Political Protests and Coup Attempts: Is There a Correlation?

Abstract

The article focuses on exploring different patterns of conflicting interaction between actors in the political struggle. The main objective is to distinguish conceptually between the terms “public contestation”, “political protest”, and “coup” while exploring a possible correlation among these occurrences, utilizing easily accessible statistical information. The paper argues that the use of technological tools in current public policy by certain political systems hinders the implementation of traditional criteria for identifying a coup d’état. The significance of self-expression values and the population’s desire to participate in political decision-­making has been reaffirmed, which becomes a contributing factor towards enhancing citizen participation in politics. Under such circumstances, a coup can no longer be seen as merely a tool for competing elite factions and may instead become public in the context of massive political action. The term “hybrid coup” has been used to refer to attempted coups d’état combined with protest actions. Empirical data has been analyzed to test whether there is a relationship between political protests and coup attempts. The analysis reveals a noteworthy correlation between these phenomena. Hybrid coups have a higher success rate than classical elitist coups. Protest mobilization is frequently incorporated into the technological arsenal of a contemporary coup d’état. In this scenario, mass political action by supporters of the regime increases its chances of survival in the face of a hybrid coup attempt. The political regime’s nature is a crucial determinant of coup vulnerability. Both authoritarian and hybrid regimes are susceptible to classic and hybrid coups.