Are There Really Dictatorships?

Selectorate theory explains variation in political leaders’ tenure in office. More specifically, it explains why leaders who produce “good” policies stay in office for short periods of time while leaders who deliver “bad” policy can hold on to power for decades. This chapter presents an overview of selectorate theory, discusses the political institutions that lie at the center of it, including the selectorate and the winning coalition, and elaborates on the place that authoritarian governance has in it. In particular, the chapter uses selectorate theory to analyze autocracies and explains why autocratic leaders implement different sets of policies to obtain and keep the political support necessary to maximize tenure in office.

Analyzing the political survival prospects of Kim Jong-un's North Korean regime through the framework of selectorate theory

The political survival of Kim Jong-un's regime in North Korea has been a major international concern since his accession in 2012. While international research has endeavored to diagnose the stability of the regime based on its limitations and weaknesses due to political, economic, and international factors, studies based on baseline theoretical models of leadership stability have rarely been undertaken. This paper employs selectorate theory to address this issue, by identifying the selectorate and winning coalition in North Korea and illustrating their relationships with Kim Jong-un's political survival. To reexamine the analytical framework and results, this study has undertaken in-depth interviews with high-level North Korean defectors who have served in key power apparatuses of Kim Jong-il and/or Kim Jong-un's regime. It analyzes how frequent co-optation of top aides, economic ideologies, and policies are utilized for political survival. It further explains the correlation of his political survival with the party-dependent bureaucracy, internal reign of terror, development of nuclear capacity, and continuous military provocations. However, as the regime further intensifies the reign of terror, the possibility of acoup d’étatby the selectorate and coalition cannot be completely ruled out.

Use of Force in Foreign Policy

Foreign policy analysis has been used effectively to explain the use of force. Several leading approaches and paradigms help explain the use of force as a tool of foreign policy. These approaches are based on the important preliminary step of opening up the black box of state, which highlights the importance of decision making for explaining international politics. The two primary approaches to explaining foreign policy analysis are rational choice theory and psychological theories. Foreign policy analysis opens the door to a variety of novel and interesting topics. Many topics of domestic politics relate to international conflict, including democratic peace theory, selectorate theory, public opinion, domestic institutions, and leaders. Each of these topics is important for explaining the use of force in foreign policy. Future research on the use of force and international conflict should account for the importance of domestic politics. Studies of leaders, selectorate theory, and the bargaining model of war provide especially promising avenues for future research.

The Selectorate Theory and International Politics

The Selectorate Theory is based upon one simple, perhaps even commonplace assumption: Once in office, leaders want to remain in office. They have a variety of tools to enhance their longevity in office, but the theory hypothesizes the leader’s allocation of two types of goods will be paramount in their efforts. One good is private, meaning that it is enjoyed by those to whom it is allocated and not to others. Such goods would include money, jobs, opportunities for corruption, but their hallmark is that they are not shared. These goods may be given to one individual or to a group, but they are not shared outside those to whom they are given. The second type of good is public and is shared by all those in the state. These goods would include potable water, clean air, education, and, importantly, national defense. There is little unique about the Selectorate Theory’s understanding of these goods, as they approximate ideas from economics. The importance and values of these two goods depend critically on the political institutions of the state. The Selectorate Theory identifies two political institutions of dominant importance: The Selectorate, from which it takes its name; and the Winning Coalition. The former consists of all those people who have a role in selecting the state’s leader. This group may be large, as in the electorate in democratic states, or small, as in the case of an extended family or a junta. In unusual circumstances it can even be a group outside the state, as when a foreign government either imposes or influences choices made inside the state. The winning coalition may be large, but not larger than the selectorate, or it may be as small as an extended family or a junta, groups that essentially constitute the selectorate. Variations in these two institutions can have important consequences for how the state conducts its foreign policy. For example, leaders in states with small winning coalitions should be able to take greater risks in their policies because if these fail, they will be able to mobilize and distribute private goods to reinforce their position. If these goods are not readily available, it is possible to purge non-critical supporters and redistribute their goods to others. These institutions are also important in identifying the kinds of issues over which states are more or less likely to enter into conflict. States with small winning coalitions are more likely to enter into disputes over things that can be redistributed to supporters, such as land or resources. Large winning coalitions will have little use for such goods, since the ratio of coalition size and goods to be distributed is likely to be exiguous. The Selectorate Theory also provides a firm analysis of the foundations for the idea of the Democratic Peace, which has been generally either lacking or imprecise. Despite its clarity, some interpretations of the Selectorate Theory have led to mistaken inferences about what it says. We discuss several of these and close with a consideration of the need for improvement in the measurement of key variables.

