Personalist Politics and Civil Resistance

• In Event: Mobilization and Repression under Authoritarianism

Abstract

Roughly three-quarters of all major nonviolent civil resistance campaigns in the world target autocratic regimes. A burgeoning literature has begun to examine the structural factors that are associated with the onset and success of these campaigns. Some prominent recent qualitative scholarship has theorized that personalist dictators are particularly vulnerable to civil resistance. Yet there is as yet no published work that systematically examines whether particular types of autocratic regimes in general or personalist dictators in particular are more vulnerable to civil resistance. This article fills this gap in the literature by leveraging new data on autocratic regimes and authoritarian personalism and new data on major nonviolent and violent campaigns and outcomes (RE-NAVCO) over the 1946 to 2010 period. We argue that personalist dictators are less likely to be challenged by a nonviolent campaign than other kinds of dictators, but that conditional on nonviolent campaign mobilization, personalist dictators are indeed vulnerable.

Authors

• Wonjun Song, Pennsylvania State University

• Joseph Wright, Pennsylvania State University

• John Joseph Chin, Carnegie Mellon University