The Successor's Dilemma: When Do Dictators Designate Successors?

Successors are crucial to the survival of autocratic regimes. They provide continuity and stability in some autocracies while being the largest challengers to the sitting dictators in other autocracies. Dictators are often trapped in this "successor's dilemma" where dictators are motivated to designate successors to help the survival of their regimes and legacies after their departure while such a successor is constantly motivated to oust them. The decision-making process of autocratic succession is hard to analyze systematically as it is purposefully kept secret, resulting in the lack of a general theory on autocratic succession. Though both economics and political science recognize the subject, neither field was able to generalize it with a systematic theory. This paper attempts to fill the void with a strategic model and a rich collection of empirical evidence. It explores two crucial questions: (1) why do some dictators designate successors while others do not? and (2) When does an autocratic succession work? To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to model the process of autocratic succession theoretically and empirically testing the model predictions. It makes the following contributions.