Dictator's Endgame. Theory and empirical analysis of military behavior in authoritarian regime crises, 1946-2014

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Aurel Croissant; Dr. David Kühn
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 279352037

This project aims to analyze the role of the military during episodes of peaceful mass mobilization in non-democratic regimes. It aims to answer two questions: (1) When does the military defend the dictator against the mobilizing masses and when does it defect from the regime coalition? (2) How can different forms of defection be explained, i.e., when and why do military leaders side with the opposition, and when do they stage a coup d'etat, respectively? In order to answer these questions, we advance the concept of dictator's endgame, and develop a game-theoretic model that explains the outcome of authoritarian regime crises as the result of strategic bargaining between the dictator, the military leadership and the opposition over the distribution of material and political privileges. We test the model's explanatory power through a mixed methods approach that systematically combines statistical analyses and process tracing case studies. At the core of the empirical analysis rests an original quantitative dataset on all instances of mass mobilizations in non-democratic regimes worldwide between 1946 and 2014. Publication goals are three peer-reviewed articles in A-ranked international journals and an English-language monograph. All original data will be made publicly available after the end of the project period. As of now, there is no comparable study that combines deductive theoretical modeling and a multi-method empirical analysis of all instances of mass mobilization in autocratic regimes. The project, therefore, promises to deliver innovative theoretical and empirical contributions to four areas of political research: the study of non-democratic regimes, democratization research, research on civil-military relations, and the study of contentious politics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants