How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse

This accessible volume shines a light on how autocracy really works by providing basic facts about how post-World War II dictatorships achieve, retain, and lose power. The authors present an evidence-based portrait of key features of the authoritarian landscape with newly collected data about 200 dictatorial regimes. They examine the central political processes that shape the policy choices of dictatorships and how they compel reaction from policy makers in the rest of the world. Importantly, this book explains how some dictators concentrate great power in their own hands at the expense of other members of the dictatorial elite. Dictators who can monopolize decision making in their countries cause much of the erratic, warlike behavior that disturbs the rest of the world. By providing a picture of the central processes common to dictatorships, this book puts the experience of specific countries in perspective, leading to an informed understanding of events and the likely outcome of foreign responses to autocracies.

Barbara Geddes is a professor of Political Science at University of California, Los Angeles. Her 1999 article in the Annual Review of Political Science is credited with changing the way social scientists think about dictatorships. She developed the theoretical reasons for using characteristics of the group that established the dictatorship as the basis for explaining dictatorial decisions and began the first systematic collection of data about these groups and the dictatorships they initiated. She has written extensively on regime transition and dictatorship, as well as research design in comparative politics.

Joseph Wright is an associate professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University and co-director of the Global and International Studies Program. He has written extensively on how international factors, such as foreign aid, economic sanctions, human rights prosecutions, and migration, influence domestic politics in dictatorships. He is the author of multiple articles on these themes published in a variety of political science journals, as well as the award-winning book (with Abel Escriba-Folch) Foreign Pressure and the Politics of Autocratic Survival (2015).

Erica Frantz is an assistant professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. She specializes in authoritarian politics, democratization, conflict, and development. She is particularly interested in communicating the security and policy implications of autocratic rule and regularly interfaces with the policy community. Her work has appeared in multiple academic journals and a variety of policy-oriented outlets. She has also published five books on dictatorships and development, the most recent of which is Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know (forthcoming).