APL (Ajiken Power Lunch)

APL (Ajiken Power Lunch) is a lunchtime workshop open to public, including IDE staffs, visiting research fellows, IDEAS students, outside researchers and graduate students. This workshop provides a platform for presentation of any work in progress where we can discuss in either English or Japanese.

Those who would attend a seminar are asked to announce yourself to receptionists on your arrival at the IDE and to obtain APL Organizers' signature on your admission card after the seminar.

July 13, 2017. (Thursday) 14：30-16：00

Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization C23 Meeting Room 　

Exclusion, Polarization, and Coup Vulnerability: An Institutional Approach

This presentation provides an integrated approach to the institutional analysis of coups. Instead of focusing on the nominal differences between different political institutions, it examines the variations in the constraints on decision making authority and analyzes how concentration of decision making authority affects countries’ coup propensities. When decision making authority is concentrated in a single political force under major political polarization, the excluded groups seek to topple incumbents to prevent or reverse policies that adversely affect them. When decision making authority is extremely fractionalized, the inability of political systems to reach agreements may also invite military interventions. In contrast, in societies that do not face major political divisions, political constraints have little effect on their coup risks. Finally, where power is neither too concentrated nor too fragmented, the political system maintains a degree of flexibility to accommodate participation by oppositions without generating permanent crises of governability. The empirical tests using global coup data support the argument.

Taeko Hiroi
(The University of Texas at El Paso)

Hirokazu Kikuchi

English