In a public lecture on September 29 co-organized by the School of Public Policy at CEU and PERG, Paul Maarek presented a paper he had recently co-authored with SPP Associate Professor Michael Dorsch. In the paper, “Rent seeking, revolutionary threat and coups in non-democracies,” Dorsch and Maarek “study both theoretically and empirically the political turnover process in autocracies due to coups.”
Maarek, an assistant professor at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, explained that there has been extensive research focused on how the threat of revolution forces regimes to democratize (Acemoglu and Robinson), but that democratizations are actually quite rare events. What interests Maarek and Dorsch is explaining why most leadership transitions in autocracies are via coups and do not improve political institutions.
There are two primary reasons why elites mount coups in non-democracies: to improve their position relative to the ruler; and to prevent a revolution that they fear may be imminent. Maarek pointed to recent events in Egypt, Burkina Faso, and Burundi as compelling examples of instances when military elites had staged coups in the aftermath of widespread anti-government rallies in order to prevent the instability from escalating into a revolution.
In their research, Maarek and Dorsch model the interactions among the ruler, elite, and citizens. Maarek explained that in normal times, rulers enact policies to extract rent from the citizens sufficient to satisfy the elite (“satisfy the coup constraint”). If the ruler is perceived by the citizens to be extracting excessive rents (“violate the revolution constraint”), however, the citizens may launch a revolution. For a given level of rent-extraction, exogenous shocks may increase the probability that the revolution constraint that was satisfied in normal times is violated after the shock. In such a case, civil unrest rises and the elite may mount a coup to replace the ruler and pre-empt a revolution.
Maarek said that the threat of revolution exists in autocracies when workers make judgments about the ruler based on the prevailing economic circumstances. Maarek noted that the ruler, elite, and citizens are interacting in a very dynamic environment and with incomplete information. “Workers only observe an outcome,” said Maarek and so, for example, they don’t know if the economic shock they are experiencing is due to the amount of rent that the ruler is extracting, whether or not the ruler is good or bad, or on some outside event. Before concluding, Maarek presented some empirical evidence using fixed effects and IV regressions on data that he and Dorsch have collected on economic shocks, popular unrest, and coups.
As Maarek noted in his concluding remarks, he and Dorsch are continuing to explore this topic and hope to learn more about, for example, the precise timing of popular unrests and coups and the “sharing rules” that may exist between rulers and elites.
Watch Maarek's full lecture below.