Trajectories of Authoritarian Consolidation

How do dictators amass personal control to become autocrats? In particular, how do seemingly weak leaders dismantle established power structures to create a centralised authority under their control? My book project, Trajectories of Consolidation explores tactics used by dictators to undercut elite constraints and ultimately concentrate power under their own control. According leading explanations for the emergence of personalist leaders, the success of leaders in consolidating power is a result of the failure of elites to constrain and stop them, ignoring the leader’s strategic choices. Relying on these explanations would suggest that a leader’s unexpected ascent is a product of luck and negligence by his competitors.

But dictators play chess, not blackjack. While there is no doubt that luck has some hand in the murky world of dictatorships, leaders also must continuously wrestle with the strategic puzzle inherent in trying to wrest power from strong elites. The framework proposed in my dissertation suggests an alternative mechanism: rather than being the failure of elites, the successful consolidation of leaders is possible due to a gradual strategy of piecemeal power seizures. As when seeking a checkmate in chess, consolidation of power requires a sequence of strategic moves to achieve one’s goal. Each move serves an immediate purpose and also opens up new strategies. Whether a dictator is carefully advancing his position or merely capitalising on a lucky break, in all cases he is acting in the moment in order to make new and more potent strategic moves available in the future, always trying to enable the final checkmate.

According leading explanations for the emergence of personalist leaders, the success of leaders in consolidating power is a result of the failure of elites to constrain and stop them. However, this fails to account for the emergence of authoritarian leaders even in the face of established power structures and strong elites, and ignores the strategic choices of leaders. I propose an alternative mechanism: rather than being the failure of elites, the successful consolidation of leaders is possible due to a gradual strategy of piecemeal power seizures, a process which I term the logic of strategic path dependence. Dictators utilise sequential strategies, each furthering immediate aims while enabling potent future moves, akin to advancing towards a checkmate in chess. To show evidence of strategic path dependence, I develop a framework of three main strategies of consolidation used by leaders to accumulate and create a novel dataset of 386 authoritarian leaders and their use of consolidation over the time period of 1946 to 2004. Using a Markov transition model, my analysis reveals obvious path dependence between strategies used by leaders, more than can be attributed solely to external contextual factors.