The political economy of ending tyranny: will the Middle East uprisings succeed?

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Column

LONGSTANDING Arab autocracies are collapsing like overcooked souffles. What will happen in those countries next?

The collapse of authoritarian regimes is not all that unusual. Between 1945 and 2002, 316 authoritarian leaders across the globe fell from power through nonconstitutional means, according to a 2009 study in the American Journal of Political Science by the University of Illinois political scientist Milan Svolik. "Nonconstitutional means" include any exits that were not the result of natural death or a constitutionally mandated process, such as an election, a vote by a ruling body, or a hereditary succession.

Of the 303 despots for whom Svolik could unambiguously ascertain how they lost political power, 32 were removed by a popular uprising. Another 30 left under public pressure to democratize. Twenty were taken out by assassins, and only 16 were removed by foreign intervention. The remaining 205 were ousted by coups d'etat.

Svolik develops a model of dictatorship in which autocrats achieve power initially as the first among equals in a ruling coalition. Constant jockeying for access to resources and authority gives new dictators an incentive to reward loyalists and to weaken members of the coalition who might challenge them. About two-thirds of the time, according to Svolik's data, this process of power consolidation provokes a successful coup d'etat.

The longer a dictator rules, the more secure his power. Among tyrants who ruled for less than to years, 162 were removed by coups while only 31 died of natural causes while in power. By contrast, among despots who ruled for 10 years or more, only 41 were removed by coup while 45 died of natural causes while in power.

Svolik also found that the tenure of military dictators averages a bit over four years, while single-party and "personalist" dictators average about It years in power. Personalist dictators are despots who destroy pre-existing social and political institutions; as a result, they eliminate rival centers of power where would-be opponents might organize and plot. A case in point is Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi, who undermined the army that brought him to power. Instead he created institutions that were directly dependent on the dictator and his family for resources. The Khamis brigade, for example, is a special military unit created and run by Qaddafi's son Khamis. Similarly, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ruthlessly purged his regime of both real and imagined enemies, so...