Record Details

Replication Data for: In the Shadows of Great Men: Retired Leaders and Informal Power Constraints in Autocracies

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

View Archive Info
 
 
Field Value
 
Title Replication Data for: In the Shadows of Great Men: Retired Leaders and Informal Power Constraints in Autocracies
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FJIQQR
 
Creator Jiang, Junyan
Tianyang Xi
Haojun Xie
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Autocratic leaders differ considerably in the degree to which they consolidate power, but what gives rise to these variations still remains under-theorized. This article studies how informal political constraints associated with retired former leaders shape intra-elite power dynamics. We argue that aging leaders’ efforts to manage the succession problem create an important, yet impermanent, check on the power of subsequent leaders. To test this argument, we use the massive text corpus of Google Ngram to develop a new measure of power for a global sample of autocratic leaders and elites, and employ a research design that leverages within-incumbent variations in former leaders’ influence for identification. We show that incumbent leaders' ability to consolidate power becomes more limited when operating in an environment where influential former leaders are present. Further analyses suggest that the presence of former leaders is most effective in reducing incumbents’ ability to unilaterally appoint or remove high-level military and civilian personnel. These findings have implications for our understanding of the dynamics of power-sharing and institutional change in autocracies.
 
Subject Social Sciences
 
Date 2024-03-11
 
Contributor Jiang, Junyan