of social mobility and one has had more economic development, it will be
more likely to experience a coup(Putnam, 1967).
Jackman carried out a similar type of analysis, using African data from
1960 to 1975, but came to rather different conclusions: notably that social
mobilization did have a destabilizing effect and that political participation,
when measure by electoral turnout, decreases the probability of coups, sug-
gesting the conclusion that ‘political mobilization in the form of higher lev-
els of mass electoral participation may reflect a higher degree of acceptance
of conventional non-violent processes of élite succession’ (Jackman, 1978,
p. 1274). Johnson et al. (1984) also found party competition, especially
between mass parties with nationwide rather than ethnic or regional sup-
port, to be strong protection against military intervention.
The military and the middle class
Social explanations of military intervention have sometimes had a class
dimension. The more developed the indigenous middle class, the stronger
the political foundation of civilian democracy. The middle class is seen by
modernization theorists as a stabilizing force but one which in the early
stages of development is ‘small, weak, ineffective, divided and therefore
politically impotent’. The economic and political interests of a fragmented
middle class diverge, thereby encouraging ‘praetorianism’ or a potential for
the military to dominate the political system (Perlmutter, 1971, p. 309).
Perlmutter explained the lack of alternatives to the military when social
cohesion breaks down by reference to divisions within all sectors of society,
including the middle class. Praetorianism occurs when the middle class is
too weak to defend democratic civilian institutions. But it can equally hap-
pen when it is large, growing and more cohesive, as in Latin America where
‘military intervention assures the middle class of power if and when they fail
to come to power by electoral means’ (Perlmutter, 1971, p. 309). This is con-
sistent with Huntington’s view that in societies that are too underdeveloped
to have produced a middle class the military will be a radical force (trying to
abolish feudalism), but that when a middle class has developed, the military
will side with it as a conservative force (Huntington, 1968, p. 221; Jackman,
1986, p. 1080). Unfortunately, attempts to prove this quantitatively have
failed, throwing serious doubt on the proposition that the effects of military
government change systematically as countries become wealthier.
It might be assumed that a new middle class will have a vested interest in
civilian government which represents their interests rather than those of the
Military Intervention in Politics 181