President
John F. Kennedy famously put it with regard to US policy options in
the Dominican Republic, “There are three possibilities in descending
order of preference: a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the
Trujillo regime, or a Castro regime. We ought to aim at the first, but
we really can’t renounce the second until we are sure that we can avoid
the third.”90
The US countered the rise and spread of hostile movements mainly
by promoting clients’ economic growth, land reform, and military ca-
pacity-building. US policymakers and military planners recognized that
the problem of “international Communism” seizing power “through in-
ternal means” wasn’t “solely a military one.”91 But while economic de-
velopment was an important foreign policy goal, along with reducing
the stark inequalities that policymakers believed drew individuals to
communism,92 the US still devoted considerable resources to organiz-
ing and training military forces in the developing world.93 Washington
sought to create militaries in its own image—due partly to a theory of
civil-military relations and battlefield effectiveness that privileges apo-
litical and autonomous armed forces, and partly to an aversion to im-
plementing “totalitarian” civil-military relations in its clients.94 The US

wasn’t setting out to construct robust authoritarianism for its own sake.
Instead, its sponsorship was primarily against the seizure of power by
groups it considered hostile to US geopolitical interests.95
87
Papers of John F. Kennedy 1961, 46.
88
Macdonald 1992, 12.
89
Gunitsky 2017, 187–88.
90
Quoted in Rabe 2016, 98.
91
92
President Harry Truman hypothesized in 1950 that “poverty, misery, and insecurity are the con-
ditions on which Communism thrives”; quoted in Kapstein 2017, 30.
93
Papers of John F. Kennedy 1961, 47–48.
94
On the US reaction to such institutions in Taiwan, see Greitens 2016, 98, 110.
95
Westad 2005, 111. In a similar vein, O’Rourke 2018, 7, finds that US policymakers were “prag-
matic” in their installation of new regimes abroad, supporting a range of autocratic regime types (as
well as democracies).
Yet this ambivalence toward the coalitional composition of its au-

tocratic allies had unintended consequences for regime durability. In
particular, it left clients highly vulnerable to military coups. Instead of
providing cover for coup prevention strategies or aiding in their imple-
mentation, US clients were forced to go it alone in trying to reduce the
threat to their rule posed by their own militaries. When their “coup-
proofing” strategies led to military backlash, the US largely stood aside,
as it was generally confident that the new military rulers would remain
amenable to core US interests.
Among its clients, the US didn’t seek to build internal security in-
stitutions that would dominate the military or repress noncommunist
opposition within the state. Instead, the US primarily viewed internal
security forces as important for repressing (allegedly) communist op-
position groups.96 In a report by the Operations Coordinating Board
(ocb) of the US National Security Council on how the US “might as-
sist countries vulnerable to communist subversion to develop adequate
security forces,” analysts warned that these organizations might be used
to bolster autocracies.97 The ocb analysts feared that if powerful secu-
rity services were created, then “situations could arise where the United
States might be associated in the public mind with backing corrupt and
authoritarian police systems manipulated by local politicos.”98
As noted above, US policymakers also viewed coup prevention strat-
egies with suspicion, out of fear that such practices would undermine
battlefield performance. Because coup-prevention practices like coun-
terbalancing explicitly sought to limit military autonomy and effective-
ness, the US didn’t promote these client behaviors. In a 1962 report on
security forces in Latin America, a US interagency team concluded that
the balancing of security forces in Bolivia was “based on political con-

siderations and not any real security criterion. This has resulted in the
absence of an integrated security program in the country [that is] re-
sponsive, in any real sense, to ultimate constitutional authority. This
policy has resulted in confusion, parochialism, and voids in coverage of
the Communist/Cuban threat.”99
This preference doesn’t mean that the US successfully halted coup
prevention strategies among its clients, only that it didn’t directly aid
in their implementation. In South Korea, for example, US training for
the Korean armed forces focused on building an autonomous, apolitical,
96
FRUS 1990, Doc. 6.
97
Operations Coordinating Board 1955, 1.
98
99
American-style, anticommunist military.100 President Syngman Rhee

frequently rotated command positions in an attempt to prevent a uni-
fied officer corps from ousting his regime, but the intensive US advisory
role in the military limited his efforts.101 But outside the regular armed
forces, Rhee relied heavily on counterbalancing internally directed co-
ercive organizations, and he ignored US advice by purging the Korean
National Police not only of suspected communists but also of conserva-
tive rivals.102 Rhee’s US sponsors cast a disapproving eye on this security
fragmentation. The US lamented the lack of “coordination” between
the fragmented internal security forces, but thought it “doubtful” that
the South Korean government could be “persuaded to make genuine
efforts to reorganize individual internal security agencies or to unite or
coordinate their activities.”103
Consider also the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia (1970–1975). Con-
fident of US support against communist insurgents,104 the regime fo-
cused on reducing the threat posed by its own officer corps.105 Rather
than promoting competent officers, as the US desired, Lon Nol de-
moted those he worried may pose a personal threat. And he rapidly pro-
moted his own brother, using his brother’s network to monitor other
officers.106 In 1972, US auditors found that because of the army’s cor-
ruption and cronyism, only 6 to 8 percent of salaries were actually being
dispensed to troops.107 Confronted with the figures, Lon Nol allegedly
replied, “Calm down! The Americans are killing a thousand of our en-
emies every week. Victory is ours.”108
Instead of aiding the Cambodian leader in coup prevention, Lon
Nol’s US sponsors were in fact open to accepting a military coup if one
were to replace him. US policymakers made this position clear (if not
publicly known) as they deliberated over the problems posed by Lon

