Anti-populist coups d’état in the twenty-first century: reasons, dynamics and consequences

Baykan, Toygar Sinan, Gürsoy, Yaprak ORCID: 0000-0001-8909-6819 and Ostiguy, Pierre (2021) Anti-populist coups d’état in the twenty-first century: reasons, dynamics and consequences. Third World Quarterly, 42 (4). pp. 793-811. ISSN 0143-6597

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Abstract

There is a burgeoning literature on how to deal with populism in advanced liberal democracies, which puts a strong emphasis on legalist and pluralist methods. There is also a new and expanding literature that looks at the consequences of coups d’état for democracies by employing large-N data sets. These two recent literatures, however, do not speak to one another, based on the underlying assumption that coups against populists were a distinctly twentieth-century Latin American phenomenon. Yet the cases of Venezuela in 2002, Thailand in 2006 and Turkey in 2016 show that anti-populist coups have also occurred in the twenty-first century. Focussing on these cases, the article enquires about the extent to which military coups succeed against populists. The main finding is that although anti-populist coups may initially take over the government, populism survives in the long run. Thus, anti-populist coups fail in their own terms and they do not succeed in eradicating populism. In fact, in the aftermath of a coup, populism gains further legitimacy against what it calls repressive elites, while possibilities for democratisation are further eroded. This is because populists tap into existing socio-cultural divides and politically mobilise the hitherto underrepresented sectors in their societies that endure military interventions.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2021 Taylor & Francis
Divisions:	LSE
Subjects:	J Political Science
Date Deposited:	09 Jul 2024 14:33
Last Modified:	11 Sep 2025 11:59
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/124145

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