Since the end of the Cold War, the number of personalist dictatorships – defined as those regimes where political power is highly concentrated in the hands of a single individual – has steadily increased. Today around 40 percent of all autocracies are ruled by personalist strongmen. Though researchers recognize the importance of personalism, we know very little about when dictators purge potential rivals from the regime and successfully promote the accumulation of power. Researchers' ability to examine the causes and process of the personalization has been limited by a lack of systematic data that identifies leaders' actions to eliminate their competitors from power. This project aims to fill this important gap by collecting a systematic dataset on purges of civilian elites from the ruling political party, the cabinet, the judiciary, and the
bureaucracy in autocracies for the period 1990-2005. The systematic analyses using a newly collected data on civilian elite purges will allow us to gain a better understanding of when and how dictators take steps to consolidate power.