Nol’s coup prevention strategies and the regime’s poor battlefield ef-
fectiveness. In August 1973, the National Security Council expressed
doubt that a coup against Lon Nol was imminent, but recommended
“we do not support Lon Nol if any independent, unified attempt is
100
Brazinsky 2007, 84, 88, 97.
101
Brazinsky 2007, 99; Greitens 2016, 142–43.
102
Greitens 2016, 144, 146–47.
103
104
The US Embassy reported in June 1972 that even with the Cambodian military’s poor perfor-
mance, Lon Nol was convinced that “the Khmer Communist Movement does not pose a serious threat
to his government.” Cited in Chandler 1991, 360, en. 89.
105
Becker 1998, 132.
106
Deac 1997, 142–43; FRUS 2010a, Doc. 36.
107
Deac 1997, 110.
108
Quoted in Chandler 1991, 223. See also Deac 1997, 221.
made by the High Council to remove him. However, this does not
mean that we should encourage coup plotting in any way, but only that
we accept a fait accompli, if and when it occurs.”109
The US was also unwilling to aid in coup prevention by other cli-
ents. In South Vietnam, the US military-style advisory group tried to
get President Ngo Dinh Diem (1954–63) to depoliticize his military
and structure it along American lines.110 US policy had generally been
“to transform the South Vietnamese state in accordance with American
values and principles.”111 Training followed the US model closely,112 and
the US built the army “in its own image.”113 US policymakers were also
frustrated by Diem’s coup prevention strategies, “which were reducing
[military] effectiveness and thus aiding the Viet Cong insurgency.”114
The regime’s efforts to increase Can Lao Party membership were
viewed negatively by the US.115 This lack of support for Diem to dom-
inate the armed forces also led the US to adopt an ambivalent response
to coup attempts. During a failed 1960 coup, the US took no strong ac-
tion—either in support of the attempt or against it.116 In 1961, “many
US planners considered Diem stubborn and inept, but they could not
identify a better alternative.”117 Ultimately, the US did provide tacit and
covert support for the 1963 coup that overthrew Diem. But this sup-
port was hesitant and focused on the probability that a coup would ac-
tually succeed.118 Once it did succeed, Washington quickly supported
the new ruling junta.119
The US accepted coups in other clients as well. In a memo for cia
director William Colby on March 8, 1974, cia analysts recommended
that the US reaction to a military coup in Thailand should be governed
by the premise that “it is in our interest to continue a close relation-
ship with almost any Thai government that might emerge from a coup”
and thus “during any coup attempt the US should maintain a low pro-
file and remain detached from the situation, but should continue all
assistance programs and contacts with the government at present lev-
els.” But “once a coup has succeeded and the dust has settled, the US
109
FRUS 2010a, Doc. 99.
110
Karlin 2018, 78–79.
111
Miller 2013, 149.
112
Ladwig 2017, 149.
113
Shurkin et al. 2017, 68.
114
O’Rourke 2018, 175.
115
Ladwig 2017, 155.
116
Miller 2013, 211–13.
117
O’Rourke 2018, 175.
118
O’Rourke 2018, 161, 179–82.
119
Ladwig 2017, 208.
should in [a] low key express acceptance of the situation.”120 Consider

also the US response to the 1961 coup in South Korea, shortly after
Rhee’s departure. The initial US reaction was negative though indeci-
sive. Steven David writes, “The lack of an American reaction to a 1961
coup in South Korea reflected Washington’s view that a successful coup
was preferable to prolonged political instability, which might provoke
a major war.”121 The coup “presented American policymakers with a
fait accompli. Once the coup occurred, it would have been difficult for
Americans to overturn it without causing complete political chaos.”122
After waiting to see if the coup makers would succeed in consolidating
control, Washington came to accept the new regime.123 Clearly, with a
foreign sponsor unwilling to aid in coup prevention strategies or to de-
fend the regime during a coup, American clients faced serious chal-
lenges to regime survival.
Thus, the superpower blocs diverged widely in their strategies of
foreign sponsorship. The Soviet Union sought to strengthen the rule
of pro-Soviet party-based regimes and to eliminate the threat posed
by military coups. The US and its allies sought to strengthen military
forces to counter communist and Islamist opposition, and in general re-
acted passively to military coups in client regimes. In the following sec-
tion, I turn to additional cross-national tests of these arguments.
Data
Before assessing the relationship between foreign support and client re-
gime survival, I must be precise about what is meant by a client autoc-
racy. The literature on international patron-client relations has generally
paid less attention to the distinctions between a client state, an allied

