Taking It Personal?: Investigating Personalism as an Autocratic Survival Strategy

Personalist autocracy is on the rise globally. The increasing tendency of dictators to concentrate power in their own hands at the expense of their coalition of elite supporters has major implications for the political stability of autocracies. However, the exact nature of this impact is unclear. On the one hand, previous research has highlighted regime personalization as an autocratic survival strategy and linked it to a reduction in the likelihood of coups. On the other hand, dictators’ purges of elite rivals (widely used as an indicator of regime personalization) have been linked to an increase in the likelihood of civil war. This paper seeks to reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings by first developing a common theoretical framework and subsequently testing this framework in a time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) analysis. The paper argues that regime personalization involves a trade-off between different kinds of threats to a dictator’s rule. By increasing the degree of personalization, dictators reduce their vulnerability to elite threats while at the same time increasing their vulnerability to mass-based threats. Dictators’ choice to (attempt to) personalize their regimes is thus informed by their perception of the threat environment in which they rule. Highly personalized regimes accordingly reflect a stable equilibrium where dictators have minimized their vulnerability to elite threats at the cost on an increased vulnerability to mass-based threats (which they perceive to be substantially less likely to arise). Consequently, personalist dictators are likely to survive in power unless this equilibrium is destabilized by an exogenous shock that increases the likelihood of mass-based mobilization, such as an international economic crisis or a regional protest wave. This helps explain why several highly personalized regimes were overthrown during both the Colour Revolutions and the Arab Spring.