Comparing Régime Performance in Africa: the Limitations of Cross-National Aggregate Analysis
The continuing prominence of coups d'état in the political life of the Third World has sustained interest in the question of whether, and in what circumstances, the armed forces are capable of making a positive contribution to modernisation. During the 1960s, a number of scholars began to take a favourable view of the military's modernising potential based on ideal-typical conceptions of armed-force organisations which, in Henry Bienen's felicitous phrase, were ‘unencumbered by empirical detail’.1 A second dimension of support for the positive image was perceived in the attitudes and class background of the officer corps.2 Critics of this viewpoint questioned the accuracy of these characterisations given the impact that transfer to a different socio-economic and political context has on institutional performance. Case-studies of Third-World militaries found that many lacked a single corporate identity, suffering from factionalism along cleavages of age, ethnicity, and regionalism; organisational cohesion was undermined by a proliferation of patron-client relationships.3 The motives for staging coups also were questioned, the military being perceived as particularly well-equipped to defend and pursue its corporate interests.1