or aligned state, and a client regime.124 As I am primarily concerned
with the relationship between foreign support and regime durability, I
am interested in foreign support for particular authoritarian coalitions.
The existing literature offers important insights into the nature of pa-
tron-client relationships. There’s a general consensus that patron-client
state relationships are hierarchical, proximate, and transactional. They
typically involve a mutually beneficial exchange of goods, for example,
120
FRUS 2010b, Doc. 380.
121
David 1987, 32.
122
Brazinsky 2007, 118.
123
David 1987, 42; Brazinsky 2007, 119–20.
124
Authoritarian regimes are both coalitions of individuals and sets of formal and informal rules for
allocating roles and responsibilities. For similar conceptions, see Svolik 2012, 41–42; Geddes, Wright,
and Frantz 2018, 5, 55–58.
economic and military aid for privileged access to natural resources, and
services, such as military protection for basing rights.125
To develop an appropriate measure for assessing the effect of foreign
support on authoritarian regime survival, I created an original data set
of autocratic client regimes.126 I define autocratic client regime as an au-
thoritarian political regime in a formally independent state, whose ten-
ure a foreign sponsor makes a serious effort to protect from potential
internal or external threats. I consider two main forms of sponsor sup-
port to be evidence of such a serious effort. To meet the threshold for a
client regime, a foreign sponsor must provide both material and orga-
nizational support. In terms of material support, the client regime must
receive either direct budgetary support (say, financial assistance to pay
state salaries) or military aid (like full-grant or below-market-rate mil-
itary supplies with generous repayment terms). This support excludes
economic support that generally doesn’t go directly to the regime, such
as official development assistance, antipoverty programs, multilateral
lending, or private investments. It also excludes purely commercial arms
transactions.
In addition to either form of material support, a client regime must
receive organizational assistance from a foreign patron. This includes
either organizing and training the coercive apparatus, intelligence co-
operation, direct assistance in counterinsurgency or repression, or mili-
tary intervention on behalf of the regime. Organizing and training the
coercive apparatus involves training programs for officers or soldiers in
any client military organization,127 directly assisting in the structuring
or allocation of responsibilities in a military organization, or stationing
advisers in the client’s territory. It doesn’t include multilateral military
missions (for example, under UN authority). Intelligence cooperation

refers to information-sharing on potential internal or external threats,
such as armed rebel groups, domestic opposition, foreign state military
forces or intelligence networks, and plots by regime insiders. Direct
assistance in counterinsurgency or domestic repression involves deploy-
ing advisers and providing tactical or strategic advice to regime secu-
rity forces. Military intervention refers to the deployment of patron
soldiers, including into defensive positions, and air or naval operations
against opposing forces.
To avoid confusing any yearly changes in material deliveries or orga-
125
Shoemaker and Spanier 1984, 13; Yom 2015, 41–43. Of course, “mutually beneficial” doesn’t
imply that each party benefits equally.
126
The full codebook can be found in the replication files; Casey 2020.
127
This includes the regular armed forces, security services, regime-controlled paramilitary organi-
zations, intelligence agencies, praetorian guards, gendarmerie, etc.
nizational assistance with a patron ending support of a client regime,128

I use different criteria to identify the cessation of sponsorship. Sponsor-
ship ends when the material and organizational support outlined above
ceases and the relationship between the patron and client is severed.
This occurs when a sponsor states that it will no longer support the cli-
ent regime; when a sponsor denounces the client regime, calls for its re-
moval, or calls for regime change; or when the client announces a break
in relations, expels any advisers, and rejects further support.
The autocratic client regime data set (acrd) uses a binary measure of
foreign sponsorship.129 Although conceptually foreign support is con-
tinuous rather than binary, there are many difficulties in constructing a
cross-case, over-time, continuous index. In particular, it is hard to in-
terpret the intensity of military aid to regimes that are facing dras-
tically different domestic and regional security environments. To be
sensitive to the continuous nature of the phenomenon while avoiding
collapsing dissimilar international relationships into the same measure,
I used the particularly intensive foreign support outlined above to iden-
tify clients.
To identify all authoritarian client regimes since 1945, I consulted
more than five hundred primary and secondary sources in English and
Russian, seeking to establish whether any of the two hundred eighty
autocratic regimes identified by Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and
Erica Frantz might meet the criteria outlined above.130 The acrd fol-
lows the same temporal scope (1946–2010) and, like the Geddes,
Wright, and Frantz data set, is not left-censored.131 I consulted five
main sources: hundreds of secondary sources based on archival sources,
recently declassified cia records, and information from the Digital Na-
tional Security Archive, the Foreign Relations of the United States se-
ries, and the Cold War International History Project.132
Rather than beginning with a set of patrons and identifying all the
regimes they supported, I generated the data set by working with each
autocratic regime to establish what foreign support, if any, was pro-
128
This is necessary because material transfers and organizational systems change over the tenure of
regimes for reasons unrelated to the depth of foreign support. For example, regimes may not need the
high levels of military matériel necessary in earlier years, or may have developed a domestic capacity to
produce weaponry. And with enough foreign training, military forces may develop a domestic capacity
to continue sponsor-style training programs.
129
Casey 2020.
130
The Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2018 data set includes autocratic regimes in office after January
1, 1946, until December 31, 2010, at which point the data is right-censored. The data set also includes
autocratic regimes in states with populations over one million in 2009.
131
This means that any client regimes whose sponsorship began before January 1, 1946, but con-
tinued after that date are included in the data set.
132
At https://www.wilsoncenter.org/program/cold-war-international-history-project.
vided. I came up with the following patrons: the United States (thirty-
seven regimes), the Soviet Union (nineteen), France (twenty-six), the
United Kingdom (six), China (two), Vietnam (two), Russia (one), Yu-
goslavia (one), and Egypt (one). There are ninety client regimes in total
(roughly one-third of all autocracies).133 In cases where multiple foreign
states supported a regime in a given year, I identified the patron as the
principal provider of organizational and material support. Once I de-
termined that a regime met the criteria for the onset of sponsorship, I
studied the trajectory of the patron-client relationship to identify when,
if ever, sponsorship ceased. I treated the transparency of coding deci-
sions with the utmost importance. Every case includes substantial justi-
fication and links to exact primary and secondary source identification,
and is provided in the code book in the replication files.134
Analysis
The analyses below employ the acrd to assess the relationship between
foreign support and autocratic survival. Following a growing body of lit-
erature, I use event history analysis to examine the relationship between
foreign sponsorship and authoritarian regime survival.135 The unit of
observation in this analysis is a regime-year, and the main independent
variable is a time-varying measure of foreign sponsorship. Figure 1 (a)
considers the relationship between foreign sponsorship and regime du-
ration overall. It shows that foreign sponsorship is associated with a re-
duced risk of regime collapse relative to nonclient autocracies.136
But this measure groups all foreign sponsors together. If the group
of sponsored regimes is split by foreign patron, we see that the Soviet
Union drives the association between foreign sponsorship and regime

