Do Juntas Lead to Personal Rule?

January 2009Although almost half of the world™s population lives under nondemocratic regimes, thequestions of how policy decisions are made and how power changes hands in nondemocra-cies have received relatively little attention in the political economy literature. A popularview, forcefully articulated by Gordon Tullock (1987), is that because there are no stronginstitutions ensuring consensus and regulating the election and succession of leaders, non-democratic regimes rapidly degenerate into personal rule, where a single dictator dominatesevery aspect of decision-making. Tullock writes: fiEmpirically the Junta characteristicallyshrinks to one man...fl(p. 144) and continues to explain this as the result of dynamic in-teractions among the members of the junta. He suggests that there will typically be anaccumulation of power by one of the junta members. If this upstart member succeeds, hebecomes the sole ruler. If he fails, he is eliminated by the other members of the junta.This process continues until one member is standing. Tullock thus concludes: fiIt can beseen that this process would tend over time to lead the junta into becoming just one manthrough the gradual exclusion of individuals who had failed in plotting or the success of anindividual who had not.fl(p. 145)Tullock™s account, like that of many others, implicitly recognizes that politics in non-democratic and weakly-institutionalized societies should be conceptualized as one of thedynamic coalition formationS there are no rules that ensure orderly transitions of powerand no checks against some members of the ruling coalition eliminating or sidelining others.However, formal models of dynamic coalition formation in nondemocratic societies have notbeen developed until recently.In this paper, we draw on our work on dynamic coalition formation (Daron Acemoglu,Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin, 2008a) and investigate Tullock™s conjecture formally.1