The Origins of Elected Strongmen

Since the end of World War II, democracies typically fell apart by coup d'état or through force. Today, however, they are increasingly eroding at the hands of democratically elected incumbents, who seize control by slowly chipping away at democratic institutions. To better understand these developments, this book examines the role of personalist political parties, or parties that exist primarily to further their leader's career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform. Using original data capturing levels of personalism in the parties of democratically elected leaders from 1991 to 2020, The Origins of Elected Strongmen shows that the rise of personalist parties around the globe is facilitating the decline of democracy. Personalist parties lack both the incentive and capacity to push back against a leader's efforts to expand executive power. As such, leaders backed by personalist parties are more likely to succeed in their efforts to dismantle institutional constraints on their rule. Such attacks on state institutions, in turn, reverberate throughout society, deepening political polarization and weakening supporters' commitment to democratic norms of behaviour. In these ways, ruling party personalism erodes horizontal and vertical constraints on a leader, ultimately degrading democracy and raising the risk of democratic failure.

Erica Frantz is an associate professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. She specializes in authoritarian politics and the dynamics of political change. She has published seven books, 17 journal articles, and a wide array of policy reports and op-ed pieces. Andrea Kendall-Taylor is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. She works on national security challenges facing the United States and Europe, focusing on threats to democracy, Russia, and the state of the Transatlantic alliance. Joseph Wright is a professor of Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University. His research examines how global and international forces shape the prospects of democratization. This research has received external funding from numerous sources, including the National Science Foundation, the Minerva Research Initiative, and private foundations.

- 1: Introduction - 2: What are Personalist Parties? - 3: The Argument - 4: The Evidence - 5: Institutional Pathways - 6: Societal Pathways - 7: Personalist Politics, Democracy, and the Path Ahead - Bibliography