Ambition, personalist regimes, and control of authoritarian leaders
| Date | 01 April 2017 |
| Published date | 01 April 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629816630434 |
| Author | Svetlana Kosterina |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Ambition, personalist
regimes, and control of
authoritarian leaders
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2017, Vol. 29(2) 167–190
©The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI:10.1177/0951629816630434
journals.sagepub.com/home/jtp
Svetlana Kosterina
Princeton University, NJ, USA
Abstract
Why do elites in some authoritarian regimes but not others remove from power the leaders
who harm their interests? We develop a formal theory explaining this. The theory shows how
elites’ ambition prevents them from controlling authoritarian leaders. Because ambitious elites
are willing to stage coups to acquire power even when the leader is good, ambition renders
elites’ claims that the leader’s actions harm them less credible, making the other elites less likely
to support coups. We show that the impact of the proportion of competent politicians on per-
sonalist regimes is non-monotonic: personalist regimes are most likely to emerge not only when
there are few competent politicians but also when there are lots of them. We also provide in-
sight into which elites become coup-plotters. The theory explains the emergence of personalist
regimes, the frequency of coups, and why some authoritarian countries enjoy a more competent
leadership than others.
Keywords
authoritarian regimes; political control; coups
1. Introduction
Why do some authoritarian leaders remain in power in spite of not providing the benefits
of the authoritarian rule to their followers? There is considerable variation in whether
leaders who appear to pursue ill-advised policies out of incompetence are removed
through coups or continue to stay in power despite harming the interests of authoritar-
ian elites. Consider an example of the Presidium removing Khrushchev, the leader of the
Soviet Union, for incompetent policies. As Taubman (2006: 290) writes,
... his [Khrushchev’s] Presidium colleagues took turns indicting him for destructive policies
both foreign and domestic, ranging from agriculture to Berlin and Cuba. Most of all they empha-
sized his personal shortcomings: his impulsiveness and explosiveness, his unilateral, arbitrary
Corresponding author:
Svetlana Kosterina, Princeton University, Corwin Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Email: svetlana.kosterina@princeton.edu
168 Journal of Theoretical Politics 29(2)
leadership, his megalomania. ... The next day the Presidium granted Khrushchev’s ‘request’
to retire ‘in connection with his advanced age and deterioration of his health’.
This is an example of authoritarian control, where authoritarian elites, recognizing that
the leader’s incompetence threatens their interests, remove the leader from power. In con-
trast, consider an example of a leader pursuing incompetent policies and yet not being
removed from power. Describing the policies of Robert Mugabe, the leader of Zimbabwe,
Meredith (2002: 131) writes:
By the mid-1990s Mugabe had become an irascible and petulant dictator, brooking no opposi-
tion, contemptuous of the law and human rights ... His record of economic management was
lamentable. He had failed to satisfy popular expectations in education, health, land reform and
employment. ... Whatever difficulties occurred he attributed to old enemies Britain, the West,
the old Rhodesian network all bent, he believed,on destroying his revolution.
In spite of being widely perceived as incompetent, Mugabe was not removed from power
by the elites, and remains in power today. We are then faced with a puzzle: why do
authoritarian elites remove from power some incompetent leaders but not others?
Scholars have called ‘personalist’1the regimes where authoritarian elites seem to be
unable to control the leader and the leader survives in powerin spite of pursuing policies
that harm the interests of the elites. Personalist regimes have been shown to have a higher
propensity to initiate conflicts (Colgan and Weeks, 2015; Weeks, 2012) and to seek to
acquire nuclear weapons (Way and Weeks, 2014).
In spite of the important consequences of authoritarian leaders acquiring absolute
power, we know little about why personalist regimes survive. Indeed, the very existence
of personalist regimes is puzzling. One would expect that leaders whom no members
of the elite have an interest in supporting would not survive in power when there is no
one to defend them, yet this is precisely what happens in personalist regimes. This paper
provides an explanation for this puzzling fact.
We argue that because some members of the elite are ambitious and want to stage a
coup against the leader regardless of whether the leader is competent or not, their claims
that the leader is incompetent and did not provide them with benefits are less credible.
Seeing a member of the elite propose a coup makes other elites more pessimistic about
the leader’s competence, but because there are ambitious elites, other elites do not be-
come pessimistic enough to be willing to replace the leader. This explains the empirically
common pattern of leaders pursuing policies that harm the elites’ interests and the elites
who have the ability to replace the leader failing to do so.
The paper makes several contributions. First, it explains the puzzling empirical reg-
ularity of personalist leaders surviving in power in spite of all the authoritarian elites
having an interest in replacing them. Second, it endogenizes the power of authoritarian
leaders, explaining under what conditions the leader, in spite of being incompetent, is
able to induce the elites to defend him in the case of a coup attempt. Third, the paper
draws a novel theoretical distinction between coups of control and coups of ambition.
Fourth, because ambition can plausibly be motivating elites staging a coup but not citi-
zens replacing a leader through an election, the paper identifies a difficulty in controlling
the leaders unique to control by authoritarian elites. Fifth, the paper shows that, counter-
intuitively, the impact of the proportion of competent politicians on the likelihood of a
To continue reading
Request your trial