Countering Coups: Leadership Succession Rules in Dictatorships

Abstract

Paradoxically, many dictators agree to institutionalized succession rules even though these rules could regulate their removal from office. This study shows that succession rules, like other pseudo-democratic institutions in authoritarian regimes, provide survival benefits for dictators. Specifically, they protect dictators from coup attempts because they reduce elites’ incentives to try to grab power preemptively via forceful means. By assuaging the ambition of some elites who have more to gain with patience than with plotting, institutionalized succession rules hamper coordination efforts among coup plotters, which ultimately reduce a leader’s risk of confronting coups. Based on a variety of statistical models, including instrumental variables regression that addresses potential endogeneity between succession rules and coup attempts, the empirical evidence supports the authors’ hypothesis that institutions governing leadership succession reduce the likelihood that dictators confront coups. This study clarifies one of the ways in which institutions in dictatorships help autocratic leaders survive.

Polity Size and the Institutionalization of Leadership Succession

“…Autocratic regimes are especially vulnerable during periods of transition (Kokkonen & Sundell 2014;Kurrild-Klitgaard 2000, 2004Treisman 2015;Tullock 1987). Ezrow & Frantz (2011: 6) report that "of the 340 leadership transitions that occurred in dictatorships from 1946 to 2009, 160 brought the regime down," and Frantz & Stein (2017) show that succession rules affect susceptibility to coups.…”

How to Keep Officers in the Barracks: Causes, Agents, and Types of Military Coups

“…Effective measures employed for coupproofing have long been studied, originally in small-n studies (Brooks 1998;Gaub 2013;Kamrava 2000;Quinlivan 1999). Such measures include the establishment of parallel security apparatuses in the form of "counter-balancing" (Pilster and Böhmelt 2011;Powell 2014;Singh 2014;Carey, Colaresi and Mitchell 2016;Sudduth 2017a; De Bruin 2017); the frequent rotation of officers in their assigned posts and the reorganization of the armed forces (Talmadge 2016); "ethnic stacking" of key positions in the army with co-ethnics deemed most loyal to the power holders (Jenkins and Kposowa 1992;Roessler 2011;Harkness 2016;Bellin 2012;Nepstad 2013); and elite management in the form of purges (Sudduth 2017b) or the institutionalization of political succession (Frantz and Stein 2016).…”

Are ICTs Democratizing Dictatorships? New Media and Mass Mobilization*

“…As a result, democratic regimes perform better at providing their citizens with public goods (Deacon, ; Lake and Baum, ), which arguably include access to the Internet . Lacking the procedural legitimacy that free, fair, and competitive elections bestow on democratic leaders, autocrats either can garner legitimacy through economic and policy performance, or they must resort to patronage or brute force to sustain their rule (Bratton and van de Walle, ; Frantz and Stein, , ; Rothstein, ). Autocrats, even more so than democrats, need economic growth to sustain their political legitimacy—to the extent that it exists.…”