Suresh Naidu (Columbia University)
Abstract. Existing theories of coups against democracy emphasize the interests of elite coup plotters in terms of the threat of democracy to their interests and what they stand to gain from dictatorship. But holding interests constant, some potential plotters, by the nature of their social networks, have much more influence over whether or not a coup succeeds. We develop a model of elite social networks and show that coup participation of an elite is increasing in their network (eigenvector) centrality as is the extent to which they receive rents from a dictatorship. We test these predictions using an original dataset we constructed of Haitian elite social networks which we linked to firm-level data on importing firms. We show that highly central families are more likely to be involved in importing and are more likely to participate in the 1991 coup against the democratic Aristide government. We then find that the retail prices of the staple goods imported by coup participators differentially increase during subsequent periods of non-democracy. Finally, we find that urban children born during periods of non-democracy are more likely to experience stunting.