survival.137 Figure 1 (b) shows that only Soviet sponsorship is strongly
associated with a reduced risk of client regime collapse relative to other
133
The total number of clients doesn’t match the number of clients per patron, as some regimes had
multiple patrons over the course of regime tenure.
134
Casey 2020.
135
This is appropriate, as I am primarily interested in assessing the relative impact of variables on
the time to event—in this case, regime collapse. Survival models provide several advantages over tradi-
tional regression-based models, since they’re better able to deal with data censoring and time-varying
covariates (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004, 16–19). There is no theoretical reason to suspect that
the probability of collapse over the tenure of authoritarian regimes takes a particular distribution, so I
employ a Cox proportional hazards model, which makes no limiting assumptions about the underly-
ing hazard distribution. For other studies of authoritarian regime survival that employ Cox models,
see Svolik 2012, 190.
136
Substantively speaking, on its own, foreign sponsorship reduces the hazard of collapse by 40.5
percent.
137
Other sponsors—China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Egypt—have only one or two client regimes
and thus aren’t included in models 2 or 3.
1.00 1.00
Survival Probability
0.75 0.75
0.50 0.50
0.25 0.25
0.00 0.00
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110
Time Time
Other regimes Client regimes Other regimes Soviet client regimes
(a) (b)
1.00 1.00
0.75 0.75
0.50 0.50
0.25 0.25
0.00 0.00
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110
Time Time
Other regimes US client regimes Other regimes French client regimes
(c) (d)
Figure 1
Survival Curves: Autocratic Regimes, 1946–2010
autocracies; US support (Figure 1 [c]) and French support (Figure 1[d])

don’t prevent regime collapse. Soviet sponsorship is substantively sig-
nificant, reducing the hazard of collapse by 78 percent. Of course, for-

eign support isn’t the only variable that affects authoritarian regime
survival. Table 1 displays the results of the models depicted in Figure 1
(and includes Great Britain), as well as three additional models incor-
porating a host of important control variables. The results are presented
as hazard ratios. Values less than one indicate a reduced relative risk of
regime collapse associated with the covariate, values greater than one
indicate an increased risk, and values of zero indicate no association.
In Table 1, model 2 includes measures of economic development
and oil revenue as well as a measure of whether the regime was en-
gaged in a civil war.138 It shows that Western sponsorship remains sta-
138
On economic performance and authoritarian survival, see Gandhi 2008, 175. On oil revenues
and autocratic survival, see Wright, Frantz, and Geddes 2015. GDP and oil revenue data are taken
from Vogt et al. 2015 and accessed through Wright 2019. On war and regime survival, see Bueno de
Mesquita, Siverson, and Woller 1992. The civil war measure is taken from Haber and Menaldo 2011
Table 1
Regime Survival Cox Models
Dependent Variable: Regime Failure
(1) (2) (3) (4)

US sponsorship 0.8572 0.7220 0.7052 0.7617
(0.4165, 1.0296) (0.4619, 1.1285) (0.4625, 1.0754) (0.4993, 1.1620)
Soviet sponsorship 0.1797*** 0.1687*** 0.2300** 0.2194***
(0.0736, 0.4382) (0.0690, 0.4124) (0.0938, 0.5641) (0.0891, 0.5404)
French sponsorship 0.8037 0.9048 0.9477 0.8347
(0.4996, 1.2929) (0.5593, 1.4638) (0.5871, 1.5301) (0.5173, 1.3472)
British sponsorship 0.7344 1.4300 0.6751 1.0640
(0.2237, 2.3078) (0.4521, 4.5237) (0.2089, 2.1816) (0.3329 3.3997)
GDP/capitat-1 1.0078
(0.9773, 1.0393)
Log (oil/capita) 0.6246**
(0.4410, 0.8846)
Civil war 2.4156***
(1.7140, 3.043)
Support party 0.6313**
(0.4692, 0.8484)
Seizure coup 1.9151*** 1.9130***
(1.4438 2.5403) (1.3600, 2.6909)
Seizure rebellion 0.5353*
(0.3135, 0.9139)
Seizure election 1.3103
(0.8449, 2.0322)
N (regime years) 4,591 4,158 4,591 4,591
Regime failures 223 210 223 223
R2 0.006 0.014 0.013 0.013
Max. possible R2 0.368 0.373 0.368 0.368
Log likelihood –1,039.391 –941.237 –1,022.829 –1,022.251
Wald test 15.050** (df=4) 49.160*** (df=7) 48.140*** (df=6) 46.620*** (df=7)
LR test 25.609*** (df=4) 57.902*** (df=7) 58.732*** (df=6) 59.889*** (df=7)
Score (Logrank) test 18.583*** (df=4) 54.080*** (df=7) 53.883*** (df=6) 51.633*** (df=7)
*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001
tistically insignificant with the inclusion of these controls, while Soviet

