A presentation by Adam Scharpf (University of Copenhagen, German Institute for Global and Area Studies). This event is part of the Political Economy Lunch Seminar (PELS), co-hosted by the International Security Research Colloquium.
Adam Scharpf is an incoming assistant professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, and a postdoctoral researcher at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg. His research focuses on how regimes produce loyalty, repression, and security. thHe holds a PhD from the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim, where I also worked in the ERC funde d Project Repression and the Escalation of Political Violence (RATE).
Event summary
Coups oust six times more autocrats than revolutions while causing three out of four failures of democracy. Conventional wisdom holds that coups are, first and foremost, motivated by the macro-organisational interests of the military. In contrast, we argue that personal interests drive individuals' active involvement in illegal power seizures. To explain why and which individuals conspire against their governments, we study the career prospects of individual officers. We expect that officers pressured by the up-or-out promotion system participate in coups to force their way up within the military organisation. Using original data on all 5,000 serving officers in Argentina, we analyse biographic differences between all 150 coup plotters, who participated in the 1955 putsches against Juan D. Perón, and the entire army officer corps. We find that officers stuck within the military hierarchy and threatened with retirement were more likely to participate in both coup attempts. The study demonstrates how organisational backlogs motivate soldiers to turn against their political leaders. This has implications for understanding the internal dynamics of political conspiracies, bureaucratic sabotage, and regime breakdowns.
