Personalist Rulers and their Provincial Leaders: Why Chechen Strongman Kadyrov is So Powerful, and Why Putin Has Not Stopped Him

Though incompatible with the very logic of their power, personalist dictators delegate authority to a great number of subordinates within their regime. Among this pool of subordinates, the political leaders of larger subnational administrative units – what we term ‘provincial leaders’ – represent an important group. On the one hand, strong, capable provincial leaders are necessary to secure the reach and strength of the dictator’s rule across the country. On the other hand, powerful provincial leaders also pose a threat to the personalist dictator’s monopoly on power. Extant research has found that personalist rulers respond to this dilemma in two ways: they generally prefer loyal subordinates to more competent ones, and they more frequently pursue the practice of ‘shuffling’ to avoid the rise of alternative centers of power. What we understand less well is how this particular incentive structure characteristic of personalist regimes affect the behavior of provincial leaders themselves. In this paper, we argue that they too face a tradeoff. On the one hand, provincial leaders in personalist settings have an incentive to keep a low profile and make sure that the dictator is pleased with their performance. On the other hand, they themselves have an aspiration for power and wealth and a wish for securing their position against the whims of the ruler. While the former leads them to act acquiescently, the latter prompt them to rapidly monopolize power locally and boost their political weight nationally. First, we discuss this dilemma and specify the conditions under which provincial leaders choose the latter and more risky strategy over the former. Second, we illustrate and validate these arguments empirically through an in-depth case study of a particular provincial leader in a particular personalist regime: the extreme case of Ramzan Kadyrov, leader of the unruly Chechen Republic within Putin’s Russia.