sponsorship still reduces the risk of regime collapse. One important
counterargument concerns whether foreign patrons simply sponsored
different types of authoritarian regimes that had differential durabil-
ity independent of any effect of foreign sponsorship. Model 3 includes
two important domestic regime–type controls: regime origins in a mil-
itary coup and whether the regime maintained a support party.139 These
and accessed through V-Dem. It is a time-variant measure of whether a regime participated in at least
one intrastate war with at least one thousand battle deaths in a given year.
139
Both measures are from Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2018.
controls are important, as scholars have long observed that military re-
gimes are less stable than other autocracies and that party-based re-
gimes are most stable.140 The latter variable is a time-varying measure
of whether the regime maintained a support party. As acknowledged
in later work by Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, these measures are im-
provements on the categorical authoritarian regime–type variables that
were widely used in earlier research.141 Even with the inclusion of im-
portant counterarguments rooted in domestic regime characteristics,
the (non)associations between our sponsor variables and regime fail-
ure remain unchanged (though the magnitude of the Soviet effect is re-
duced slightly).142 Model 4 includes two controls meant to capture party
strength (regime origins in elections, and rebellions) alongside regime
formation after a military coup.143 Soviet sponsorship remains statisti-
cally and substantively significant.
The theory offered here focuses on the variable vulnerability to regime-
ending military coups, the modular source of autocratic collapse. There
are several ways to assess that foreign sponsorship affects regime sur-
vival through coup likelihood. The simple descriptive statistics pro-
vided in Table 2 show that remarkably, no Soviet client regime ever lost
power to a military coup. By contrast, Western-backed clients fell to
coups at rates similar to those of nonsponsored autocracies.
Moving beyond the descriptive statistics provided in Table 2, logistic
regression models can be used to assess the relationship between foreign
sponsorship and regime-ending military coups. Our theoretical expec-
tations are that US, French, and British sponsorship will not reduce the
likelihood of regime overthrow by coup. Figure 2 plots the coefficient
estimates from four bivariate logistic regressions.144
Because Soviet clients experienced zero regime-ending military

coups, I exclude Soviet sponsorship in these models. We see that spon-
sorship overall is associated with a reduction in coup likelihood; this is
driven by Soviet clients. Neither US, French, nor British sponsorship
140
Geddes 1999.
141
Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2018. See also Wright 2019. For a criticism of these earlier mea-
sures, see Pepinsky 2014, 637–41.
142
Using a different measure of military regimes—whether the leadership group of the regime was
directly comprised of officers—generates similar findings. But the hazard ratio for military-led regimes
is slightly higher than for regimes that originated in military coups, which reflects the increased dura-
bility of successfully personalized regimes, in line with findings in Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2018.
143
On the strength of parties that seize power after armed rebellion, see Geddes, Wright, and
Frantz 2018, 159. We might also expect regimes that successfully “authoritarianized” a democratically
elected regime to be of relatively greater capacity than those organized after the seizure of power; Ged-
des, Wright, and Frantz 2018.
144
As I am not interested in time-to-event per se, but rather the likelihood of experiencing a
regime-ending military coup at any point during regime tenure, I can use a simple logistic regression.
Table 2
Foreign Sponsorship and Regime Failure Events, 1946–2010a
Election
Rule Election No Popular Military Ousted by Foreign State Mean
Sponsorship Change Loss Incumbent Uprising Coup Insurgency Intervention Autogolpe Death Fail Survive Duration N
None 7 16 27 25 57 7 6 5 3 153 37 15.0 190
(4.6%) (10.5%) (17.6%) (16.3%) (37.3%) (4.6%) (3.9%) (3.3%) (2.0%) (80.5%) (19.5%)
All clients 3 12 4 13 20 10 4 2 2 70 20 25.2 90
(4.3%) (17.1%) (5.7%) (18.6%) (28.6%) (14.3%) (5.7%) (2.9%) (2.9%) (77.8%) (20.2%)
US 2 6 3 6 7 5 2 1 1 33 4 22.4 37
(6.1%) (18.2%) (9.1%) (18.2%) (21.2%) (15.2%) (6.1%) (3.0%) (3.0%) (89.2%) (10.8%)
Soviet 1 4 0 3 0 3 0 0 1 12 7 42.8 19
(8.3%) (33.3%) (0.0%) (25.0%) (0.0%) (25.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (8.3%) (63.2%) (36.8%)
French 0 2 1 4 9 2 1 1 0 20 6 16.4 26
(0.0%) (10.0%) (5.0%) (20.0%) (45.0%) (10.0%) (5.0%) (5.0%) (0.0%) (76.9%) (23.1%)
British 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 3 3 51.8 6
(0.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (100.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (50.0%) (50.0%)
N 10 28 31 38 77 17 10 7 5 223 57 18.3 280
(4.5%) (12.5%) (13.9%) (17.0%) (34.5%) (7.6%) (4.5%) (3.1%) (2.2%) (79.6%) (20.4%)
a
As these data are cross-sectional, regimes are coded as clients if they receive foreign sponsorship at any point during regime tenure. The “rule change” outcome is
used by Geddes, Frantz, and Wright 2014, to capture regime changes in which “insiders changed the rules for choosing leaders and policies, or the executive was re-
moved by elite actors other than the military, ending the period of time in which one set of formal and informal rules remained in force.” Autogolpe refers to regime
changes coded by Geddes, Frantz, and Wright 2014, in which “a new leader chosen in a regular autocratic succession changed the formal and informal rules defining
the regime after his accession to power while himself remaining in power.” The category “all clients” includes Chinese (n = 2), Vietnamese (n = 2), Yugoslav (n = 1),
Russian (n = 1), and Egyptian (n = 1) client regimes.
Sponsorship
American
French
British
–1.0 –0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5

