All the President's Men: Personalistic Networks in a Competitive Authoritarian Regime

Do autocrats undermine the efficiency of their government by distributing rents to secure their survival? Existing literature on elite defection under authoritarianisms focuses on strategies to preempt the rise of countercoalitions. This paper looks at a relatively undertheorized aspect of this puzzle, the impact of such strategies on regime’s output efficiency in the long run. Using an original dataset of ministers under the Turkish government from 2003 to 2019, we argue that autocrats’ strategy to shuffle elites to prevent defection undermines the quality of governance and undercuts public support in the long run. Autocrats populate positions of power by those who are loyal to them regardless of whether they merit those positions. Concurrently, autocrats compensate policy losers by bringing them to key positions in the economy and ensure their support by distributing rent. While this shuffling mechanism ensures elite cohesion, it increases inequality in society and undercuts regime support. The implication of this argument is the shuffling strategy is sustainable only in the short run. In the long run, inefficiency of governance compels autocrats to acquiesce to liberalization. This paper’s contribution lies in using a novel dataset to study the impact of the shuffling strategy on regime effectiveness.