Does democratization affect civil-military relations and increase the likelihood of coups? Does purging military officers from the government increase the likelihood of coups? Democratizing regimes strive to reduce the influence of the military over politics. Extant research looks at the structural ‘coup-proofing’ measures and institutional reform to explain coup risk. I contend that democratizing hybrid regimes who reduce power-sharing with the military risk to face two reverse outcomes: increased risk of coups and democratic backslide. Democratization allows the government to abandon power-sharing and purge military officers from the government and outright from the military. However, this creates a vacuum in which authoritarian leaders can easily backslide and adopt the co-optation of loyalists and coup-related repression, easing the authoritarian power-grab. I test this theory using several datasets including Colpus, Military Participation In Government Data, Military Purges in Dictatorships (MPD) dataset and a qualitative case study on Turkey using process tracing techniques between 2002-2017, and find support for the theory.