Networks of Coercion: Military Ties and Civilian Leadership Challenges in China

Abstract: Civilian-led coups are one of the most common routes to losing power in autocracies. How do authoritarian leaders secure themselves from civilian leadership challenges? We argue that autocrats differentiate civilian rivals in part by their social ties to the military. To reduce the threat of coup, leaders buy off civilians with strong military ties by promoting them to lower-tier institutions – but isolate these same civilians by denying them promotion to higher-tier institutions that afford opportunities to challenge the leader. We introduce an original dataset of over 117,000 postings of 34,140 Chinese military officers and map ties between the entire civilian and military elite between 1927 and 2014. We find that civilian leaders with strong ties to the military improve prospects for promotion to the Central Committee – but degrade the likelihood of promotion to the apex Politburo Standing Committee, particularly for civilians outside the leader’s social network.摘要：由平民主导的政变是威权政体下领导人丧失政权的最常见路径之一。威权领导人应如何防范来自平民阶层的执政挑战？本文认为，威权统治者会依据平民对手与军方的社会关联程度对其加以区分。为降低政变威胁，威权领导人会将与军方关联紧密的平民提拔至低层级机构以收买笼络，但同时拒绝将其提拔至可提供挑战领导人机会的高层级机构，以此孤立这些平民群体。本文构建了包含1927年至2014年间34140名中国军官逾11.7万条任职记录的原创数据集，并绘制了同期全部平民精英与军方精英之间的社会关联图谱。研究发现，与军方关联紧密的平民领导人获得中央委员会（Central Committee）提拔的概率更高，但晋升至最高层级的政治局常务委员会（Politburo Standing Committee）的可能性反而降低，这一效应在与领导人无社会关联的平民群体中尤为显著。

搜集汇总

背景与挑战

背景概述

该数据集涵盖1927年至2014年中国军事官员的职位记录，用于分析文职领导人的军事社会关系如何影响其晋升模式。研究发现，军事联系强的文职官员更易晋升至中央委员会，但更难进入政治局常委会，这反映了独裁者通过控制晋升路径来防范政变风险的策略。