Constitutionalism and Authoritarian Leadership: Evidence from the Post-Soviet Space

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 or shortly after a real leadership change. 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 understand the role of constitutional change under autocracy, 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 followed 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 leadership change occurs and address the issue of reverse causation.