Working Paper: NBER ID: w20216
Authors: Patrick Francois; Ilia Rainer; Francesco Trebbi
Abstract: We posit the problem of an autocrat who has to allocate access to the executive positions in his inner circle and define the career profile of his own insiders. Statically, granting access to an executive post to a more experienced subordinate increases political returns to the post, but is more threatening to the leader in case of a coup. Dynamically, the leader monitors the capacity of staging a coup by his subordinates, which grows over time, and the incentives of trading a subordinate's own position for a potential shot at the leadership, which defines the incentives of staging a palace coup for each member of the inner circle. We map these theoretical elements into structurally estimable hazard functions of terminations of cabinet ministers for a panel of postcolonial Sub-Saharan African countries. The hazard functions initially increase over time, indicating that most government insiders quickly wear out their welcome, and then drop once the minister is fully entrenched in the current regime. We argue that the survival concerns of the leader in granting access to his inner circle can cover much ground in explaining the widespread lack of competence of African governments and the vast heterogeneity of political performance between and within these regimes.
Keywords: autocracy; political survival; cabinet ministers; Sub-Saharan Africa
JEL Codes: H11; P16; P48
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| leader experience (M54) | ministerial selection (D79) |
| time spent in office (J29) | minister survival risk (H12) |
| leader experience (M54) | minister survival risk (H12) |
| dynamic interplay (C69) | non-monotonic hazard function (C41) |