This paper examines how authoritarian elites manage support coalitions to consolidate power and sideline rival elites. To survive during times of rivalry, elites need to manage both horizontal coalitions with other elites as well as vertical coalitions with supporters. While elites have a variety of strategies to deal with threats from rival elites, such as balancing coalitions with other elites and rotation, these are not feasible when rivals pose the greatest threat.
Therefore, under conditions of high elite rivalry, elites will seek to strengthen their own support coalitions and weaken those of others. Slater (2004) identifies, packing, rigging, and circumventing as broad strategies that authoritarian leaders may use to capture power in institutionalized authoritarian settings. I expand on Slater and identify four violent strategies that elites use to strengthen their support coalitions and weaken others: raising, restructuring, locking, and division. First, raising builds new coalitions through the creation of new security institutions outside state control, such as Mao’s Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution and the expansion of the Interahamwe militias during the Rwandan genocide.
Second, restructuring is the creation of new organizations—or units—by combining existing organizations, such as the creation of new army units under a combined command structure. For example, at the breakup of Yugoslavia, Milosevic established control of the Yugoslav Army by pairing its units with Red Berets Special Operations Forces that were directly under his control (Van der Maat and Holmes 2023).
Third, locking ties up rival organizations in the execution of specific tasks so they can no longer support of rival elites. Coups and purges against rivals require the total and immediate commitment of available force. Forces kept at a distance from the center are often not available to aid elites in the execution of a coup or purge. During the Vietnamese civil war, for example, the generals that could threaten Diem’s position were kept away from the capital (Van der Maat and Holmes 2023).
Last, division is the mechanism Forces of dividing contestation by encouraging rival supporters to switch sides under an (implicit) threat of violence. Division does not target rival supporters directly as a direct assault may lead them to band together. Rather, division forces supporters of rival elites to signal their allegiance during periods of heightened insecurity. In both Rwanda and Cambodia potential supporters of rival elites were forced to choose: join the violence against civilian out-groups to signal their loyalty to the genocidal regime or come out as traitors (Van der Maat 2020, forthcoming). Through process tracing of rivalry events, this paper examines the conditions under which elites use which strategy to strengthen their support coalitions and weaken those of rivals.
Slater. (2003). Iron cage in an iron fist: Authoritarian institutions and the personalization of power in Malaysia. Comparative Politics, 81-101.
Van der Maat. 2020. Genocidal consolidation: final solutions to elite rivalry. International Organization, 74(4):773-809.
Van der Maat & Holmes. 2023. The Puzzle of Genocidal Democratization: Military Rivalry and Atrocity in Myanmar. Journal of Genocide Research, 25(2):172-194.
