Guilty by association: patrons, purges, and promotions under personalism

Mounting scholarship grapples with the causes and consequences of power personalization in autocracies. Prominent research suggests that as the personalist dictator amasses power, he tends to repress potential rivals from his inner circle to stave off mortal threats to his rule. Because military supporters of fallen elites are considered especially menacing to the dictator, they should be more susceptible to a similar fate than other officers, but little empirical work systematically studies authoritarian purges of secondary targets in the military. Drawing on monthly data from 1955–1976 on the leaders of the regional commands of the People's Liberation Army, I find China's regional military leaders hailing from patronage networks of disgraced top civilian and military leaders at the center were more likely to be purged or otherwise experienced more adverse career outcomes than their counterparts without such tainted associations amidst the consolidation and culmination of Mao's personalist rule.