“Autogolpes in Hybrid Regimes: Disrupting the Power-sharing Balance while Maximizing Survival”
In the mid-twentieth century, a trend of autocratization originated in Latin American politics: autogolpes. They have since become a global political phenomenon. Autogolpes are unconstitutional incumbent takeovers with the aim of consolidating executive power. They are similar to military coups in that they are elite-driven, immediate takeovers, but they differ because the agents are political incumbents rather than military elites. Autogolpes have been understudied due to a lack of quantified data, so this article contributes to existing literature by analyzing the political consequences of autogolpes across time and space. In this article, I analyze how autogolpes affect incumbent survival. Do autogolpes stabilize or destabilize governments in autocratic regimes? How do autogolpes affect the incumbents’ survival in other regime types? This article aims to answer these questions and provide insight on the empirical consequences of autogolpes.
“Fujimori’s Takeover, Castillo’s Downfall: A Comparative Analysis of the Peruvian Autogolpes”
Perhaps no autogolpe has been studied more extensively than Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori’s infamous takeover in 1992. Existing literature has employed the case to illustrate a successful self-coup and how it led to the return of authoritarianism in Peru for eight years. Thirty years later, President Pedro Castillo similarly attempted an autogolpe of his government, which instead resulted his immediate removal from office. What accounts for the dichotomy between these cases? Peru has democratized since the end of Fujimori’s reign, so it is expected to be more intolerant to such unconstitutional seizures of power. While Castillo has been sentenced to more than a decade in prison, fujimorismo remains considerably popular and continues to influence contemporary politics. Notably, Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko Fujimori, won the presidential election in July 2026. Through a comparative case study, I theorize the personalization of autogolpes is instrumental to their success. Fujimori and Castillo had populist platforms and relied on cult of personalities to legitimize their political power. I will illustrate how their actions leading up to the onset of the autogolpes determined their distinctive trajectories onward.
“Authoritarian regime change in the world: The autogolpe data, 1945-2024”
Executive self-coups represent an important path of authoritarian regime change and have contributed to the breakdown of democracy around the world. Despite their notoriety in contemporary politics, we have little broad, comparative knowledge of such autogolpes. This article conceptualizes the phenomenon and presents findings from a systematic data collection of autogolpes since 1945. Autogolpes are sudden events setting in motion discrete dynamics of change towards autocracy. The article’s theoretical contribution discusses what autogolpes are—and what they are not, distinguishing them from other authoritarian interventions in politics, namely military coups, democratic backsliding, and elite purges. We identify 200 incidents across 89 countries, including successful and failed autogolpe attempts. We discuss commonalities of all episodes but also point at differences among distinct types of such executive self-coups. The article’s empirical contribution presents our data, explains the data collection process, and isolates individual cases particularly pertinent for how we conceptualize the phenomenon. It also shows temporal and regional patterns of how autogolpes have spread around the world across space and time.