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Introduction
All autocratic leaders confront the guardianship dilemma: a military that is strong enough to protect the regime against mass unrest and foreign threats is also strong enough to overthrow it via a coup d’etat (Greitens 2016; Harkness 2018; Paine 2022). The coup threat is prevalent: 244 coups were successfully carried out worldwide between 1950 and 2021, and coups are the most common way in which autocratic leaders are deposed (Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2018). Men with guns pose a dangerous threat to authoritarian leaders.
How do dictators mitigate the guardianship dilemma and avoid removal by their own military officers? Seemingly, this dilemma would be acute in regimes that gained power via the military. In such cases, men with guns dominate the winning coalition (Svolik 2012). Yet surprisingly, rebel regimes, or those that gain power by winning a rebellion, are exceptionally durable and essentially immune from coups. Prominent examples of rebel regimes include the MPLA regime in Angola, which has governed since winning a colonial liberation struggle against Portugal in 1975, and the RPF regime in Rwanda, which has governed since 1994 after winning a civil war. 1 Our originally coded dataset, which we detail below, includes 21 rebel regimes in Africa since independence. In any particular year, rebel regimes were four times more likely to survive in power than authoritarian regimes founded by other means. In fact, 78% of postindependence rebel regimes in Africa are still in power today.
We propose that rebel regimes solve the guardianship dilemma by sharing power with military elites. In general, sharing power with coercive actors is a double-edged sword. A key decision is whether the leader appoints a distinct military elite as the Minister of Defense, as opposed to eliminating the position, keeping it vacant, or the ruler taking the post himself. On the one hand, this appointment should mitigate motives for high-ranking military officials to stage a coup by distributing spoils and delegating decision-making autonomy. On the other hand, military elites are better-positioned to stage a coup when they are closer to the center of power. They will seize this opportunity when commitments to share power are not credible. Appointed elites may anticipate that the ruler will renege on the power-sharing deal in the future, which would...