When Does Executive Aggrandizement Result in Democratic Breakdown?

• In Event: Global Insights on Political Parties

Abstract

An unsettling number of democratic countries have seen their leaders abuse executive powers to undermine democratic accountability, but only some of these leaders were able to destroy the democratic regime completely. Why did some cases of executive aggrandizement result in democratic breakdown while others did not? I argue that where leaders enjoyed unrivaled control over their political organization, their efforts to concentrate power were likely to succeed and eventually secure autocratic control.

To support my argument, I identify 26 cases of executive aggrandizement worldwide since 1989 using indicators from the V-Dem dataset and a new conceptualization of executive aggrandizement as a simultaneous attack on both horizontal and vertical accountability. Data on party organizational features from the V-Party dataset show that among these cases, incumbent control over party career paths is tightly associated with successful incumbent takeover. I explain this regularity by demonstrating two mechanisms: consequential defections from the ruling coalition and policy radicalization. I show, using the cases of Ecuador, Macedonia and Turkey, that defection undermines the incumbent’s power only when the latter cannot command personal loyalty from the vast majority of party cadres and elites. The second mechanism, policy radicalization, operates through the electoral costs incumbents pay when they must accommodate policy demands by extremist interest groups. While the influence of religious pressure groups brought on premature policy radicalization in the United States and Poland, this did not happen in Turkey. I address alternative explanations such as the strength of democratic institutions and the personal popularity of the leader.

Author

• Melis G. Laebens, Central European University