Research in Progress
Book Projects
The Rise and Fall of Personalist Dictatorship (tentative title, manuscript in process).
Description: This book project – co-authored with Abel Escriba-Folch, Wonjun Song, and Joseph G. Wright – builds on a stream of co-authored work to theorize and empirically test how personalist dictatorships emerge, how they endure, and why they fail in the post-World II period. The book explains how elite bargains shape the threat environment – from coups, assassinations, mass uprisings, and armed insurgency – to personalist dictators over time.
Book Chapters
John J. Chin. “Which Coups Promote Democracy? Revisiting the Good Coup Hypothesis” (under contract for Research Handbook on Authoritarianism, eds. Natasha Lindstaedt and Jeroen Van den Bosch, Edward Elgar Publishing.)
Working Papers (select, under review)
John J. Chin, Kiron Skinner, and Clay Yoo. "Organizing National Security Strategies." (under review)
John J. Chin and Dov Levin. “A Protest Vote? Partisan Electoral Interventions and the Onset of Electoral Revolutions.” (under review)
Abstract: Do partisan electoral interventions by great powers bring about post-election nonviolent resistance campaigns in target countries? Both phenomena are quite common -- but the ties between them are yet to be investigated in a systematic manner. This paper examines this relationship using new, original data on such U.S. and Russian/Soviet electoral interventions (PEIG) and major nonviolent and violent episodes of resistance (NEVER) over the 1946 to 2000 period. Our results show that electoral interventions can significantly increase the chances of post-election protests in the target erupting under certain situations -- such as when the intervention is done in an overt manner or the meddling was conducted in favor of the challenger in that election but failed to gain the latter a victory in the ballot box.
Ongoing Projects (in process)
“Assassin’s Aftermath: The Political Consequences of Leader Assassination,” with Abel Escribà-Folch, Wonjun Song, and Joseph G. Wright
“Defect or Splinter? Coup-Proofing and Military Behavior during Mass Uprisings,” with Wonjun Song and Joseph G. Wright
“Oil Discoveries, Coups, and Personalism,” with Joan Timoneda and Abel Escribà-Folch
“Scheduling coups: Election Calendar and Coup Risk in Autocracy,” with Jia Li
“ColpusCast: Forecasting Regime Change and Reshuffling Coups in Africa,” with Aaditya Ramdas and Ben Chugg
“The Determinants of Coups de regime vs. Coups de chef: An Extreme Bounds Analysis,” with Ben Chugg
“Organizing U.S. Joint Military Exercises: New Data, 1975-2022,” with Creighton Arrington and Kiron Skinner
“Organizing U.S. National Defense and Military Strategies,” with Michael Gormley, Kiron Skinner, and Clay Yoo
“Organizing U.S. Diplomatic Agreements: New Data, 1776-2022,” with Meghana Palakodeti, Jackson Romero, and Kiron Skinner
“Conceptualizing Self-Coups: Definition, Measurement, and the Trump Coup in Comparative Perspective,” with Sophie Peirano and Oliver Bauer
“Violence and the Strategy of Coups D’état,” with Jesse Jenkins and Avani Seshiah
“Why Personalist Security Forces Defect,” with Lavanya Jasra, Jacoby Ramsey, and Lucia Shen
“Balancing and Bandwagoning in Warring States China,” with Lauren James, Peter Moody, and Ryan Murphy
“Bad Coups: Coups and the Fate of Provisional and Democratizing Regimes,” with Marcus So-Holloway
“The Search for Democratic Coups,” with David B. Carter and Joseph Wright
“The Politics of Ethnic Coups,” with Joseph Wright
“Political Polarization and Coup Risk”
“Personalism, Coups, and Assassinations of Democratically-Elected Leaders, 1990-2010”
“The Geography of Coups D’état: Why Peripheral Coups Fail”
“Re-syncing the CINC Data: Introducing the RE-CINC Dataset”
“Re-counting Nonviolent Campaigns: Introducing the NEVER Dataset”