Making Autocracy Work
نویسندگان
چکیده
One of the key goals of political economy is to understand how institutional arrangements shape policy outcomes. This paper studies a comparatively neglected aspect of this the forces that shape heterogeneous performance of autocracies. The paper develops a simple theoretical model of accountability in the absence of regularized elections. Leadership turnover is managed by a selectorate a group of individuals on whom the leader depends to hold onto power. Good policy is institutionalized when the selectorate removes poorly performing leaders from o¢ ce. This requires that the selectorates hold on power is not too dependent on a speci c leader being in o¢ ce. The paper looks empirically at spells of autocracy to establish cases where it has been successful according to various objective criteria. We use these case studies to identify the selectorate in speci c instances of successful autocracy. We also show that, consistent with the theory, leadership turnover in successful autocracies is higher than in unsuccessful autocracies. Finally, we show by exploiting leadership deaths from natural causes, that successful autocracies appear to have found ways for selectorates to nominate successors without losing power a feature which is also consistent with the theoretical approach. The rst author is grateful for support from CIFAR. The authors received much helpful feedback from members of the Institutions, Organizations and Growth program of CIFAR to which a preliminary version of this paper was presented. Useful comments from Madhav Aney, Fernando Aragon, Peter Evans, Gabriel Leon, Adam Przeworski, Konstantin Sonin, and Guido Tabellini are gratefully acknowledged.
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