66 Paradigms and Sand Castles

ordinary poor economic performance. Recent African experience
suggests that reforms reducing state intervention in the economy,
and hence the rents and corruption opportunities often used to
reward supporters, may be as destabilizing to personalist regimes
as economic crisis itself.
Because officers tend to decide to return to the barracks for
reasons relating to internal military concerns rather than being
forced out of office by popular protest or external events, we
should expect them to negotiate their extrication. When officers
decide to withdraw from power, they enter into negotiations with
civilian political leaders to arrange an orderly transition and to
safeguard, if possible, their own interests after the transition. We
should thus expect that military regimes will be more likely than
other kinds of authoritarianism to end in negotiation.
Because of the internal sources of fragility in military regimes,
we should expect them to be overthrown by armed insurgents or
ousted by popular uprisings only rarely. Demonstrations against
them occur, but most of the time such demonstrations persuade
factions of the military to initiate a transition before popular
opposition develops into rebellion. Coups are common in mili-
tary regimes, but they rarely end the regime. They are usually
leadership changes, the analogue of votes of no confidence in
parliamentary systems. Coups that bring a liberalizing military
president to power often precede transitions in military regimes;
such coups can be interpreted as first-mover strategies. They
demonstrate that a shift in officer opinion has occurred and that
a substantial faction prefers to return to the barracks.
In strong contrast to military officers, the leaders of personal-
ist regimes generally fight tooth and claw to hang on to power. In
Bratton and van de Walle's words, "They resist political open-
ings for as long as possible and seek to manage the process of
transition only after it has been forced on them" (1997, 83). If
they are forced - by foreign pressure, for example - to negotiate
with opponents, they renege on agreements at the first opportu-
nity.21 Military governments rarely renege on the agreements
they make, not because they cannot, but because agreements are
made at a time when most officers want to return to the barracks.
The cadre-interests argument claims that in normal times, the
21. Note, for example, the way Mobutu of Zaire (now Congo), Eyadema of
Togo, and various other long-ruling African leaders manipulated electoral rules and
intimidated opponents after agreeing, under pressure from international aid donors,
to initiate multiparty elections.