Leader-Elite Power Dynamics in Dictatorships

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel explores the dynamics of leader-elite power balance and their implications in dictatorships using a variety of methodological approaches. Many existing studies have examined contentious politics between authoritarian regimes and society, identifying popular uprisings or opposition movements as the central threat to a dictator’s power. However, our understanding of intra-elite power dynamics and how leaders address the threats posed by regime elites is still limited. With that in mind, this panel aims to improve our scholarly understanding of this issue by, first, exploring what determines the variations in leaders’ decisions to promote or eliminate rival elites, and, second, by investigating the consequences of such leaders’ actions on the subsequent leader-elite power dynamics as well as the regimes’ abilities to protect them from regime change movements. Further, the panel reveals that leaders’ decisions on whether to promote or repress individual elites crucially depend on whether the individuals are (connected to) members of security apparatus, providing important implications for the literature on civil-military relations and comparative authoritarianism.

First, Grewal explores when a dictator’s security forces defend him from a mass uprising and whether security forces’ responses would be shaped by dictators’ strategies to weaken them via counterbalancing to prevent coups. In particular, Grewal explores the variations in military defection across junior and senior ranks using the original dataset, Armed Responses to Mobilization Or Revolution (ARMOR), that tracks how the military and police forces respond during every nonviolent regime change campaign included in NAVCO.
Second, Jost and Mattingly examine the promotion of party elites in autocracies. They argue that elite promotion hinges on an elite’s social ties to coercive institutions, especially the military, as the connections to the coercive institutions would improve an elite’s ability to mobilize their social network to challenge the leader through a coup. Specifically, they expect that prospects for promotion are highest when elites are well-connected to the autocracy’s coercive institutions but not so well-connected that it rivals those of the autocrats. They test their arguments by using an original biographical dataset that contains over 190,000 appointments to senior positions within the Chinese military between 1927 and 2014.

Third, Sudduth analyzes the dynamics of the leader-elite relationship by focusing on when and how dictators purge rival elites from the key positions in the regime. She argues that whether the targets of purges are military officers or civilian elites has a crucial impact on the subsequent leader-elite power balance. In particular, she claims whether a dictator can repress civilian elites and consolidate power depends on whether the dictator has already purged strong rival military officers, and thus the possibility of countercoups is low. She tests this argument using novel cross-national data on elite purges covering 118 authoritarian countries between 1980 and 2010.

Finally, Jiang explores how informal political constraints associated with leadership turnovers shape intra-elite power dynamics. He argues that aging leaders’ efforts to manage the succession problem create an important check on the power of subsequent leaders, and thus, incumbent leaders’ ability to consolidate power becomes more limited when operating in an environment where influential former leaders are present. They test this argument by using the massive text corpus of Google Ngram and developing a new quantitative measure of power for a global sample of autocratic regime leaders and elites between 1950 and 2019.

Sub Unit

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Individual Presentations

• Introducing the ARMOR Dataset - Sharan Grewal, College of William & Mary

• The Military Origins of Civilian Power in China - Tyler C. Jost, Brown University; Daniel Mattingly, Yale University

• Personalizing Power in Autocracies - Jun Koga Sudduth, University of Strathclyde

Chair

• Jennifer Gandhi Yale University

Discussants

• Jennifer Gandhi Yale University

• Paul J. Schuler University of Arizona