Personnel Management as a Credible Commitment Mechanism: Evidence from North Korea

Dictators control elites by creating power-sharing institutions such as parties and legislatures to prevent elites from challenging their rule. Yet the literature falls short in explaining how institutions function as a credible commitment mechanism in personalist dictatorships. This paper draws attention to how personnel management, which involves management of promotions, demotions, and movement of positions of cadres within the party-state can operate as a credible commitment mechanism in personalist dictatorships. Personnel management is an institution that dictators use to credibly commit to power sharing but at the same time restrain elites from engaging in collective action. This paper theorizes the role of personnel management as a power-sharing institution in personalist dictatorship context and test the conditions under which personnel management functions as a credible commitment mechanism using an original data set with more than 9,000 career trajectories of 600+ elites across major party, military, government, and parastate organizations from 1948-2021 in North Korea.