Elite Rivalry, Coalitions, and Violent Disruption in Authoritarian Regimes

Both authoritarian and autocratizing elites need to build and maintain support coalitions to survive. Elite coalition building is, therefore, key to understanding authoritarian politics and behavior. And yet our understanding of authoritarian coalition building is limited because evidence is scarce. For some regimes, we get a glimpse into the black box of elite politics; for others, we never do. I argue that Political Science should study elite coalitions in authoritarian regimes despite these difficulties. Much like archeologists, we should use a combination of theory and observation across cases to reconstruct the inner workings of elite coalitions in authoritarian regimes. Theories of elite coalition building in authoritarian regimes should both guide the evidence we seek and help evaluate the evidence we do uncover.This paper therefore aims to introduce a theory of violent and nonviolent coalition building in authoritarian and autocratizing regimes. The paper leverages available qualitative evidence to establish how elites build and manage coalitions. It also examines how authoritarian elites adopt violent disruption strategies, such as mass atrocity, deportation, and war, to personalize the security services, build armed support coalitions, and sideline rivals. The resulting theory aims to establish on how elites build and manage coalitions. A fundamental assumption is that elites act in ways that strengthen their own coalitions or weaken those of rivals. The theory posits that this can be achieved through disruptive conflict—such as mass atrocity, deportations, or war. In turn, elites enter into disruptive conflict in expectation of changes of their relative position versus other elites. The theory therefore considers elite coalition building as both a cause for the occurrence of violent conflict and its effect. The theory aims to both contribute to our understanding of authoritarian politics and provide a plausible explanation for why and how authoritarian elites resort to violence—even when it is seemingly against their wider interests. It suggests that elite coalition building can explain a wide range of violent authoritarian behavior such as Trump’s forced deportations of migrants, Putin’s war in Ukraine, Mohammad Bin Salman’s intervention in Yemen, Min Aung Hlain’s atrocities against the Rohingya, and Xi’s atrocities against the Uyghur.