When soldiers surrounded the presidential palace in Niger in July 2023 and detained President Mohamed Bazoum, many Nigeriens took to the streets in Niamey to celebrate the junta. Crowds waved Russian flags, burnt French ones, and cheered the men in uniform.
It was the fifth coup in the Sahel in under three years. Across the region, juntas spoke the language of popular anger, framing military takeovers as a response to popular frustration with civilian rule. But how much truth is there to that claim, and does enthusiasm for soldiers in government today run deeper in places that have lived through it before?
I examine that question in this article using two datasets. The first is the Afrobarometer Round 9 survey data, collected across 39 African countries between 2021 and 2023. Afrobarometer is a pan-African research network that has been conducting nationally representative surveys on citizens’ attitudes toward democracy, governance, and public life since 1999. The specific question used here is Q22B, which asked respondents whether they would approve or disapprove of a political system in which “the army comes in to govern the country”. Responses recorded as refused, don’t know, or missing were excluded from the analysis.
The second dataset is the Powell and Thyne Global Instances of Coups dataset, which tracks every coup attempt worldwide since 1950. This dataset distinguishes between successful and failed coup attempts, a distinction that, as I show in this article, matters considerably. A successful coup installs soldiers in the government and gives citizens a taste of military rule. A failed attempt signals political instability but does not necessarily produce the same governing reality.
Because the Afrobarometer outcome variable is ordered – responses range from strong disapproval to strong approval – I used an ordered logistic regression model for the analysis, which is suited to outcomes with sequential categories. I also control for a range of individual-level factors from Afrobarometer: rural/urban residence, gender, education, age, and lived poverty. At the country level, controls included the World Bank’s GDP per capita and population size, both averaged from 2000 to 2023 and expressed as logarithms, as well as the V-Dem liberal democracy measure for 2022. Country-clustered standard errors are used throughout, since respondents within the same country share the same coup history, and treating them as fully independent observations would produce misleading estimates.
We first turn to the regional picture from the Powell and Thyne dataset. Since 1950, Africa has experienced more coup attempts than any other part of the world. As Figure 1 shows, the continent recorded 111 failed and 109 successful attempts, nearly half of all global coup activity during this period. Latin America follows with 146 total attempts, while Europe and South Asia trail far behind.
Figure 1: Coup Attempts by Region since 1950.
What makes Africa’s record particularly interesting is the success rate. Almost half of all attempts on the continent have succeeded. And while coups have become less common globally in recent decades, Powell and Thyne’s research shows that those that do occur are increasingly likely to succeed. Africa remains the main theatre for this trend.
As Figure 2 shows, within the continent, Sudan leads with 18 coup attempts since 1950, six of them successful – a record that mirrors its long history of unresolved power struggles and institutional collapse. Burundi follows with 11 total attempts, then Burkina Faso with 10, nine of which succeeded, giving it the highest success rate on the continent. Ghana and Sierra Leone each record 10 attempts with five successes apiece.
Figure 2: Coups in 54 African Countries since 1950.
Figure 2 also shows that the pattern is not confined to the usual suspects. Countries with different colonial histories, political traditions, and economic circumstances have all seen unconstitutional regime change. Of the 54 countries on the continent, 45 have experienced at least one attempt since 1950.
Against that historical backdrop, where do citizens actually stand? Figure 3 shows the share of citizens in each of the 39 countries surveyed by Afrobarometer who said they approve or strongly approve of the army governing their country. Across all 39 countries, the average is 28%, which is a substantial minority.
Figure 3: Public approval of military rule across 39 African countries, Afrobarometer Round 9 (2021–2023).
The distribution, however, shows that Mali tops the chart at 76%, followed by Burkina Faso at 70%. Niger is at 50%, and Sudan is at 43%. These are all countries that have experienced military rule repeatedly in recent years. At the other end, Mauritius, a stable parliamentary democracy with no history of coups, registers just 4%, followed by Seychelles and Zambia at 7% each.
The pattern shows that countries at the top of the chart are almost entirely places where coup attempts have been most frequent and most successful. Those at the bottom are, by and large, places that have been spared that experience.
The regression results in Table 1 provide a more precise estimate of the relationship. The main finding is that successful coups are associated with higher public approval of military rule. As Table 1 shows, each additional successful coup in a country’s history is associated with about a 9% increase in the odds of a citizen expressing greater approval for military rule after accounting for individual and country-level control variables.
Table 1: Ordered logistic regression results predicting approval of military rule.
| Dependent variable: Support for army rule | ||||
| Predictor | Successful coups model: Coef. (SE) | Odds ratio | Failed coups model: Coef. (SE) | Odds ratio |
| Successful coup attempts | 0.089** (0.041) | 1.093 | — | — |
| Failed coup attempts | — | — | 0.046 (0.032) | 1.048 |
| Rural | -0.044 (0.062) | 0.957 | -0.058 (0.062) | 0.944 |
| Female | 0.051** (0.024) | 1.052 | 0.046* (0.025) | 1.047 |
| High education | -0.078*** (0.015) | 0.925 | -0.091*** (0.018) | 0.913 |
| Youth | 0.123*** (0.033) | 1.131 | 0.122*** (0.032) | 1.130 |
| Lived poverty | -0.007 (0.044) | 0.993 | -0.005 (0.045) | 0.995 |
| Log GDP per capita | -0.014 (0.134) | 0.986 | -0.044 (0.136) | 0.957 |
| Log population | -0.041 (0.079) | 0.960 | -0.036 (0.075) | 0.965 |
| Liberal democracy index | -1.234* (0.649) | 0.291 | -1.273* (0.712) | 0.280 |
Notes: Higher outcome values indicate greater approval of military rule. Standard errors are clustered by country. Significance levels: *p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.
