4. Democracy will probably be restored within the next few years… As Henk Goemans and Nikolay Marinov show in a paper published last year in the British Journal of Political Science, since the end of the Cold War, most coups have been followed within a few years by competitive elections. The pattern they observe is even stronger in countries that have at least seven years of democratic experience and have held at least two elections, as Thailand does and has. In a paper forthcoming in Foreign Policy Analysis that uses a different measure of coups, Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne see that same broad pattern. After the 2006 coup, it took Thailand a little over a year to get back to a competitive elections for a civilian government under a new constitution. If anything, I would expect this junta to move a little faster, and I would be very surprised if the same junta was still ruling in 2016.