Isegoria

The assumption that popular opinion has an impact on coups is common in political science, but there is no evidence to support it:

Over the course of writing my book, “Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups,” I spent 300 hours talking with participants in 10 coup attempts in Ghana and statistically analyzed the determinants of every coup attempt and outcome in the world from 1950 to 2000. Based on this evidence, I argue that there is no reason to believe that military factions hesitate to attempt coups when popular opinion is against them, or that coup attempts are more likely to fail when the populace is opposed.

Over the course of this research, I observed that conspirators devoted very little consideration during coup plotting to the question of how the population would react. Coup makers are largely convinced that their cause is just (even when the coup comes from a partisan or personal interest), and that they will have widespread popular support for their actions, with perhaps limited opposition coming from entrenched special interests. And, in general, coup attempts do encounter very little popular protest, although this is not a reflection of support for military intervention. Coup attempts generally transpire very quickly and, with a few noteworthy exceptions, are over before civilians can mobilize in opposition. If a coup succeeds, civilians respond strategically. Opponents of the previous government will rejoice, joined by opportunists who wish to curry favor with the new rulers. Supporters of the previous government will usually remain quiet, afraid of bringing attention to themselves. Because successful coups are generally met with expressions of popular support, it spuriously appears that public opinion had a role in encouraging the conspirators to act.

The whole point of a coup is for a faction of the military to take over the government without kicking off a civil war:

That means that coups are typically marked by defections to whatever side appears to be winning, rather than outright military conflict between factions.

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One critical way to create this self-fulfilling prophecy, according to Singh’s research, is to take control of the broadcast media. Once you’ve got the radio and television stations, you then use them to tell everyone the government has already been overthrown. That convinces people in the military that the coup has succeeded, leading them to take your side.

But reports on the ground say that this didn’t happen. President Erdogan managed to make a televised statement opposing the coup (though he did so, amusingly, via a cellphone on Skype). Leaders of major political parties, including the opposition, publicly opposed the coup.

Perhaps most importantly, the coup plotters did a very poor job of getting their message out. While they did seize a number of media outlets, like CNN Turk, they failed to use them effectively in broadcasting their message.

“We had no clear statement from the coup forces. No leader came on TV, no real manifesto,” Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina who was in Turkey during the coup attempt, tweeted. “In Turkey, successful coup attempts are massive, happen within chain-of-command, and take over media immediately.”

The coup plotters failed to establish the perception that they were fully in control, and hence failed to win the overwhelming bulk of the military to their side. It’s still early, so we can’t be sure of anything. But given Singh’s research, and the information we have, it’s very likely that this explains — at least in part — why they failed.

The Declaration of Independence was America’s first propaganda coup, as Max Boot explains:

This [talk of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"] was designed to cast the colonialists’ cause not as a grubby dispute over levels of taxation but as an idealistic fight for freedom. This was a bit of a stretch given that Britain in the late 18th century was already one of the most liberal countries in the world with established democratic institutions both at home and abroad. The Founding Fathers, after all, had developed their ideas of self-government precisely because they were a mainstream product of the English political and educational system.

What the Declaration of Independence showed was that the rebels, far more than their Tory adversaries in Britain, had a proper appreciation of the power of “public opinion” — a word that first appeared in print, by a fateful coincidence, in the very year 1776 in the first volume of Edward Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. They understood that to prevail against the British Empire — the superpower of its day — it was not enough to fight on the field of battle; it was necessary to fight in the realm of ideas as well to influence public opinion at home and abroad in favor of the pro-independence cause.

The most radical colonialists had been doing just that for years. Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren had started a Committee of Correspondence in Boston in 1772 to make their case, an example that was soon emulated across the colonies. Thomas Paine was another propagandist extraordinaire; the publication of his pamphlet Common Sense in early 1776 prepared the way for the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin was yet another effective salesman for the Revolution — his political and propaganda work in France made it possible for the rebels to secure French help, which made all the difference.

The rebels were constantly engaging in what we would today call “spinning.” They managed to get their account of the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775 to Britain, addressed to the “Inhabitants of Great Britain,” a full two weeks before the official British dispatches arrived, thus helping to mold public opinion in their favor.

Ultimately this line of operations proved decisive. The British Empire could have continued fighting after the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. Lost armies could have been reconstituted from the vast resources of the empire. But it was not to be because Britain was a parliamentary democracy. On February 28, 1782, the House of Commons voted by a narrow margin to discontinue offensive operations. This forced the downfall of Lord North’s hardline Tory ministry and led to its replacement by Lord Rockingham’s more liberal Whigs, who were bent on concluding a peace treaty with their American cousins.

In a sense, February 28 should really be our Independence Day. But the propaganda coup of the Founding Fathers continues to resonate down through the centuries, turning July 4 into our national holy day (the origin of “holiday”).