Suchergebnisse

Personalist autocracy is on the rise globally. Dictators' increasing tendency to concentrate power in their own hands has major implications for the political stability of autocracies. However, the exact nature of this impact is unclear. On the one hand, regime personalization has been linked to a reduction in the likelihood of coups. On the other hand, personalization has also been linked to an increase in the likelihood of civil war. This article reconciles these findings and argues that personalization involves a trade-off between different kinds of threats against a dictator. By increasing the degree of personalization, dictators reduce their vulnerability to insider challenges while at the same time increasing their vulnerability to outsider challenges. These expectations are corroborated by a time-series cross-sectional analysis of a global sample of autocratic regimes. The findings help shed light on recent instances of longstanding autocrats being overthrown during episodes of mass mobilization.

Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright og Erica Frantz, How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse, Cambridge University Press, 2018 (anmeldt af Alexander Taaning Grundholm)

This paper investigates to what extent and under what conditions democracy and state capacity affect human development. We argue that democratic institutions provide leaders with incentives for improving human development, whereas capable state apparatuses enable them to do so. Accordingly, we argue that the two factors reinforce the effects of each other and that the highest levels of human development are achieved when high levels of both factors are present. Our argument contradicts earlier studies, which have claimed that the effects of the two factors crowd out one another. We investigate the proposition through time-series cross-sectional analyses, employing new and improved measures of both democracy and state capacity. These new measures not only give our analysis an advantage in terms of measurement validity; they also substantially increase its temporal scope compared to previous studies. Consequently, we analyze a global sample of countries spanning the period 1902–2008. The results provide strong support for our theoretical expectations, and they are robust to both alternative measures and different model specifications. Our results highlight the importance of building capable state structures and democracy in conjunction and have significant implications for scholars and practitioners of development policy.