Executive constraints and incumbent takeovers

Abstract This paper provides a systematic study of how judicial and legislative constraints on the executive safeguard against incumbent-driven regime transitions and argues that the relationship, across the regime-type spectrum, should take the shape of an inverted U. The basic argument is based on opportunity and incentive. In regimes with high levels of constraints, incumbents are inhibited by their institutions from taking over, whereas incumbents in regimes with very low levels of constraints provide no incentive for such moves. However, in regimes with medium levels of constraints, the constraining institutions restrict the incumbent enough to incentivize takeover whilst remaining insufficient to curtail them. This relationship is examined using newly available data on incumbent-induced breakdown, spanning over 2,000 regimes. Different operationalizations of the dependent variable are employed to sufficiently account for the incremental nature of incumbent takeovers. A series of TSCS Logit and LPM models find consistent and largely robust support for the hypothesis.