This article draws on the authoritarian institutions literature to explain the role of dominant parties in constraining the ability of autocrats to reshuffle cabinet ministers. Dominant party leaders are constrained in their ability to frequently reshuffle ministers by the need to maintain credible power-sharing commitments with party elites. These constraints also produce distinct temporal patterns of instability where large reshuffles occur following elections. Conversely, personalist leaders face fewer power-sharing constraints and engage in more extensive cabinet reshuffles at more arbitrary intervals. Military leaders face complex constraints that depend on whether officers or civilians occupy cabinet posts and the extent to which leaders are dependent upon civilian ministers for regime performance and popular support. Empirical analyses using data on the cabinets of ninety-four authoritarian leaders from thirty-seven African countries between 1976 and 2010 support the theoretical expectations for dominant party and personalist leaders, but are inconclusive for military leaders.

Recent research finds an association between nonviolent protests and democratic transitions. However, existing scholarship either does not specify the pathways through which nonviolent protests bring about democratization or conduct systematic empirical analyses demonstrating that the specified pathways are operative. This article proposes four pathways through which nonviolent anti-regime protests encourage democratic transitions, emphasizing their ability to directly conquer or indirectly coerce such transitions. Most simply, they can conquer democratic reforms by directly overthrowing authoritarian regimes and installing democracies. They can also coerce democratic reforms through three additional pathways. Nonviolent anti-regime protests can coerce incumbent elites into democratic reforms by threatening the survival of authoritarian regimes. They also increase the likelihood of elite splits, which promote negotiated democratic reforms. Finally, they encourage leadership change within the existing authoritarian regime. Following leadership change, nonviolent movements remain mobilized and are able to coerce democratic concessions from the regime’s new leaders. Our within-regime analyses provide robust empirical support for each pathway. We show that nonviolent anti-regime protests conquer democratic reforms by ousting autocratic regimes and replacing them with democracies. Nonviolent anti-regime protests also coerce elites into democratic reforms by threatening regime and leader survival. These findings highlight the importance of protest goals and tactics and also that nonviolent anti-regime protests have both direct and indirect effects on democratization.

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The finding that military regimes are more fragile than other authoritarian regimes represents one of the few stylized facts in comparative politics. However, the existing literature contains substantial differences in the theoretical explanations for military regime instability and operationalizations of military rule. To assess competing explanations, we examine regime and leader instability after distinguishing between collegial and personalist military rule. We show that regime and leader insecurity characterize only collegial military regimes. Particularly, the fragility of collegial military regimes comes from a heightened likelihood of democratization, not more frequent transitions to alternative autocratic regimes. In addition, leaders of collegial military regimes face higher risks of both regular and irregular turnovers than other autocrats. Also, irregular exits of collegial military leaders tend to occur through reshuffling, rather than regime-changing, coups. The results strongly support theories focusing on military officers’ preference for unity over other explanations.

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