Replication Data for "Support for Coups in the Americas: Mass Norms and Democratization"

Coups d’etat, once a commonplace end for democracies in the Americas, have declined sharply in recent years. We investigate whether overall public support for coups in 21 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean from 2004-2014 is also in decline. Examining these trends help us evaluate two alternative theses on democratization: 1) Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán’s (2016) normative regime preferences theory which suggests (but does not test) whether public opinion can signal to elites a reluctance/willingness to support a coup, and 2) classic modernization theory (Inglehart 1988; Inglehart and Welzel 2005). We find a substantively meaningful effect of democratic attitudes on coup support, and a weak effect for national wealth, from which we infer that evolving elite values and preferences are paralleled at the mass level, and together play a stronger role in the consolidation of democratic regimes than modernization.