Personalism and Executive Takeovers

Personalist regimes have distinct origins. Some personalist regimes develop as a result of the degeneration into personal rulership within an existing dictatorship (Brooker 2000, Svolik 2012). Military regime in Chile following the coup in 1973 has come to be dominated by its leader, Pinochet, and has acquired its personalist characteristics from 1978. Second, personalism may result from the process of democratic breakdown, an autogolpe that an elected democratic president launch to take over the office acquired previously by constitutional means, such as in Belarus, Nicaragua, Venezuela, or Uganda. While scholars have began to study the process of transition to personal rulerships in existing dictatorships formally (Svolik 2012) and empirically (Geddes, Wright and Frantz 2018), we lack understanding about the simultaneous processes of authoritarian reversals and executive takeovers. The paper primarily addresses the question of how previously democratising countries turn into personalist regimes. Building on the existing literature on democratic breakdown and non-democratic politics, this paper attempts to explain different paths to personalism that the incumbent rulers can take and the obstacles they have to overcome during their ``authority building”. Secondly, the paper offers new data by aggregating various indicators, i.e., “subversion by ruling executive,” or “consolidation of incumbency advantage”, available in the literature. Altogether, there are over a hundred of cases of executive takeovers that arguably denote the onset of personalism. Using the Cox proportional hazards and competing risks models we find that the executive control over the judiciary and being the party founder, as well as access to natural resource rents, are important factors that increase the hazard of incumbent takeovers. Furthermore, using three cases of regime personalization, we find that establishing personal control over economic rents, as well as placing supporters in security agencies early in tenure, matter. The paper improves our understanding of democratic breakdown and personalism.