“I Leave in Peace: Autocratic Elections and Negotiated Regime Transitions” (manuscript)
Abstract: Do elections undermine or stabilize autocratic regimes? This paper distinguishes between negotiated and forced transitions and posits that autocratic elections make dictators and challengers more likely to negotiate a deal for peaceful regime change. Elections reveal information about regime strength, which aligns power contenders’ expectations about conflict outcomes and conduces to their bargaining rather than violent conflict. However, strong ruling parties weaken this informational effect of elections because the party shapes all players’ expectations about incumbent strength, leaving less room for elections to yield information. Using two-way fixed effects and instrumental variable models, this paper examines regime transitions in 261 autocracies from 1955 to 2010 with a long regime-month panel data. It introduces a new global Dataset of Autocratic Election Schedules (DAES) and a novel measure of autocratic party strength. Findings suggest that negotiated transitions are more likely to occur in autocracies with recent national elections than in those without, but this negotiation effect only holds for regimes with either no support party or a weak one. This paper demonstrates the distinct logics of negotiated and forced transitions with implications for understanding how and when elections can produce peaceful regime change.
Presented at APSA 2019, PEDD 2020, MWEPS V in 2020, and SPSA 2021.
Marginal Effects of Elections on Negotiated Transitions