A political umbrella to authoritarianism? Multi-party elections and leadership dynamics in personalist dictatorships

This paper examines the role of multi-party elections in leader exit in personalist dictatorships. Personalist regimes where power is concentrated on a dictator on which a narrower group centered and legitimation strategies are configured not to tie a large group of people to the regime elite increase the risk of rulers to be ousted from office by actors outside the ruling coalition. Existing research confirms that multi-party elections have more potential to contribute to the stability of authoritarian regimes. Authoritarian elections help the regime incumbents identify opposition strongholds, and provide key opposition forces with legislative representation of autonomous political parties that make more likely generating policy outcomes that cater to their preferences. Thus, the function of such types of institutions is to co-opt opposition groups and buy social peace. This paper, however, argues that a multi-party election fails to elicit cooperation of outsiders but instead increases the risk of leader exits from office through outsider’s extra-institutional actions. At least three causal mechanisms might explain the alleged link between multi-party elections and such forms of risk. The first might be called the “legitimacy-shifting effect.” Multi-party elections lead the shift of legitimation claim from phrasing a personality cult to acting on popular will, it is expected that electoral personalist dictatorships, compared to their counterparts where elections are banned, increase the probability of leader exit through outsider’s rebellion in time of poor governance. The second mechanism might be the “self-destructive effect.” The incumbent party attempts to win the vast majority of seats in legislature through media control or electoral fraud, thus reducing the possibility that the dictator ties outsiders to the regime elites through an increase in their legislative representation. It raises the risk of a removal by regime outsiders. A third possible cause might be called the “trade-off effect.” Multi-party elections increase the dictator’s willingness to reduce control over the justice system for attracting popular attention and support. An independent judiciary, however, reduces a cost for the ruler’s punishment of those who participated in a failed rebellion. It thus increases the outsider’s mobilization of the civilian population against the incumbents. This study confirms these expectations using data on dictatorships between 1945 and 2022, proposing the competing risk framework of leader exits, combining competing risk survival analysis and qualitative comparative analysis.