Replication Data for: "Oust the Leader, Keep the Regime?: Autocratic Civil-Military Relations and Coup-Behavior in the Tunisian and Egyptian Militaries during the 2011 Arab Spring"

Abstract: We present a theory for how variation in autocratic civil-military relations affects the type of coups to which autocratic leaders are vulnerable. Dictators rely on alternative strategies of control that involve tensions across two imperatives—governance and coup-prevention. In a Grand Bargain leaders cede prerogatives to the military and compromise on the governance imperative. This insulates them from regime change coups, but still renders them vulnerable to reshuffling coups that result from bargaining failures. Alternatively, political leaders may rely on Containment, in which they marginalize the military. While they make fewer concessions on the governance imperative, when the military has the opportunity to engage in a coup, it is more likely to oust the entire regime, not just reshuffle the leader. We evaluate this theory using within-case process tracing and paired case studies of Tunisia and Egypt, and conduct descriptive quantitative analyses to demonstrate the generalizability of our theory.