The killing game: A theory of non-democratic succession

Egorov, Georgy; Sonin, Konstantin

doi:10.1016/j.rie.2015.05.005

Cited by 17 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…(See Acemoglu, Golosov, and Tsyvinski, 2008, for a general theory of political incentives; Padró i Miquel and Yared, 2012, analyze politics of indirect control under the threat of using violence.) In Egorov and Sonin (2005) and Debs (2010), the winner of a power contest decides the fate of the loser and may execute the latter in order to prevent him from challenging his position again. In Acemoglu, Egorov, and Sonin (2008) powerful coalitions are able to eliminate political opponents until a stable coalition is formed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incumbency Advantage in Non-Democracies

Egorov

Sonin

2014

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In elections that take place in a less-than-perfect democracy, incumbency advantages are different from those in mature democracies. The incumbent can prevent credible challengers from running, organize vote fraud, or even physically eliminate his main opponents. At the same time, formally winning the election does not guarantee staying in power. We present a unified model of elections and mass protests where the purpose of competitive elections is to reveal information about the relative popularity of the incumbent and the opposition. Citizens are heterogenous in their attitudes toward the dictator, and these individual preferences serve as private signals about the aggregate distribution of preferences; this ensures a unique equilibrium for any information the incumbent may reveal. We show that the most competent or popular dictators run in competitive elections, mediocre ones prevent credible opponents from running or cancel elections, and the least competent ones use outright repressions. A strong opposition makes competitive elections more likely but also increases the probability of repression. A totalitarian regime, where repression is cheaper, will have more repression, but even in the absence of repression, competitive elections will be rarer. A crueler, say, military, regime, where protesting is costly, makes repression less likely and, surprisingly, competitive elections more likely.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incumbency Advantage in Non-Democracies

Egorov

Sonin

2014

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“…Across countries, elite purges are more likely to occur in non-democratic states (Carey, 2010; Hill & Jones, 2014), when the elite is temporarily weakened (Sudduth, 2017), or when the country is still relatively poor and cooptation is too costly (Bove et al, 2017). In addition to coup threats per se, the intensity of political purges also seems to depend on a number of additional strategic concerns, such as rules of political succession (Egorov & Sonin, 2015), the existence of multiple parallel threats to the ruler (Bueno de Mesquita & Smith, 2017), the need to enforce top-down accountability (Montagnes & Wolton, 2019), or the availability of information (see Gehlbach et al, 2016 for an overview).…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Staying Out of Trouble: Criminal Cases Against Russian Mayors

Buckley

Reuter

Rochlitz

et al. 2022

Comparative Political Studies

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Although repression against elites is a common occurrence in authoritarian regimes, we know little about which elites are targeted. This paper uses an original dataset on the prosecution of mayors in large Russian cities to examine the factors that make elites more likely to be arrested. We argue that in electoral authoritarian regimes like Russia, regime leaders are reluctant to arrest popular officials. Such officials command political capital that is useful to the regime, and arrests of prominent officials can produce popular backlash. We examine this argument using an original dataset on all arrests of municipal leaders in Russia’s 221 largest cities between 2002 and 2018. We find that mayors who won their elections by large margins are less likely to be arrested. In addition, we document several other substantively important patterns: (1) a mayor’s professional background is not related to the likelihood of arrest, (2) opposition mayors are four times more likely to be arrested, and (3) mobilization of votes for the regime is not protective against arrest. JEL Classifications P16, P30, R59

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“…On the other hand, a failed challenge to an authoritarian leader will likely result in the loss of rents, and possibly life (cf. Egorov & Sonin, 2015). Milan Svolik (2012, p. 95) notes that the latter risk is so great that “fear of joining the losing side outweights any substantive preferences over who prevails.” Such fears are hard to assauge when there is uncertainty in terms of how successful the challenge will be, which is normally the case.…”

Section: The Coordination Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leader Succession and Civil War

Kokkonen

Sundell

2019

Comparative Political Studies

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Leadership succession is a perennial source of instability in autocratic regimes. Despite this, it has remained a curiously understudied phenomenon in political science. In this article, we compile a novel and comprehensive dataset on civil war in Europe and combine it with data on the fate of monarchs in 28 states over 800 years to investigate how autocratic succession affected the risk of civil war. Exploiting the natural deaths of monarchs to identify exogenous variation in successions, we find that successions substantially increased the risk of civil war. The risk of succession wars could, however, be mitigated by hereditary succession arrangements (i.e., primogeniture—the principle of letting the oldest son inherit the throne). When hereditary monarchies replaced elective monarchies in Europe, succession wars declined drastically. Our results point to the importance of the succession, and the institutions governing it, for political stability in autocratic regimes.

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The killing game: A theory of non-democratic succession

Cited by 17 publications

References 22 publications

Incumbency Advantage in Non-Democracies

Incumbency Advantage in Non-Democracies

Staying Out of Trouble: Criminal Cases Against Russian Mayors

Leader Succession and Civil War

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