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.