Leadership succession in politics: The democracy/autocracy divide revisited
| Author | Ludger Helms |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148120908528 |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120908528
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2020, Vol. 22(2) 328 –346
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148120908528
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Leadership succession in politics:
The democracy/autocracy divide
revisited
Ludger Helms
Abstract
Leadership succession marks a truly ubiquitous phenomenon with manifold and wide-ranging
implications, which explains the major attention that issues of succession have received in the
international literature. Most contributions to the field continue, however, to focus on political
succession in either democratic or non-democratic regimes. This article develops an integrated
perspective on key aspects of leadership succession at the level of political chief executives in
democracies and autocracies. A comparative assessment across time and space reveals several
features that challenge established notions, and stereotypes, of leadership succession in democratic
and autocratic regimes. The empirical ambivalences identified suggest that the way leaders come
to and fall from power should be made a more explicit part of conceptualisations of political
regimes, and comparative evaluations of their respective democratic quality.
Keywords
autocracy, democracy, dictators, leaders, presidents, prime ministers, succession
Introduction
No regime can avoid the challenges of leadership succession indefinitely. As Dankwart A.
Rustow (1964: 104) noted in his classic article, ‘the problem of political succession is
implicit in the human condition: it is posed by man’s mortality and frailty’. Political or
leadership succession (two terms that will be used interchangeably here) is, however, not
just an empirical phenomenon found across the globe. Given the very nature of politics,
issues of political succession tend to be ever-present, even in the absence of a recent or
pending succession.
Since Valerie Bunce’s (1976, 1980a, 1980b, 1981) seminal work on the impact of elite
succession on public policies, leadership succession has been studied as a dependent and
an independent variable. The possible effects of leadership change are obviously not con-
fined to the level of public policies or the political fate of individual leaders (although the
Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
Corresponding author:
Ludger Helms, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of
Innsbruck, Universitätsstraße 15, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria.
Email: ludger.helms@uibk.ac.at
908528BPI0010.1177/1369148120908528The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsHelms
research-article2020
Original Article
Helms 329
ways and means by which leaders come to power have been identified as a key factor
shaping their standing and performance in office, see Weller, 2014: 494). The politics of
leadership succession is of crucial importance to the development of political regimes
more generally. While smooth successions can increase the performance, legitimacy and
stability of a given regime, badly handled or failed successions can put a regime under
serious pressure and even trigger its very end. The latter is true in particular for leader-
centred and power-concentrating authoritarian regimes; indeed, bringing about a succes-
sion to long-standing charismatic leaders has been considered inherently problematic
ever since Max Weber famously introduced the concept of ‘charismatic authority’
(Hoffmann, 2009). Yet, even in many established democracies, which are committed to
routinising and ‘dedramatising’ political turnovers to the greatest possible extent, issues
of leadership succession have figured prominently.
This article looks into leadership succession at the level of political chief executives,
that is, presidents and prime ministers. As Paul ‘t Hart and John Uhr (2011c: 5) suggest,
while leadership succession is an ubiquitous phenomenon, succession at the top of the
executive branch is ‘the most dramatic succession of all’. The dramatic element that ‘t
Hart and Uhr refer to flows from the power usually resting in the hands of the political
chief executive. Indeed, largely irrespective of the different architectures of political sys-
tems, the political executive tends to be the relatively most powerful agent. While the
notion of ‘strong leaders’ in the sense of leaders who go it alone and get their way may
indeed be a myth (see Brown, 2014), the past decades have no doubt seen an increase in
the power of political chief executives, both within and beyond the executive branch (see
Peters et al., 2000; Peters and Helms, 2012; Poguntke and Webb, 2005).
Much work in the field has focused on how power changes hands in democratic
regimes (see, for example, Bynander and ‘t Hart, 2006, 2008; Helms, 2018; Horiuchi
et al., 2016; ‘t Hart, 2007; ‘t Hart and Uhr, 2011b; Worthy, 2016). More recently, this
work has come to be complemented by valuable comparative assessments of successions
in democratic politics and business (see, for example, Bynander and ‘t Hart, 2017; Farah
et al., 2019). This article seeks to make a distinctive contribution to the comparative study
of leadership succession by looking into the politics of succession in democratic and non-
democratic regimes, the latter of which have to date been overwhelmingly treated as a
separate species in the succession literature (see, for example, Ambrosio and Tolstrup,
2018; Brownlee, 2007; Egorov and Sonin, 2014, 2015; Frantz and Stein, 2012, 2017;
Kendall-Taylor and Frantz, 2016). The next sections address six key aspects of leadership
succession (relating to context, succession rules, and the roles and behaviour of incum-
bent leaders and would-be successors) from a comparative perspective. Before proceed-
ing to this, a brief note on the more general nature of democratic and non-democratic
regimes is in order.
The single most important difference between democratic and autocratic regimes, not
least in terms of the politics of succession, certainly concerns the question as to whether
those in power are vulnerable to electoral defeat. Scholars seeking to establish the ulti-
mate function of genuinely democratic elections have rightly argued that ‘if an election
does not make it possible to evict incumbent policymakers and bring another set of indi-
viduals to power, we would be reluctant to characterise the election as democratic’
(Powell, 2010: 228). It is in fact this more particular requirement that matters, not the act
of being elected into office in the first place. As Teorell and Lindberg remind us, histori-
cally even some kings, in the Holy Roman Empire and elsewhere, were elected (Teorell
and Lindberg, 2019: 68).
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