Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-frp75 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T19:51:41.530Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The latent characteristics that structure autocratic rule

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2019

Joseph Wright
Joseph Wright*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: josephgwright@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Research on autocratic regimes in comparative politics and international relations often uses categorical typologies of autocratic regimes to distinguish among different forms of autocracy. This paper introduces historical data on dozens of features of dictatorships to estimate latent dimensions of autocratic rule. We identify three time-varying dimensions of autocracy that correspond to ideal types proposed in the literature: party dominance, military rule, and personalism. We show that dimensions of autocratic rule are orthogonal to commonly-used measures of democracy–autocracy, and compare these dimensions to existing typologies of autocracies, showing that time-varying information on personalism is unique. We discuss a measurement model of personalism and illustrate the time-varying features of this measure in applied research on conflict initiation and regime collapse.

Keywords

Comparative politics: developing countriesInternational Relations

Information

Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Brooker, P (1995) Twentieth-Century Dictatorships: The Ideological One-Party States. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Brooker, P (1997) Defiant Dictatorships: Communist and Middle Eastern Dictatorships in a Democratic Age. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooker, P (2000) Non-Democratic Regimes: Theory, Government and Politics. New York: St. Martin's Press.Google Scholar
Chehabi, HE and Linz, JJ (1998) Sultanistic Regimes. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Cheibub, JA, Gandhi, J and Vreeland, JR (2010) Democracy and dictatorship revisited. Public Choice 143, 67–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clapham, C (1988) Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Colgan, JD (2013) Domestic revolutionary leaders and international conflict. World Politics 65, 656–690.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diamond, LJ (2002) Thinking about hybrid regimes. Journal of democracy 13, 21–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erlich, H (1983) The Ethiopian army and the 1974 revolution. Armed Forces and Society 9, 455–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Escribà-Folch, A (2013) Accountable for what? Regime types, performance, and the fate of outgoing dictators, 1946–2004. Democratization 20, 160–185.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Escribà-Folch, A and Wright, J (2015) Foreign Pressure and the Politics of Autocratic Survival. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fitzpatrick, S (2015) On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gandhi, J (2008) Political Institutions under Dictatorship. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geddes, B (1999) What do we know about democratization after twenty years?. Annual Review of Political Science 2, 115–144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geddes, B (2003) Paradigms and Sand Castles. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geddes, B, Wright, J and Frantz, E (2014) New data set: autocratic breakdown and regime transitions. Perspectives on Politics 12, 313–331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geddes, B, Wright, J and Frantz, E (2018) How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalism, and Collapse. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goemans, HE, Gleditsch, KS and Chiozza, G (2009) Introducing archigos: a dataset of political leaders. Journal of Peace research 46, 269–283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hadenius, A and Teorell, J (2007) Pathways from authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy 18, 143–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haile-Selassie, T (1997) The Ethiopian Revolution, 1974–1991: From a Monarchical Autocracy to a Military Oligarchy. London: Kegan Paul International.Google Scholar
Huntington, SP (1968) Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Huntington, SP (1991) How countries democratize. Political Science Quarterly 106, 579–616.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Israel, J (1974) The red guards in historical perspective: continuity and change in the Chinese youth movement. In Cohen, LJ and Shapiro, JP (eds), Communist Systems in Comparative Perspective. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, pp. 400–426.Google Scholar
Janowitz, M (1960) The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Karl, TL (1995) The hybrid regimes of central America. Journal of Democracy 6, 72–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kenwick, M (2017) Is civilian control self-reinforcing? a measurement based analysis of civil-military relations. Working paper Available At http://bit.ly/2xsOXJ6 (Accessed 10 November 2017).Google Scholar
Klein, DW and Hager, LB (1974) The ninth central committee. In Cohen, LJ and Shapiro, JP (eds), Communist Systems in Comparative Perspective. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, pp. 222–243.Google Scholar
Levitsky, S and Way, LA (2010) Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levitsky, S and Way, L (2013) The durability of revolutionary regimes. Journal of Democracy 24, 5–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, PH (1978) Salazar's ministerial elite, 1932–1968. The Journal of Politics 40, 622–647.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linz, JJ (2000) Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. Boulder: Lynne Reinner Publishers.Google Scholar
Magee, CSP and Doces, JA (2015) Reconsidering regime type and growth: lies, dictatorships, and statistics. International Studies Quarterly 59, 223–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, AD and Quinn, KM (2002) Dynamic ideal point estimation via Markov chain Monte Carlo for the US supreme court, 1953–1999. Political Analysis 10, 134–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgenbesser, L (2017) Misclassification on the Mekong: the origins of Hun Sen's personalist dictatorship. Democratization 25, 1–18.Google Scholar
Nordlinger, E (1977) Soldiers in Politics: Military Coups and Governments. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
North, DC (1990) Institutions, institutional change and economic performance.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pemstein, D, Meserve, SA and Melton, J (2010) Democratic compromise: a latent variable analysis of ten measures of regime type. Political Analysis 18, 426–449.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ristaino, MR (1987) Chapter 10 – party and government. In Worden RL, Savada AM and Dolan R (eds), China: A Country Study. Washington, DC: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, pp. 407–442. Available At http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cntoc.html (Accessed 11 August 2014).Google Scholar
Robinson, TW (1972) Lin Piao as an elite type. In Scalapino, RA (ed). Elites in the People's Republic of China. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 149–195.Google Scholar
Scalapino, RA (1972) The transition in Chinese party leadership: a comparison of the eighth and ninth central committees. In Scalapino, RA (ed). Elites in the People's Republic of China. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 67–148.Google Scholar
Schedler, A (2009) Electoral Authoritarianism. In Landman, Todd and Robinson, Neil (eds). The SAGE Handbook of Comparative Politics. London, pp. 381–394, http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9780857021083.n21.Google Scholar
Schnakenberg, KE and Fariss, CJ (2014) Dynamic patterns of human rights practices. Political Science Research and Methods 2, 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shinn, R-S and Worden, R (1987) Chapter 1 – historical setting. In Worden, RL, Savada, AM and Dolan, R (eds). China: A Country Study. Washington, DC: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, pp. 1–58, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cntoc.html.Google Scholar
Song, W and Wright, J (2018) The North Korean autocracy in comparative perspective. Journal of East Asian Studies 18, 157–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Svolik, MW (2012) The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Treier, S and Jackman, S (2008) Democracy as a latent variable. American Journal of Political Science 52, 201–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, M (1964) The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Weeks, JL (2008) Autocratic audience costs: regime type and signaling resolve. International Organization 62, 35–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weeks, JL (2012) Strongmen and Straw Men: authoritarian regimes and the initiation of international conflict. American Political Science Review 106, 326–347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weeks, JLP (2014) Dictators at War and Peace. New York: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, MC (2014) A discreet critique of discrete regime type data. Comparative Political Studies 47, 689–714.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, MC and Piazza, JA (2013) Autocracies and terrorism: conditioning effects of authoritarian regime type on terrorist attacks. American Journal of Political Science 57, 941–955.Google Scholar
Wintrobe, R (1990) The tinpot and the totalitarian: an economic theory of dictatorship. American Political Science Review 83, 849–872.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, J (2009) How foreign aid can foster democratization in authoritarian regimes. American Journal of Political Science 53, 552–571.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Wright Dataset

Dataset

https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/3BC21O
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Wright supplementary material

Wright supplementary material

Download Wright supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 18.2 MB