Introducing Regular Turnover Details, 1960–2015: A dataset on world leaders’ legal removal from office
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Author | Amanda A Licht |
| DOI | 10.1177/00223433211045854 |
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Special Data Features |
Special Data Features
Introducing Regular Turnover Details,
1960–2015: A dataset on world leaders’
legal removal from office
Amanda A Licht
Department of Political Science, Binghamton University (SUNY)
Abstract
The premier data on leader survival focus on the violent, dramatic means by which leaders ‘exit’ office. This
information, vital for many research questions, constitutes a valuable public good for the community. Yet, it provides
an incomplete picture of the political rise and fall of world leaders. The burgeoning study of leaders using survival
analysis requires a fine-grained understanding of not just when, but why and how leaders lose power. We cannot, for
example, conclude that a leader’s exit implies a successful application of international pressure if her removal stems
from pre-set constitutional laws and the immediate successor has long been considered the heir apparent. The
Regular Turnover Details dataset remedies this problem. Two principal variables report information about the
manner of each leader’s exit and the relationship between outgoing and incoming leaders, allowing analysts to
arbitrate between exits that suggest political failure and those that don’t, identify non-political leaders (such as
interim and technocratic executives), and determine whether leaders constitute heirs to power or challengers thereto.
Keywords
comparative politics, data, domestic politics, international relations, leader survival
Introduction
The role of leaders’ incentives has grown in the litera-
tures on foreign policy, conflict, and cooperation. Bol-
stered considerably by theoretical models, we now focus
on elites’ desires to maintain their own power as a pivotal
driver of domestic and international politics (e.g. Wol-
ford, 2007). Goemans, Gleditsch & Chiozza’s (2009)
heroic data collection effort facilitated this shift towards
individual political incentives. Their Archigos v4.1 data-
set covers leaders of all independent states from 1875 to
2015. Availability of information on the entry and exit of
leaders allows researchers to create empirical designs
which closely mirror our theoretical arguments – focus-
ing on individual leaders’ incentives over the course of
their time in office rather than second-image factors, like
domestic institutions.
For most leader exits in the world, though, we have
only a very blunt answer to the question, ‘How did this
happen?’ Given the research interests of its principal
investigators, Archigos provides more details about
violent turnovers than the business-as-usual exits which
make up the bulk of empirical reality. Regular turnovers
constitute 80% of leader exits. Nuanced information
about such exits will improve researchers’ ability to mea-
sure the key concepts that permeate leader-based the-
ories: political destabilization or insulatio n by foreign
policy, politicians’ fears and insecurities, turnover-
induced uncertainty, and windows of opportunity for
policy and relationship changes. In most cases, analysts
need to know whether an exit is also a political failure.
The Regular Turnover Details dataset (RTD) facilitates
this determination for the 1,317 leader exits between
1960 and 2015 outside Archigos’s categories of foreign
and irregular removal. RTD features two key variables
that describe the means by which leaders exit and the
relationship between outgoing leaders and successors.
With these data in hand, analysts can make theoretically
Corresponding author:
alicht@binghamton.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2022, Vol. 59(2) 277–285
ªThe Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433211045854
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