Incumbent takeovers
| Author | Alexander Baturo,Jakob Tolstrup |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221075183 |
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Special Data Features |
Incumbent takeovers
Alexander Baturo
School of Law and Government, Dublin City University
Jakob Tolstrup
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University
Abstract
The expansion of power by incumbent political leaders has become the subject of increased scholarly attention. In
democracies, this is known as ‘subversions by the ruling executive’, ‘executive aggrandizement’, or ‘autogolpe’; in
autocracies, researchers study ‘personalization’, ‘transition to personal rulership’, or ‘power-grabbing’. While the
terminological landscape is rich, there is little conceptual agreement of what leader-driven power expansion is (and is
not). Furthermore, we still lack broad data that allow us to inv estigate the phenomenon systematically across
democracy and autocracy. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, it offers a unified approach to study
leader-driven power expansion – incumbent takeovers – across the political regime spectrum. Second, drawing from
11 datasets and original data collection and coding, we introduce a new, comprehensive dataset on 495 individual
takeover events carried out by 279 political leaders in 132 countries in the period 1918–2019. We provide estimates
of the takeover onset years, the time to takeover, the length of the takeover spells, and discuss the differences between
distinct indicators, inter alia. Future research may leverage these data for a better understanding of the drivers of
incumbent takeovers as well as the role of takeovers in regime change, civil wars, coups, and uprisings.
Keywords
autogolpe, democratic breakdown, incumbent takeover, new data, personalism, self-coup
Introduction
In recent years, scholars of democratization and com-
parative authoritarianism have argued that we are witnes-
sing two new, important empirical trends: on one side of
the political regime continuum, we see a rising number
of incumbent-driven subversions of democracy (Bermeo,
2016; Svolik, 2015, 2019: 61); on the other side of the
spectrum, a growth in the share of so-called personalist
autocracies (Kendall-Taylor, Frantz & Wright, 2017;
Geddes, Wright & Frantz, 2018). Of recent examples,
Viktor Orba
´n’s expansion of power in Hungary repre-
sents the former, while Xi Jinping’s rapidly growing
authority in China illustrates the latter. However, so far
research on these closely related phenomena has been
compartmentalized. That is, scholars tend to study the
reduction of incumbent constraints that accompanies the
erosion of democracy – takeovers perpetuated by elected
leaders – separately from the increases in incumbent
autonomy that are part and parcel of transitions to per-
sonal dictatorships.
In this article, we make the case for a unified approach
and refer to both such events as incumbent takeovers.We
argue that such an approach is needed as many simila-
rities exist not only in terms of what takeovers are pri-
marily about (incumbent-driven power expansion) and
how they manifest themselves (be it through the closing
of parliaments or the avoidance of term limits) but also
because more protracted takeovers often involve coun-
tries traversing regime types (as the case of Hugo Cha
´vez
of Venezuela amply demonstrates). To understand the
conditions under which incumbent takeovers happen
across the political regime spectrum, we, therefore, need
two things that are lacking today: conceptual clarity as
Corresponding author:
tolstrup@ps.au.dk
Journal of Peace Research
2023, Vol. 60(2) 373–386
ªThe Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221075183
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