Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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
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
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.
414 w o r l d p o li t i c s
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,
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000039 Published online by Cambridge University Press
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.
d u r a b i li t y o f c li en t r e g i m es 417
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
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000039 Published online by Cambridge University Press
“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.
420 w o r l d p o li t i c s
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
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000039 Published online by Cambridge University Press
72
Ayele 2014, 210.
73
US CIA 1988b, 29.
74
Khristoforov 2016, 295–96.
75
Khristoforov 2016, 217.
76
Khristoforov 2009, 196.
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.
422 w o r l d p o li t i c s
87
Papers of John F. Kennedy 1961, 46.
88
Macdonald 1992, 12.
89
Gunitsky 2017, 187–88.
90
Quoted in Rabe 2016, 98.
91
Papers of John F. Kennedy 1961, 1.
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).
424 w o r l d p o li t i c s
100
Brazinsky 2007, 84, 88, 97.
101
Brazinsky 2007, 99; Greitens 2016, 142–43.
102
Greitens 2016, 144, 146–47.
103
Operations Coordinating Board 1955, 37.
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.
426 w o r l d p o li t i c s
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-
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000039 Published online by Cambridge University Press
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.
d u r a b i li t y o f c li en t r e g i m es 427
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
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000039 Published online by Cambridge University Press
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
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000039 Published online by Cambridge University Press
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.
430 w o r l d p o li t i c s
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
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000039 Published online by Cambridge University Press
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
Survival Probability
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 US client regimes Other regimes French client regimes
(c) (d)
Figure 1
Survival Curves: Autocratic Regimes, 1946–2010
Table 1
Regime Survival Cox Models
Dependent Variable: Regime Failure
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
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
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000039 Published online by Cambridge University Press
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.
d u r a b i li t y o f c li en t r e g i m es 435
Sponsorship
American
French
British
Figure 2
Regime-Ending Military Coups and Foreign Sponsorship
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
Figure 3
Regime-Ending Military Coups and US Sponsorship
French
Support Party
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000039 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Seizure Coup
Figure 4
Regime-Ending Military Coups and French Sponsorship
d u r a b i li t y o f c li en t r e g i m es 437
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.
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
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000039 Published online by Cambridge University Press
*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001; standard errors clustered by country
Sponsorship
Counterbalancing
Commissars
–6 –4 –2 0
Estimate
Figure 5
Coup Prevention Strategies and Regime-Ending Military Coups
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
440 w o r l d p o li t i c s
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
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000039 Published online by Cambridge University Press