Constitutional Politics and Authoritarian Leadership

Why do autocratic leaders change constitutions? This article suggests that autocratic rulers propose constitutional amendments in the nascent stages of a transformation that threatens their political status. In the specific context of a patrimonial society, where the entire power pyramid is aimed towards the top, a constitutional amendment can also indicate an upheaval in the leadership group or the attempt of an autocratic leader to cement his legacy. To preserve their cultural and/or economic hegemony, autocratic leaders use constitutional amendments to signal to the supporting elite and allow the system to adapt to changing circumstances. To test the relation of autocratic stability and constitutional politics, this article draws on a new data set of constitutional amendments in all non-democratic successor states of the Soviet Union until 2017. It shows that a leadership change in an autocratic setting is preceded by a constitutional amendment in a significant number of cases. This extends the survival of the ruling nomenklatura and guarantees the hegemonic preservation of the status quo, despite a change in the actual leader. This result holds after controlling for various variables, time lags and country fixed effects. In addition to the quantitative approach, several case studies detail the mechanism by which this relationship between constitutional amendment and autocratic stability occurs and address the issue of reverse causation.