Playing the Sycophant Card: The Logic and Consequences of Professing Loyalty to the Autocrat

Authoritarian elites must show loyalty to the ruler to survive. However, some officials, taking take flattering and praising of the autocrat to the extreme and, become sycophants. Why do some elites ‘play the sycophant card’ more feverishly than others, and does such a strategy pay off? We propose that sycophantic sycophancy behavior is a strategicstrategy, primarily performed driven by more vulnerable, whether temporarily or structurally, elites, and that it dictators are likely is to reward ited. Using semi-supervised text analysis and an original dataset of almost 1000 annual legislative addresses of Russian governors, we offer a first-ever systematic test of sycophancy in a dictatorship,distinguish outright sycophancy from opinion conformity, and analyze analyzing when elites "overpraise" the ruler and imitate his rhetoric. We find that politically and economically vulnerable governors and those without alternative career paths behave more like sycophantssycophantic, and we show that such elites also survive in office longer. Our results have important implications for how ‘yes-men’-cultures and personality cults develop and how dictators navigate the loyalty-competence tradeoff.