Selectorate Theory in Hybrid Regimes: Comparing Hong Kong and Singapore

This article investigates public and private goods provision in two hybrid regimes: Hong Kong and Singapore. We build on the selectorate theory, which analyses all regimes in terms of the size of their leaders’ support coalitions. This research follows a differences-in-differences design, with the exogenous political change in Hong Kong in 1997 as a treatment and Singapore as a control case. This study contributes to the literature in two ways. First, as the aim of the selectorate theory is to transcend traditional regime typologies, a focus on hybrid regimes provides another test of the theory beyond the democratic–authoritarian divide. Second, the distinctive comparative set-up allows us to disentangle the effects of the size of the winning coalition from those of supporter loyalty. The empirical results demonstrate that whilst public goods increase with the winning coalition size, private goods provision is not affected unless accompanied by a change in supporter loyalty.

Issues, leaders, and regimes: reaching settlement in Northern Ireland

How do actors settle contentious territorial issues – particularly the delimitation of their mutual borders? This chapter uses interview data to examine this broad question within the context of Northern Ireland. The issue-based approach to conflict suggests that states handle territorial disputes via more aggressive foreign policies than disputes over non-territorial issues. This perspective therefore predicts protracted negotiations and violence in Northern Ireland, but Irish nationalists redefined the territorial basis of the conflict to allow a peace agreement to emerge. Selectorate theory predicts that leaders will be constrained in negotiations by what their constituencies want. The interview data in this chapter suggests that political elites negotiating the Agreement were very conscious of the need to both lead and follow their constituencies in the peace process.

Political Succession

In addition to everyday political threats, leaders risk removal from office through coups and mass movements such as rebellion. Further, all leaders face threats from shocks such as downturns in their health, their country’s economy, or their government’s revenue. By integrating these risks into the selectorate theory, we characterize the conditions under which each threat is pertinent and the countermoves (purges, democratization, expansion of public goods, and expansion of private benefits) that best enable the leader to survive in office. The model identifies new insights into the nature of assassins; the relative risk of different types of leader removal as a function of the extant institutions of government; and the endogenous factors driving better or worse public policy and decisions to democratize or become more autocratic. Importantly, the results highlight how an increase in the risk of deposition via one means intensifies other removal risks.

Coalition Formation and Selectorate Theory: An Experiment

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to examine how different rules for re-selecting the leader of a group affects how that leader builds a winning coalition. Leaders play an inter-group game and then distribute winnings from that game within their group before standing for re-selection. The results of the experiment show that leaders of groups with large winning coalition systems rely heavily on distributing winnings through public goods, while leaders of groups with small winning coalition systems are more likely to target specific citizens with private goods. Furthermore, the experiment shows that supporters of small coalition leaders benefit from that support in future rounds by receiving more private goods than citizens that did not support the leader. Meanwhile, citizens that support a large coalition leader do not benefit from this support in future rounds. Therefore, small coalition leaders target individual citizens to maintain a coalition over time in a way not possible in a group with a large winning coalition. Finally, in the experiment, small coalition leaders increased their payoffs over time, suggesting that once power has been consolidated, small coalition leaders narrow their coalition.