Strategic Logic of Elite Purges in Dictatorships

Sudduth, Jun Koga

doi:10.1177/0010414016688004

Cited by 81 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 56 publications

(92 reference statements)

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“…When necessary, dictators rebuild their coalitions using strategies like purging, ideological re-alignment, and political party formation (Sudduth, 2017;Gandhi, 2008;Magaloni, 2008;Svolik, 2012 Even where leaders are somewhat less intentional about reshaping their supporting coalitions, we would argue that the passage of time depreciates the value of the information provided by a leader's entry and therefore weakens any deterrent effect that an irregular regime replacement might have on subsequent political challenges. Fidel Castro's successful revolution in…”

Section: Signals Of Strength Will Fade Over Timementioning

confidence: 99%

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The Rise Predicts the Fall: How the Method of Leader Entry Affects the Method of Leader Removal in Dictatorships

Sudduth

Bell

2018

International Studies Quarterly

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How does the way a non-democratic leader takes power affect the stability of her government? Prior research identifies irregular leader entries-those violating the regime's norms for leader selection-to be especially likely to foreshadow subsequent unconstitutional transitions. This paper shows how some forms of irregular leader entry can actually protect leaders from most threats of forced removal from power. When leaders use a strong and loyal coalition of supporters to overthrow their predecessors and their entire ruling regimes, as they do in successful rebellions, popular uprisings, and major regimechanging coups, they explicitly prove their strength to any potential rivals. These leaders are substantially less likely to be ousted than leaders who take power in ways that do not convey strength so convincingly, such as normal succession and elite reshuffling. We analyze an original dataset of non-democratic leader transitions and show that accounting for the strength demonstrated during a leader's entry to power substantially improves our ability to predict how and when the leader will eventually leave office. * NOTE: The data and all computer code necessary to replicate the results and figures in this analysis will be made publicly available at the authors' homepage on publication. R and Stata 14 were used for all statistical analyses.

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Section: Signals Of Strength Will Fade Over Timementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Leaders stay in power by maintaining a strong and loyal coalition of supporters (Ames, 1987;Bueno de Mesquita et al, 2003;Chiozza and Goemans, 2011;Svolik, 2012;Sudduth, 2017).…”

Section: Political Allegiances and Uncertainty In Non-democratic Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rise Predicts the Fall: How the Method of Leader Entry Affects the Method of Leader Removal in Dictatorships

Sudduth

Bell

2018

International Studies Quarterly

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“…Existing studies stress the scenario that leaders who face high coup threats are likely to diminish their militaries' coupmaking capabilities in order to reduce these risks. However, they overlook the possibility that the enactment of coup-proofing actions might actually prompt the militaries to launch a coup in order to pre-empt their leaders' efforts to weaken them (Nordlinger, 1977;Zartman, 1970;Sudduth 2014). This point indicates that the relationship between coup threats and coup-proofing actions is not as simple as existing studies suggest.…”

Section: The Way Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Roessler (2011), for instance, introduced the data on ethnic exclusion that identifies when a particular ethnic group is excluded from the central government for sub-Saharan African countries. Sudduth's (2014) Finally, as suggested by McMahon and Slantchev (2015), another step forward would be to investigate whether the nature of the trade-offs between protection by the militaries and protection from the militaries depends on whether the external threat emanates from domestic or international adversaries. Recent empirical evidence on the relationship between civil and international wars and coup attempts do indeed indicate that there are important differences.…”

Section: The Way Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Focusing on the post-civil war environment,Braithwaite and Sudduth (2016) claim that the removal of high-ranking military officials deters subsequent domestic unrest by demonstrating the capacity of the regime to remove powerful yet undesirable individuals from the regime. Using the data on military purges created bySudduth (2014), they show that purges of military officers in autocracies decrease the probability of civil war recurrence.…”

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Coup-Proofing and Civil War

Sudduth¹

2016

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics

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Political leaders face threats to their power from within and outside the regime. Leaders can be removed via a coup d’état undertaken by militaries that are part of the state apparatus. At the same time, leaders can lose power when they confront excluded opposition groups in civil wars. The difficulty for leaders, though, is that efforts to address one threat might leave them vulnerable to the other threat due to the role of the military as an institution of violence capable of exercising coercive power. On one hand, leaders need to protect their regimes from rebels by maintaining strong militaries. Yet, militaries that are strong enough to prevail against rebel forces are also strong enough to execute a coup successfully. On the other hand, leaders who cope with coup threats by weakening their militaries’ capabilities to organize a coup also diminish the very capabilities that they need to defeat their rebel challengers. This unfortunate trade-off between protection by the military and protection from the military has been the long-standing theme in studies of civil-military relations and coup-proofing. Though most research on this subject has focused primarily on rulers’ maneuvers to balance the threats posed by the military and the threats coming from foreign adversaries, more recent scholarship has begun to explore how leaders’ efforts to cope with coup threats will influence the regime’s abilities to address the domestic threats coming from rebel groups, and vice versa. This new wave of research focuses on two related vectors. First, scholars address whether leaders who pursue coup-proofing strategies that weaken their militaries’ capabilities also increase the regime’s vulnerability to rebel threats and the future probability of civil war. Second, scholars examine how the magnitude of threats posed by rebel groups will determine leaders’ strategies toward the militaries, and how these strategies affect both the militaries’ influence over government policy and the future probability of coup onsets. These lines of research contribute to the conflict literature by examining the causal mechanisms through which civil conflict influences coup propensity and vice versa. The literatures on civil war and coups have developed independently without much consideration of each other, and systematic analyses of the linkage between them have only just began.

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To appease or to repress: how dictators use economic dynamics to increase their regime longevity

Harrijvan¹,

Weerdesteijn²

2020

Crime Law Soc Change

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International crimes, such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, are more likely to occur in non-democratic regimes. Consequently, the decision-making process of dictators has increasingly garnered criminological interest [78]. The decisions dictators make and the strategies they use impact the longevity of their regime. Scholars predominantly focus on the extent to which a dictator is able to generate support from both the elite and the masses in explaining regime survival [3, 22, 54]. A dictator can use economic dynamics to increase his support among the elite through corrupt practices [3], he can determine the extent to which he is supported by the masses by offering public goods and services to them [22] and he can withhold benefits to repress threats stemming from these groups [17]. However, the intentional use of these strategies to increase regime survival remains under-researched [77]. The present research aims to fill this gap through an analysis of Paul Biya’s 37-year reign in Cameroon. It is argued that the economic structure of a country influences the strategy—repression or appeasement—that is chosen to deal with the threat stemming from the masses or the elite and that ultimately, these considerations are likely to influence the economic development of a country.

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Strategic Logic of Elite Purges in Dictatorships

Cited by 81 publications

References 56 publications

The Rise Predicts the Fall: How the Method of Leader Entry Affects the Method of Leader Removal in Dictatorships

The Rise Predicts the Fall: How the Method of Leader Entry Affects the Method of Leader Removal in Dictatorships

Coup-Proofing and Civil War

To appease or to repress: how dictators use economic dynamics to increase their regime longevity

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