Erica Frantz

Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set

When the leader of an autocratic regime loses power, one of three things happens. The incumbent leadership group is replaced by democratically elected leaders. Someone from the incumbent leadership group replaces him, and the regime persists. Or the incumbent leadership group loses control to a different group that replaces it with a new autocracy. Much scholarship exists on the first kind of transition, but little on transitions from one autocracy to another, though they make up about half of all regime changes. We introduce a new data set that facilitates the investigation of all three kinds of transition. It provides transition information for the 280 autocratic regimes in existence from 1946 to 2010. The data identify how regimes exit power, how much violence occurs during transitions, and whether the regimes that precede and succeed them are autocratic. We explain the data set and show how it differs from currently available data. The new data identify autocratic regime breakdowns regardless of whether the country democratizes, which makes possible the investigation of why the ouster of dictators sometimes leads to democracy but often does not, and many other questions. We present a number of examples to highlight how the new data can be used to explore questions about why dictators start wars and why autocratic breakdown sometimes results in the establishment of a new autocratic regime rather than democratization. We discuss the implications of these findings for the Arab Spring.

Oil and Autocratic Regime Survival

This article uncovers a new mechanism linking oil wealth to autocratic regime survival: the investigation tests whether increases in oil wealth improve the survival of autocracies by lowering the chances of democratization, reducing the risk of transition to subsequent dictatorship, or both. Using a new measure of autocratic durability shows that, once models allow for unit effects, oil wealth promotes autocratic survival by lowering the risk of ouster by rival autocratic groups. Evidence also indicates that oil income increases military spending in dictatorships, which suggests that increasing oil wealth may deter coups that could have caused a regime collapse.

A dictator’s toolkit Understanding how co-optation affects repression in autocracies

A dictator’s motivation for using repression is fairly clear, but why some repress more than others or favor particular types of repressive strategies is less obvious. Using statistical analysis, this article demonstrates that a dictator’s reliance on co-optation fundamentally alters how repression is used. Specifically, it finds that co-optation through the use of political parties and a legislature creates incentives that lead dictators to decrease empowerment rights restrictions, like censorship, while increasing physical integrity rights violations, like torture and political imprisonment. This occurs because, by creating parties and a legislature, a dictator draws his potential opposition out of the general public and into state institutions, making it easier to identify who these opponents are, to monitor their activities, and to gauge the extent of their popular support. This reduces the need to impose broad types of repressive measures, like empowerment rights restrictions, that breed discontent within the overall population. At the same time, co-optation creates the risk that rivals, once co-opted, will use their positions within the system to build their own bases of support from which to seek the dictator’s overthrow, generating incentives for dictators to increase physical integrity violations to limit the threat posed by these individuals.

How Autocracies Fall

Because autocrats can rarely be voted out of power, most find themselves exiting office in far less conventional ways. Since the 1950s, the coup d’etat—or the illegal seizure of power by the milita...

Are coups good for democracy

A number of recent studies argue that coups can help usher in democracy. We examine this relationship empirically by looking at the political regimes that follow coups in autocracies, as well as the level of repression against citizens. We find that, though democracies are occasionally established in the wake of coups, more often new authoritarian regimes emerge, along with higher levels of state-sanctioned violence.

Mimicking Democracy to Prolong Autocracies

Democracy has suffered eight straight years of global decline. This was the finding Freedom House issued in its 2014 report examining the state of global political rights and civil liberties. This downward slide in political freedom has been the longest continuous decline in political rights and civil liberties since the watch-dog organization began measuring these trends over 40 years ago. Some of this backsliding has occurred in democratic countries like Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban publicly declared the end of liberal democracy as he continued to undermine the media, the judiciary, and other key institutional checks on executive power following his election in 2010. Or in Turkey where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dismantled checks on his power, censured opponents, and limited critical media, particularly in the last two years. However, a good deal of the deterioration globally has occurred within the subset of states we would consider to be non-democracies. From Egypt to Russia to Venezuela to Thailand, autocratic incumbents are expanding their control over the levers of power. Adding to the respite (and perhaps even the reversal) in the steady march toward democracy that occurred under the “Third Wave”—a term coined by Samuel P. Huntington to describe the third major surge of global democracy from 1974 to 2000—is the decelerating pace of political transitions from autocracy to democracy (see Figure 1). In the decade following the end of the Cold War (1990–99), there were approximately 3.2 democratic transitions per year. From 2000–12, however, that

Revisiting the Concept of the Failed State: bringing the state back in

Abstract The policy and donor communities have placed great importance on fixing ‘failed states’. World leaders have cited failed states as one of the greatest threats to the global community. Nevertheless the concept of the failed state is currently subject to a backlash from the academic community. Scholars have criticised the failed states literature on theoretical, normative, empirical and practical grounds. We provide a brief overview of these main concerns and offer a more systematic method for measuring ‘state failure’. Coming up with better ways of assessing how states underperform will enhance our understanding of how institutional decay affects stability and development and, most importantly, will provide an improved system of early warning for practitioners.

Countering Coups Leadership Succession Rules in Dictatorships

Paradoxically, many dictators agree to institutionalized succession rules even though these rules could regulate their removal from office. This study shows that succession rules, like other pseudo-democratic institutions in authoritarian regimes, provide survival benefits for dictators. Specifically, they protect dictators from coup attempts because they reduce elites’ incentives to try to grab power preemptively via forceful means. By assuaging the ambition of some elites who have more to gain with patience than with plotting, institutionalized succession rules hamper coordination efforts among coup plotters, which ultimately reduce a leader’s risk of confronting coups. Based on a variety of statistical models, including instrumental variables regression that addresses potential endogeneity between succession rules and coup attempts, the empirical evidence supports the authors’ hypothesis that institutions governing leadership succession reduce the likelihood that dictators confront coups. This study clarifies one of the ways in which institutions in dictatorships help autocratic leaders survive.

Comparative Leadership in Non-democracies

The Peruvian author and politician Mario Vargas Llosa deemed Mexico, prior to 2000, ‘the Perfect Dictatorship’. The country earned this ‘honour’ in large part because it had mastered leadership turnover within the framework of an authoritarian political system.1 The ability to seamlessly transfer power helped the Mexican single-party dictatorship achieve one of the longest periods of relative domestic tranquillity compared to its authoritarian peers. In contrast to Mexico, Uganda has experienced five different political regimes — either military or personalist — since independence in 1966. None of these regimes had institutionalized mechanisms allowing a peaceful transfer of power. Given this uncertain institutional setting, when a Ugandan leader overstayed his welcome, other elites resorted to coups d’etat, overthrowing not only the leader but the regime as well. Where no established mechanism for the transfer of power exists, leadership succession breeds chaos, potentially destabilizing economic markets and increasing citizen insecurity.

The Global Rise of Personalized Politics: It's Not Just Dictators Anymore

No one would dispute that power in Russia today lies firmly in the hands of President Vladimir Putin. But his command over the political system was not always so sweeping. When Putin assumed power ...