Emergency Declarations and The Fate of Military Coups: Evidence from South Korea

Political scientists have produced a voluminous literature on coups d’état. Coups can be accompanied by emergency declarations such as martial law and the state of siege. The literature, however, does not investigate whether these declarations shape the course of a coup attempt. This paper examines the role emergency declarations can play in determining the fate of a coup through the lens of the 1979-1980 political crisis in South Korea. The crisis began with the assassination of President Park Chung Hee on October 26th, 1979. The author assesses two hypotheses regarding the relationship between martial law and the subsequent coup. The first is that martial law increased the likelihood of the coup being launched and succeeding relative to the counterfactual of no emergency declaration. The second is that absent martial law, the coup would have proceeded anyway. The analysis reveals that emergency declarations can increase the probability that a coup will succeed.