Estimate
95% Confidence interval 90% Confidence interval
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4
Figure 2
Regime-Ending Military Coups and Foreign Sponsorship
reduces the risk of experiencing a regime-ending military coup. But

these bivariate regressions don’t consider how factors other than foreign
sponsorship may affect the likelihood of a coup. The most important
counterargument to address is, again, centered on authoritarian regime
type. To begin, I examine US clients. Figure 3 shows that the nonrela-
tionship between US sponsorship and coup vulnerability is maintained
even after I control for whether the regime maintained a party, and for
two measures of military regimes (regime origins in a coup and regime
leadership comprising military officers).145 Similarly, Figure 4 shows
that this nonassociation holds for French regimes with the inclusion of
these three controls.146
I can also test whether foreign sponsorship affected coup vulnera-
bility through the mechanisms provided here. I assess the relationship
between foreign sponsorship and autocratic coup prevention strate-
gies. Erica De Bruin has compiled data on regime counterbalancing
of the regular armed forces with new coercive organizations.147 Using
145
On the effect of authoritarian regime type on coup risk, see Svolik 2012; Geddes, Frantz, and
Wright 2014.
146
Since there are so few British clients, I don’t conduct this analysis for these regimes.
147
De Bruin 2018; De Bruin 2019. This data set covers a random sample of countries from 1960–
2010 (n = 110).
American
Support Party
Seizure Coup
LDR Group Military
–1.0 –0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0

Estimate

Model 2 Model 4 Model 6
Figure 3
Regime-Ending Military Coups and US Sponsorship
French
Support Party
Seizure Coup
LDR Group Military
–1.0 –0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0

Estimate

Model 2 Model 4 Model 6
Figure 4
Regime-Ending Military Coups and French Sponsorship
her measure of the number of forces with independent military com-

mand and a position near the capital (and thus theoretically capable of
counterbalancing the military), I assess the relationship between for-
eign sponsorship and security apparatus fragmentation. The security
services coded by De Bruin capture those like the snasp in Mozam-
bique and the Soviet kgb, as well as praetorian guards and party militia,
among other security forces. As such, I expect to see a strong association
between Soviet sponsorship and the presence of these security forces.
Table 3 displays the results of a series of ordinary least squares models
with controls used in earlier analyses.
The results fit well with theoretical expectations. Soviet sponsor-
ship is associated strongly with more counterbalancing (Table 3, models
2–4). US and French sponsorship is not associated with counterbal-
ancing.148 And although British sponsorship is associated with more
counterbalancing, the results should be interpreted cautiously given the
small number of observations.
I also assess the relationship between coup prevention strategies and
the likelihood of a military coup. In this analysis, I include newly avail-
able data from Geddes, Wright, and Frantz on the presence of polit-
ical commissars in the military.149 This analysis is also a good indirect
test of the effect of Soviet sponsorship. Although nearly all Soviet cli-
ents had commissars, not all the regimes that maintained commissars
were Soviet clients. Figure 5 shows that counterbalancing slightly re-
duces the likelihood of a regime-ending military coup but this fails to
achieve statistical significance. In contrast, commissar presence strongly
reduces the probability of a military coup. Figure 5, model 4, shows that
once commissars are included, the effect of foreign sponsorship is ren-
dered insignificant.
These tests provide considerable support for the proposition that for-
eign sponsorship differs in its impact on regime survival, and that this
variation can be accounted for by the divergent effects of Western and
Soviet sponsorship on military coups.
Discussion and Conclusion

