{"id":6160,"date":"2012-10-16T21:33:20","date_gmt":"2012-10-17T01:33:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/?p=6160"},"modified":"2013-10-05T09:41:07","modified_gmt":"2013-10-05T13:41:07","slug":"the-democratic-coup-detat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/2012\/10\/the-democratic-coup-detat\/","title":{"rendered":"The Democratic Coup d&#8217;Etat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This Article examines the typical characteristics and constitutional consequences of a largely neglected phenomenon that I call the \u201cdemocratic coup d\u2019\u00b4etat.\u201d To date, the academic legal literature has analyzed all military coups under an anti-democratic framework. That conventional framework considers military coups to be entirely anti-democratic and assumes that all coups are perpetrated by power-hungry military officers seeking to depose existing regimes in order to rule their nations indefinitely. Under the prevailing<br \/>\nview, therefore, all military coups constitute an affront to stability, legitimacy, and democracy. This Article, which draws on fieldwork that I conducted in Egypt and Turkey in 2011, challenges that conventional view and its underlying assumptions. The Article argues that, although all military coups have anti-democratic features, some coups are distinctly more democracy-promoting than others because they respond to popular opposition against authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, overthrow those regimes, and<br \/>\nfacilitate free and fair elections.<br \/>\nFollowing a democratic coup, the military temporarily governs the nation as part of an interim government until democratic elections take place. Throughout the democratic transition process, the military behaves as a self-interested actor and entrenches, or attempts to entrench, its policy preferences into the new constitution drafted during the transition. Constitutional entrenchment may occur in three ways: procedural, substantive, and institutional. The Article uses three comparative case studies to illustrate the democratic coup phenomenon and the constitutional entrenchment thesis: (1) the 1960 military coup in Turkey, (2) the<br \/>\n1974 military coup in Portugal, and (3) the 2011 military coup in Egypt.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/84\/2012\/10\/HLI203.pdf\">Read full post (PDF)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This Article examines the typical characteristics and constitutional consequences of a largely neglected phenomenon that I call the \u201cdemocratic coup 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