The recent failed coup attempt has thrown Turkey into new depths of instability and uncertainty. The government has declared a state of national emergency and has suspended the European Convention of Human Rights. In the wake of the coup attempt, a massive purge is ongoing, with unprecedented detentions and dismissals of members from all spheres of society. Turkey’s deputy prime minister has tried to reassure foreign companies and investors that the state of emergency won’t affect business, but alarm bells are nonetheless ringing at company headquarters and foreign ministries around the globe.
Clearly, the situation is dire. Even so, the country wouldn’t necessarily be in a better situation had the coup succeeded. If history is any indication, a successful coup would have had a negative effect on the country’s prosperity. My research finds that a coup overthrowing democratically elected leaders — even in weak democracies — is highly discouraging for a country’s economic development.
Turkey has its own long history of coups, and they all came at a cost. The interventions usually have served more to protect elite interests than to solve socioeconomic problems. The 1980 coup, for example, ushered in years of human rights abuse and incubated a violent insurgency in the country’s southeast region, a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people. It also ended up boosting the use of religion as a social cement to replace ideologies deemed less desirable. The national constitution implemented by the military shortly after that coup is still in place. It harbors institutional prejudice against minorities and contains many provisions that limit citizens’ influence in shaping public policy.
In 1997 the military ousted a democratically elected, Islamist-led coalition government without even leaving the barracks. This was possible only because of the vast powers vested in the bureaucracy, judiciary, and security forces that facilitated the persecution of groups and individuals deemed threats to the integrity of the state. The subordination of individual freedoms to state interests is, and has been, omnipresent in Turkey even before today’s ruling party, the AKP, came to power. The country’s history of coups is partly to blame. This dysfunctional institutional system ultimately bears the signature of the country’s armed forces and its allies within the secular elite.
Internationally, successful coups, where the military or state elites have unseated an incumbent leader, have occurred 232 times in 94 states since 1950. Roughly a quarter of these overthrew democratically elected governments.
Although military influence in politics rarely is seen as conducive to democracy, military coups that overthrow democratically elected governments often have been met with quiet approval from outside observers. Western governments have a long and problematic history of tacit support for military coups overthrowing democratic governments, be it left-leaning governments in Latin America or Islamist governments in the Middle East and North Africa. During the 2013 coup in Egypt, several prominent foreign policy experts spoke out in defense of the coup plotters, and a Wall Street Journal editorial proclaimed that “Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who took over power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.”
Independent observers who express support for coups often invoke extreme outcomes to represent the counterfactual side of the military coup. For example, they claim that if Pinochet had not overthrown President Allende, the latter would have created a Castro-style regime in Chile. Or they argue that if the Algerian army had not intervened to “save the republic” in 1992, the about-to-be-electorally-victorious Islamists would have turned Algeria into an Islamist dictatorship in the Maghreb. Similarly, the argument goes, the fault for the coup and preceding problems invariably fall upon the ousted leader; the coup constitutes an unfortunate but necessary means to rid the country of an incompetent, if not dangerous, leader.
Critics of these arguments warn that allowing a military to intervene and dictate post-coup institutions to their advantage is extremely risky. They say it results in a “Faustian” bargain likely to bring regime stability but not a solution to the underlying problems. And they cite the frequent human rights abuses following coups, as well as the common ineptitude of military leaders running economies.
To understand the effect of military coups on economic development, I distinguished between coups occurring in democracies and those occurring in autocracies. For example, a coup in Chad will have very different consequences than a coup in Chile. In the former, a coup might reflect an autocratic regime changing leaders. In the latter case, coups typically imply deeper institutional changes with long-running development consequences.
My research shows that in countries that were more democratic, a successful coup lowered annual growth in income per capita by as much as 1%–1.3% over a decade. In contrast, among more autocratic countries, the results were much less conclusive and show smaller, positive effects.
This research also refutes the commonly held view that coups overthrowing democratically elected leaders offer the chance to institute unpopular but much-needed economic reforms. Instead, the evidence shows coups often reverse important economic reforms while pushing countries deeper into debt and ushering in economic crises. After a coup, spending on social programs usually declines. That could be interpreted as a sign of shifting economic priorities away from the masses and to the benefit of political and economic elites.
Coups mostly occur in dire situations. But my research shows they rarely result in adequate remedies to underlying problems. Instead, the institutional changes that follow a coup show clearly detrimental economic consequences. Any short-lived benefit of regime stability brought about by a coup comes at a steep economic, political, and human cost in the long run.
Today, Turkey’s political future looks particularly dark. The country is now being held hostage by an elected regime fearful of political competition and demonstrably unwilling to see a deeper democracy take root.
There is a lone bright spot to this extraordinarily difficult situation. The failed coup may mean the end of an era of military interference in Turkish politics. The solutions to Turkey’s deeper institutional problems need to be found elsewhere. That, despite all that is alarming today, is a kind of progress too.