Importantly, when a country like Burkina Faso has recorded nine successful coups since 1950, the cumulative weight of that history adds up. This pattern suggests that successful coups may have a normalising effect. Where the army has successfully taken power before, military rule may become more familiar, more politically imaginable, and, for some citizens, more acceptable.
This does not mean people necessarily like coups in the abstract. Rather, it suggests that repeated successful military interventions can make the army appear a viable governing actor, especially when civilian governments are viewed as corrupt, ineffective, or unable to provide security.
The result for failed coup attempts is weaker in Table 1. The coefficient is positive but not statistically significant. This is important because failed coups may signal political instability, but what matters is whether a coup was successful and the army actually governed – whether soldiers moved from the barracks into the offices of state, set policy, and became the face of authority. The experience of that, repeated over generations, appears to leave a measurable trace in how citizens think about who can legitimately run a country.
The control variables meaningfully show that higher education is associated with lower approval of military rule, suggesting that more educated citizens are less receptive to soldiers taking power. Youth is associated with higher approval, which may reflect younger citizens’ frustration with the performance of civilian governments. Women are slightly more likely to approve of army rule, though the effect is modest. The liberal democracy index is negative and marginally significant, suggesting that citizens in more liberal democratic contexts are less likely to support military government.
Mali and Burkina Faso illustrate the main results very well on the ground. Mali has recorded eight coup attempts since 1950, five of which have been successful. The two most recent came in quick succession: Colonel Assimi Goïta removed the elected president in August 2020, then deposed the transitional civilian government meant to steer the country toward elections in May 2021.
The justification, familiar across successive Sahelian coups, centred on the civilian government’s failure to contain jihadist violence spreading from the country’s north. At 76%, Mali has the highest approval for military rule of any country in the survey in Figure 3, a figure shaped not only by frustration with the governments that were overthrown but also by a political culture in which military intervention has recurred often enough to feel, for many citizens, less like a rupture and more like a known quantity.
Elections scheduled for February 2024 were postponed indefinitely, and the junta proposed a further five-year extension of its transition plan. The approval numbers for military rule in Figure 3 remain high despite continued democratic backsliding, underscoring how thoroughly repeated coups can reshape political expectations.
Burkina Faso, on the other hand, experienced two coups in 2022 alone, the second removing the officer who had seized power just eight months earlier, on the grounds that he too had failed to contain the jihadist insurgency. With nine successful coups out of 10 total attempts, Burkina Faso has both the deepest coup record and, alongside Mali, the highest citizen approval for military rule in the survey in Figure 3.
The Burkina Faso government has since extended its transition period until 2029 and, in 2025, disbanded the electoral commission, framing the decision as a move to reinforce sovereign control over the electoral process. That a population subjected to this level of institutional disruption still records 70% approval for military governance is less a key reflection of what the data, taken together, suggests: that each successful coup that goes unreversed gradually narrows the distance between what citizens consider acceptable and what they consider normal.
The broader implication is that coups are also a form of political conditioning. Each successful takeover that settles in for years rather than the months originally promised, each junta that suspends a constitution and dissolves political parties while citing national necessity, makes military governance more familiar and, for some citizens, more conceivable as an alternative to failed civilian rule.
There is, however, another possibility worth considering. In countries where the military has successfully seized and consolidated power, expressing disapproval of army rule is not without risk. Authoritarian military governments have a well-documented record of cracking down on dissent, dissolving political parties, restricting the press, and punishing those who publicly challenge their legitimacy.
In that environment, some approval in a survey may be better understood as the silence of people who have calculated that openly demanding a return to democratic rule is not worth the personal cost. The Afrobarometer survey captures what citizens are willing to say, not necessarily what they privately believe.
However, this does not invalidate the findings. The pattern linking coup history to higher approval holds even across countries where military rule is not the current reality, suggesting something more durable than fear alone is at work. But it does counsel against reading high approval figures in active junta states at face value.
Moreover, the data does not suggest that Africans welcome military rule with open arms. Across the 39 African countries surveyed, most still disapprove. But in the places where coups have succeeded most often, that disapproving majority is smaller, and the minority willing to approve is considerably larger, whether out of genuine conviction, accumulated political resignation, or simple caution about what dissent might cost them.
This matters for how we interpret the popular coup narrative that junta leaders across the Sahel have deployed so effectively. People took to the streets in Niamey, Ouagadougou, and Bamako, and the anger that brought them out was genuine. But the data suggest that openness to military governance in these settings is, at least in part, the accumulated product of decades of coup history.
Coup leaders who invoke a popular mandate to justify their hold on power may be right that some citizens support them. The harder question is whether that support reflects a true preference for what soldiers offer. The data, on its own, cannot fully answer that. But it makes the question impossible to dismiss.
Nnaemeka served as a Senior Data Analyst at Good Governance Africa. He completed his PhD in Applied Data Science at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, supported by South Africa’s Department of Science, Technology and Innovation. His research applies data science and computational methods to questions of governance, social bias, political attitudes, human development, and disinformation. His work has been published in journals including EPJ Data Science, Journal of Computational Social Science, Social Science Computer Review, Political Psychology, and Politeia. He has also worked as a Data Consultant at DataEQ Consulting and has teaching experience at the University of the Witwatersrand, both in South Africa.
