Big Questions, Little Answers

63

rival ousts the original leader. The officer corps will not, how-
ever, go along with disintegration of the military into openly
competing factions. If elite splits threaten military unity and effi-
cacy, some factions will opt for a return to the barracks. If the
soft-line faction can make a credible first move in that direction,
most other officers will go along.
Military regimes thus contain the seeds of their own destruc-
tion. When elite rivalries or policy differences intensify and these
factional splits become threatening, a return to the barracks be-
comes attractive to most officers. For officers, there is life after
democracy, because all but the highest regime officials can usu-
ally return to the barracks with their status and careers untar-
nished and their salaries and budgets often increased by nervous
transitional governments (Nordlinger 1977; Huntington 1991).
Leaders of single-party regimes also face competition from
rivals, but most of the time, as in personalist regimes, the bene-
fits of cooperation are sufficient to ensure continued support
from all factions. Leadership struggles and policy disagreements
occur, but they do not affect the desire of most cadres to remain
in office. For them, life after democracy would require some
unpleasant changes in lifestyle. They would have to compete for
the benefits they have become accustomed to monopolizing. Dur-
ing leadership struggles, most ordinary cadres just keep their
heads down and wait to see who wins. Thus, leadership struggles
within single-party regimes usually do not result in transitions.
The close allies of personalist dictators have even less reason
to desert the ship in normal times. If the ship goes down, they are
likely to go with it. As long as the dictatorship is able to supply
some benefits and has a sufficiently competent repressive appara-
tus to keep the probability of successful plotting reasonably low,
they will remain loyal.
These differences explain why the early transitions literature,
drawing insights primarily from the transitions from military rule
in Latin America, emphasized splits within the regime as causes
for the initiation of democratization though later studies did not.
In other parts of the world, where rule by the military as an
institution is less common, factions and splits could be identified
within authoritarian regimes, but they did not result in transi-
tions. Instead, observers emphasized the importance of other
factors in bringing down long-standing dictatorships: economic
crisis (Haggard and Kaufman 1995), foreign pressure (Hunting-
ton 1991), and popular protest (Bratton and van de Walle 1992,