Through the first systematic analysis of the relationship between for-
eign sponsorship and regime survival, my research finds that only sup-
port from the Soviet Union reduces the risk of client regime collapse.
148
While the coefficient for US sponsorship is negative, it’s insignificant in all models.
149
Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2018. This measure identifies when “a party imposes commissars,
party advisors, or some kind of party committee on military units or garrisons.”
Table 3
Foreign Sponsorship and Counterbalancing
Dependent Variable: Counterbalancing Organizations
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Foreign sponsorship 0.167
(0.216)
US sponsorship –0.463 –0.425 –0.403
(0.334) (0.301) (0.351)
Soviet sponsorship 0.948*** 0.872*** 0.955***
(0.277) (0.303) (0.308)
French sponsorship 0.095 0.057 0.054
(0.265) (0.247) (0.250)
British sponsorship 0.652*** 0.490** 0.606***
(0.140) (0.244) (0.209)
Military-led –0.442*
(0.249)
Support party –0.025
(0.232)
Seizure coup –0.091
(0.299)
Seizure rebellion –0.240
(0.294)
Seizure election 0.223
(0.367)
Constant 1.354*** 1.348*** 1.510*** 1.394***
(0.140) (0.140) (0.244) (0.209)
N (regime years) 2,775 2,775 2,775 2,775
R2 0.004 0.102 0.129 0.114
Adjusted R2 0.004 0.101 0.127 0.111
*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001; standard errors clustered by country
This variation can be explained by the variable effects of foreign spon-

sorship on military coups. The Soviet Union directly aided its clients
in implementing a series of highly penetrative coup prevention strate-
gies that proved effective in reducing the risk posed by military coups.
By contrast, and owing to their primary focus on preventing the sei-
zure of power by communist or Islamist groups, the US and its West-
ern allies acted ambivalently toward coups in their authoritarian clients.
Western patrons offered no assistance in coup prevention and instead
accepted successful reactive coups. This rendered clients highly vulner-
able to military intervention.
Sponsorship
Counterbalancing
Commissars
–6 –4 –2 0
Estimate

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5
Figure 5
Coup Prevention Strategies and Regime-Ending Military Coups
The evidence provided above helps us to rethink some of the litera-

ture on civil-military relations under communism. Institutions consid-
ered critical for explaining the longevity of communist regimes, such
as ruling party control over the armed forces and large security ser-
vices, were often endogenous to Soviet sponsorship. Communist re-
gimes didn’t simply come to power fully formed. Instead, they had to
establish penetrative security services and party institutions, and embed
these organizations in military forces that were often hostile to such ac-
tions. The presence of communist-style institutions is thus an outcome
itself worthy of explanation. We must take seriously not only the effects
on coup outcomes of highly penetrative coup prevention, but also the
conditions under which such institutions can be established in the first
place. In cases like Ethiopia and Afghanistan, where regimes originally
seized power after military coups, it’s difficult to understand the capac-
ity of such regimes to build these institutions successfully without con-
sidering the role played by the Soviet Union.
It’s also important to understand the limits of Soviet support. It
wasn’t that the Soviet Union suffered from fewer principal-agent di-
lemmas with their client regimes. In Ethiopia, Mengistu long ignored
Soviet pressure for the regime to create a party. When he eventually

gave in, it was to use Soviet aid to create a highly personalized party
that didn’t broaden regime support. In Afghanistan, the two factions
of the party relentlessly purged one another rather than unified against
growing external opposition, as Moscow had wished. Moscow was also
unable to stop the rise of Hafizullah Amin, to prevent his overtures to-
ward the US, or to improve the poor counterinsurgency performance of
the regime, short of direct military intervention. So it wasn’t that So-
viet clients dutifully followed Moscow’s orders. Instead, Soviet clients
had a clear interest in receiving assistance in coup prevention. As cli-
ents themselves feared military overthrow, they were more than happy
to use Soviet support to inoculate their regimes from military coups,
and to create large new security services to brutalize opposition within
and outside the regime.
The analysis above raises interesting questions about how we might
judge the success of American foreign policy toward client autocra-
cies. For US-backed clients, of the twenty-seven regimes that collapsed
while receiving US support, six realigned either toward another great
power or to active hostility toward the US. This means that nearly eight
of ten times that US-backed clients collapsed, the subsequent regime
maintained pro-US alignment. So, if pro-US orientation is the only
measure of American foreign policy success, then this can be judged
quite positively. But, as this article attempts to demonstrate, US for-
eign policy toward its client regime indirectly incentivized destabiliz-
ing coups and coup prevention behaviors that often necessitated further
intervention. In this sense these policies might be deemed much less
successful. And, of course, the human cost of these interventions was
frequently enormous. As a result, these policies might seem to be far

