Replication Data for: Firing Up The Ranks (How Combat Experience Decreases the Odds of Military Promotion in Revolutionary Autocratic Regimes)

Conventional wisdom holds that leaders should promote experienced military personnel to ensure their national security. Yet, the literature on authoritarian regimes suggests that autocrats are often as concerned with loyalty as they are capability. We explore this dynamic in the context of revolutionary autocratic militaries, arguing that revolution-era combat experience complicates the loyalty-competence dilemma observed in the existing literature: while revolutionaries participate in combat that enhances their operational experience, this lends them symbolic legitimacy that could threaten the political leadership. As such, national leaders must hedge against the risk of coup by constraining their promotion. We test our theory using a recent officer-level dataset of China's People's Liberation Army (1955--2021). Leveraging exogenous variation in age, we demonstrate that officers with pre-revolutionary combat experience have substantially lower odds of promotion to General after state consolidation. Our findings call into question the assumption that combat experience will always help advance one's career and highlight the contradictory political forces that may hinder an autocrat's effort to build a modern state.