Last month’s coup d’état against Turkey’s President Erdogan
failed, but between 1950 and 2010, on average a coup had a 50-50 chance of
succeeding.
Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne from the University of
Kentucky examined 450 from that 60 year period, and found that 227 – 49.7% – were
successful. And the plotters seemed to be improving, because those mounted
since 2003 had a 70% success rate.
But coups have become less common. Their heyday was the
1960s, when there were about 15 a year. By the first decade of the new
millennium that was down to 5 a year. One reason may be that the world is
getting richer. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler of Oxford University found that
if people’s average incomes doubled, the risk of a coup fell by more than a
quarter.
As to the ingredients of a successful coup, there seems a fair
degree of consensus – detain key leaders, take over key media outlets, control
key transport arteries. The Turkish plotters failed to implement these properly, but perhaps a new
factor was at play – social media, which President Erdogan used very
effectively to rally support.
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