from unqualified successes.
There are reasons to suspect that the argument offered here is use-
ful not only for explaining past outcomes, but also for understanding
future trajectories. Although coups have decreased since the end of the
Cold War, they’re not mere objects of historical curiosity. They have
succeeded as recently as November 2019 in Bolivia, failed as recently
as January 2019 in Gabon, and are still promoted by American for-
eign policymakers as a solution to problematic regimes, for example, in
Venezuela.150 Nor are pervasive controls over military forces by author-
itarian regimes a thing of the past. Some evidence suggests that similar
arrangements were present in the organization of the Islamic State. In a
150
Londoño and Casey 2018; Reuters 2019; Searcey 2019.
draft plan obtained by Der Spiegel, the is sought to embed a parallel in-
telligence service alongside military commanders in Islamic State–held
territory in Syria and Iraq that would bypass the local commander and
report to a “security emir.”151
Moreover, as US foreign policy has sought to move away from di-
rect military intervention in favor of supporting client governments152
and the Russian government and connected groups have been training
security forces outside Eurasia since 2014,153 the dynamics of security
support for authoritarian regimes is still of critical importance today.
Policymakers must consider the impact of foreign sponsorship on the
domestic distribution of power in client regimes and its incentives for
coups and coup prevention strategies, or else they run the risk of pro-
moting ultimately counterproductive foreign policies. These dynamics
don’t just help us to understand the difficulties in creating effective mil-
itary forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, they also shed light on the poten-
tial challenges in aiding pro-US autocrats in the Maghreb to strengthen
their counterinsurgency potential against Islamist militants.
Data
Replication files for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OW
GEAR.
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Author
Adam E. Casey will be a research fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging
Democracies at the University of Michigan, beginning in September 2020. He
earned his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Toronto in May 2020.
His research interests include the durability of authoritarian regimes, civil-mili-
tary relations, comparative democratization, and Soviet foreign policy. He can be
reached at aecasey@umich.edu.
Acknowledgements
For their very helpful feedback, I thank the World Politics editors, three anonymous
reviewers, and Barbara Peck, as well as the following: Lucan Way; Seva Gunitsky;
Joe Wright; Jean Lachapelle; Steve Levitsky; Sean Yom; Stephen Hanson; Noel
Anderson; Erica De Bruin; Kristen Harkness; Brian Taylor; Paul Staniland; Roy
Licklider; Lynette Ong; Shivaji Mukherjee; Carolina de Miguel Moyer; Josh
Tucker; Egor Lazarev; Sophie Borwein; Jakob Tolstrup; Diana Fu; Orysia Kulick;
Timothy Frye; Stathis Kalyvas; Oisín Tansey; Karrie Koesel; Kathleen Collins;
Kevin Luo; Zain Asaf; Lama Mourad Ajmal Burhanzoi; Zak Black; Dan Hutton
Ferris; Dan Sherwin; and Kirstyn Hevey; and participants in seminars at Yale Uni-
versity, Columbia University, the University of Toronto, and in the annual meet-
ings of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia and Boston.
Key Words
authoritarian durability, civil-military relations, foreign interventions, Cold War,
great power foreign policy, alliances, military coups, coup prevention

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THE DURABILITY OF

C ONVENTIONAL wisdom holds that great power support helps

tocracies is present in a variety of analyses of authoritarian survival,

services and commissars prevented coups by providing intelligence on

Islamist takeover—rendered their clients vulnerable to military coups.

I then turn to a systematic test of these arguments on the universe of

Foreign Sponsorship and Regime Survival

tially risky repression.9 Moreover, foreign patrons can directly engage

client regime survival. Rather than being uniformly advantageous for

ably between superpower blocs—variation that can largely be explained

Strategies of Foreign Sponsorship and the Military

tributing spoils to the military, promoting political allies or coethnics

Therefore, limiting officers’ ability to launch a coup often involves a

active or preemptive coup. By deploying their own forces in the form of

Soviet Sponsorship and Coup Prevention

forces, the purging of precommunist officer corps, and the embedding

Africa.51 Although none of these regimes had received enough assist-

mainly with controlling the mood of officers and investigating military

viet advisers and between twelve thousand and eighteen thousand

regime after the withdrawal of Soviet combat forces.81 In the summer

of 1989, khad82 uncovered a coup plot and arrested 127 officers. On

Western Sponsorship and Military Coups

US wasn’t generally concerned about the particular constitution of the

stated that American interests in areas targeted by communist opposi-

plementing “totalitarian” civil-military relations in its clients.94 The US

Yet this ambivalence toward the coalitional composition of its au-

the balancing of security forces in Bolivia was “based on political con-

American-style, anticommunist military.100 President Syngman Rhee

publicly known) as they deliberated over the problems posed by Lon

should in [a] low key express acceptance of the situation.”120 Consider

paid less attention to the distinctions between a client state, an allied

missions (for example, under UN authority). Intelligence cooperation

nizational assistance with a patron ending support of a client regime,128

Union drives the association between foreign sponsorship and regime

autocracies; US support (Figure 1 [c]) and French support (Figure 1[d])

nificant, reducing the hazard of collapse by 78 percent. Of course, for-

(1) (2) (3) (4)

tistically insignificant with the inclusion of these controls, while Soviet

Because Soviet clients experienced zero regime-ending military

–1.0 –0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5

95% Confidence interval 90% Confidence interval

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

reduces the risk of experiencing a regime-ending military coup. But

LDR Group Military

–1.0 –0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0

95% Confidence interval 90% Confidence interval

LDR Group Military

–1.0 –0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0

95% Confidence interval 90% Confidence interval

her measure of the number of forces with independent military com-

Discussion and Conclusion

This variation can be explained by the variable effects of foreign spon-

95% Confidence interval 90% Confidence interval

The evidence provided above helps us to rethink some of the litera-

Soviet pressure for the regime to create a party. When he eventually

frequently enormous. As a result, these policies might seem to be far

Albrecht, Holger. 2015. “The Myth of Coup-Proofing: Risk and Instances of

Boix, Carles. 2011. “Democracy, Development, and the International System.”

New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press.

Papers of John F. Kennedy. 1962. Presidential Papers. National Security Files.

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