A Bomb from Insiders or Outsiders? Leadership Dynamics in Personalist Dictatorships

This article answers why the survival of authoritarian leaders varies across personalist dictatorships. While a substantial body of literature proposes the positive effect of power-sharing political institutions (e.g. legislatures or parties) on the duration of dictators’ tenures, most empirical work has provided inconsistent results. This paper addresses this disjuncture between theory and empirical results by making a threefold contribution. First, it differentiates types of dictators’ exits from office into a removal by regime insiders and outsiders, which is further divided into popular uprising and electoral defeat. Second, it reconsiders the mode of authoritarian management examining power-sharing (for insiders) and recruitment (for outsiders) mechanisms, arguing the two weak and informal ones embedded in personalist regimes, compared to other forms of autocracies, increase the rulers’ risk of being ousted from office by insiders or outsiders. Third, it explains the variation in the duration of dictators’ tenures in personalist regimes. For one thing, instead of institutions per se, their overall levels of constraint on executive power do reflect the chances of power-sharing, thus determining the risk of a rebellion by insiders. Elections, for another, fail to complement recruitment function, thus making it more likely for a regime change through outsiders. That is, non-competitive elections not only preclude recruitment but provide outsiders a channel to act collectively, which increases the risk of popular uprising, while competitive elections, despite helping recruitment, cause outsiders to sense that regime change is possible, thus raising the risk of electoral defeat. We confirm these expectations using data on dictatorships between 1945 and 2017, and employing competing risk survival analysis. This research concludes that an effective institutional design to lower a personalist leader’s risk of losing power should strengthen the two modes of authoritarian management.