The Durability of Client Regimes

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that great power patrons prop up client dictatorships. But this is generally assumed rather than systematically analyzed. This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between foreign sponsorship and authoritarian regime survival, using an original data set of all autocratic client regimes in the postwar period. The results demonstrate that patronage from Western powers—the United States, France, and the United Kingdom—is not associated with client regime survival. Rather, it’s only Soviet sponsorship that reduced the risk of regime collapse. The author explains this variation by considering the effects of foreign sponsorship on the likelihood of military coups d’état. He argues that the Soviet Union directly aided its clients by imposing a series of highly effective coup prevention strategies. By contrast, the US and its allies didn’t provide such aid, leaving regimes vulnerable to military overthrow.

Don’t turn around, der Kommissar’s in town: Political officers and coups d’état in authoritarian regimes

“…To my knowledge, this dataset is the first to create a cross-national time-series measurement of the presence of political officers across autocracies. Similar to Casey (2020), I model this variable dichotomously based on whether the ruling party instituted the highest value of control over the military in a year, as indicated by the Geddes, Wright & Frantz (2018) party-military ordinal scale.…”

“…Outside of the military, the institution best placed in many regimes to provide these services is a ruling support party, which has its own apparatuses and cadres to draw upon in service of this objective (Gehlbach & Keefer, 2011;Shih, Adolph & Liu, 2012;Miller, 2019). Similar to how they can set up local branches to perform surveillance on remote civilian populations, the party can use similar methods to embed cadres of loyalists in the armed forces, through the creation of a political officer system developed with the aim of embedding in the armed forces to conduct coup-proofing (Geddes, Wright & Frantz, 2018;Casey, 2020).…”

“…Through their decentralized placement across units of the armed forces, individual political officers are best positioned to engage in active monitoring for coups by utilizing a range of techniques that they have been trained and equipped to perform. These methods include the collection of human and material intelligence, the development of dossiers on suspects, patrolling the barracks to watch for suspicious behaviors, and other efforts that could help them search out conspiracies (Casey, 2020; Herspring 1996).…”

“…Besides this direct monitoring and reporting coup-proofing function, political officers also create a passive effect that should reduce the likelihood of plots from even being started (Casey, 2020). Potential plotters see the political officer and realize that their presence makes coordinating in secret more challenging, therefore increasing the potential costs of failure, which are already high (Thyne & Powell, 2016).…”

The Rush to Personalize: Power Concentration after Failed Coups in Dictatorships

“…Yet, many personalizing moves, such as appointing loyalists or creating paramilitary units, are highly noticeable to elites. Others focus on structural factors that put the dictator in an advantageous position vis-à-vis the elites, such as the conditions at the time the ruler takes over (Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2018;Meng 2020;Sudduth 2017), the availability of oil rents (Fails 2019), or the support of foreign allies (Boutton 2019;Casey 2020). These approaches, however, cannot inform us about the impact of contextual changes in internal power dynamics and, hence, about the timing of rapid, sharp increases in power concentration even years after the dictator seized power.…”