Blue Bloods: The Impact of Nepotism on Authoritarian Resilience

• In Event: Autocracy and Public Policy

Abstract

Patronage practices such as cronyism, factionalism, and nepotism persist both in democracies and autocracies. The patronage networks represented by interest groups and factions within the regimes’ elites are well studied. However, the existing literature in political science does not provide us with a theoretical account of nepotism's impact on authoritarian resilience. This research attempts to fill the research gap. Based on a novel cross-country dataset of the USSR, China, Vietnam, Laos, we find that political leaders tended to appoint more of their relatives on leadership posts right after the foundation of the regime. However, along with the development of the authoritarian regime, it often becomes harder to be selected for a higher political office if one belongs to a "noble" family. Why did these phenomena happen? Moreover, how do bloodlines matter in non-monarchic authoritarian regimes? What are the implications of nepotism on authoritarian resilience? Drawing on the literature of businesses and family enterprises and politics of authoritarian regimes, we hypothesize that regimes, where the princelings of higher-ranking elites reside in the selectorate, are more resilient than those where the political career of elites’ siblings do not, because bloodlines serve as a motivation of the elites to save the regime during turbulent political events. We test the hypothesis using our cross-country dataset

Authors

• Jiangnan Zhu, The University of Hong Kong

• Nikolai Mukhin, The University of Hong Kong