Econ Gov (2010) 11:5176

DOI 10.1007/s10101-009-0068-9

ORIGINAL PAPER

Military coups and the consequences of durable de facto

power: the case of Pakistan

Aditya Bhave Christopher Kingston

Received: 30 October 2006 / Accepted: 5 October 2009 / Published online: 2 November 2009
Springer-Verlag 2009

Abstract We analyze the role of the military as an independent interest group

within the State, based on the two-player theoretical framework of Acemoglu and
Robinson (Economic origins of dictatorship and democracy. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2006); we innovate by introducing the military as a third player, a
specialist in violence. In particular, we study the conditions under which a democratic
regime can prevent a transition to an authoritarian regime via a military coup, when
a coup requires the support of both the military and the elite sections of the civilian
population. We carry out an historical case study of Pakistan to motivate and illustrate
our argument, and show that Pakistans three coups since independence are associated
with parameter shifts in our model.

Keywords Military Coups Pakistan

JEL Classification N40 P00 H56

1 Introduction

The military is both an institution of the state and a powerful interest group. It is funda-
mental to the organization of the state because it protects property rightsit maintains

We thank Sami Alpanda, Adam Honig, the editor, and an anonymous referee for comments.

A. Bhave
Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
e-mail: abhave@uchicago.edu

C. Kingston (B)
Department of Economics, Amherst College, Amherst, MA 01002, USA
e-mail: cgkingston@amherst.edu

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internal law and order, and provides national security. The military is problematic,
however, because it is an independent actor; granted the power to enforce the law,
it is also sufficiently powerful to make its own laws, that is, to coercively alter the
political institutions of the state. Hence, we arrive at a critical conundrum in the study
of political institutions: Why do people who have guns obey people who do not have
them? (Przeworski 2003, p. 96).
This paper uses an intertemporal model of political competition, based on that of
Acemoglu and Robinson (2006), to investigate the conditions under which a civil-
ian government can maintain control of the military. In Acemoglu and Robinsons
framework there are two players, the poor and the rich, and the military is implicitly
assumed to be aligned with the rich (p. 224). Our innovation is to add the military as
an independent third player.
In our model, the poor and the rich have taxable incomes, and the military is paid
from tax revenue. Players compete over two policy instruments, the tax rate and the
rents obtained by the military. Democracy is the rule of the poor, while authoritarian
regimes are governed by a coalition of the rich and the military.1 In both cases, disen-
franchised populations can occasionally threaten regime change. In these high-threat
states, ruling groups may offer concessions in order to protect their franchise; how-
ever, they cannot credibly commit to future concessions after the threat has passed.
Regime change is also costly, so it occurs only if the disenfranchised groups can gain a
higher expected value from regime change than under the status quo. We describe the
range of parameters over which coups are feasible against democratic governments.
We observe that military coups coincide with the occurrence or expectation of a reduc-
tion in the institutional dependence of the state on the military, except in cases when
a democratic government is able to forestall regime change by making concessions.
Pakistan is a case in point of turbulent civil-military relations. In the 62 years since
Pakistan became an independent state, the military has overthrown democratic gov-
ernments three times. On each occasion, the act was motivated by an infringement
of the institutional interests of the military, and supported by sections of the elites,
whose interests had also been compromised. Military dictatorships in Pakistan have
been predatory and have set policies that heavily favored elite groups such as the
bureaucracy, Islamic clerics and rural landlords, at the expense of the general masses.
The narrative underscores our notion that military dictatorships are spawned and gov-
erned by military-elite coalitions.
In this paper, we interact theory with history to present an analytical narrative based
on a game theoretical model of military behavior. The major political events in the

1 In interpreting democracy as rule by the poor, we follow Acemoglu and Robinson, who justify this
assumption by positing an underlying model of two-party Downsian political competition in which the
median voter is poor (2006, chap. 3). However, as Fearon (2006) points out, this model does not explain the
rationale for elections or any of the other features generally associated with democracyone could equally
view democracy as dictatorship by the poor. For models explaining the role of elections in democracy,
see Fearon (2006) (who argues that elections can serve as a coordinating device enabling a credible threat
of rebellion), and Londregan and Vindigni (2006) (who argue that elections enable competing factions to
gauge their relative strength, reducing the risk of conflict due to asymmetric or incorrect information about
their chances of prevailing in a civil war).

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