Big Questions, Little Answers

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detailed information than would be needed to test the argument
itself. Testing implications in this kind of situation can make it
possible to avoid the selection bias that would almost inevitably
arise in an attempt to test the argument itself.
The argument sketched above claims that because officers
see their interests in terms similar to a battle-of-the-sexes game,
military regimes break down more readily than do other types
of authoritarianism in response to internal splits, regardless of
the cause of the splits. If that is true, we should expect mili-
tary regimes to last less long, on average, than other forms of
authoritarianism.
We should also expect economic crisis, which weakens support
for all governments, to have a stronger disintegrating effect on
military governments because of their underlying fragility. This
suggestion might at first seem surprising, since most military
governments hold no elections and tend to be more insulated
from societal interests than other types of dictatorship. Thus, we
might suppose them less vulnerable to pressures emanating from
citizens unhappy with the regime's economic performance.
The cadre-interests argument, however, implies that officers
may decide to step down even without the inducement of overt
public pressure. Officers and cadres are aware of their govern-
ment's economic performance, and they are linked to society via
their families and friends. Typically, when officers perceive their
government's performance as unsuccessful, some of them advo-
cate intensifying the economic strategy being pursued while oth-
ers advocate changing it. The backers of each policy prescription
support the presidential aspirations of a different officer, and com-
petition between them intensifies, sometimes leading to coups
and countercoups. A split over economic strategy has the same
effect as any other kind of split: if it threatens to get out of hand,
most officers prefer to return to the barracks.
Observers such as Bratton and van de Walle (1997) note the
importance of material inducements to loyalty in personalist re-
gimes. We might suspect that where loyalty depends on the
leader's ability to deliver individual benefits, economic crisis
would cause regime breakdown, but that would be an insuffi-
ciently cynical view. Run-of-the-mill poor economic performance
hurts ordinary citizens but does not preclude rewarding support-
ers. It takes a true economic disaster to do that. We should thus
expect personalist regimes to be destabilized by economic cata-
strophe but, in comparison to military regimes, less affected by