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Abstract /
This paper takes a closer look at those authoritarian political regimes with a leader holding absolute power referred to as either 'personalist' or 'neo-patrimonial regimes. In the literature, these regimes have been set apart since they exhibit a different behavior than their counterparts that are not under personal rule. This paper proposes another approach and aims to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of such regimes not being treated as a separate type, but analyzed with regard to their personalist element as a characteristic that can be present in various autocratic types. Firstly, this paper gives an overview of the characteristics of personalism and the dynamics by which autocrats acquire such amounts of personal power. Secondly, to provide data for the question at hand, the author links medium-N quantitative datasets of regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa (1972-2010). By linking insights from Hadenius & Teorell, Bueno de Mesquita, Geddes and many other prominent scholars who have contributed to political regime theory, the author investigates the various sources of personalist regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa in order to answer the research question.
Keywords /
dictatorship, personal rule, personalist regimes, political regimes, Sub-Saharan Africa
Introduction
The personalist regime is the most stereotypical form of dictatorship. The term raises associations of absolute power in the hands of one man, surrounded by a loyal group of sycophants telling the dictator what he wants to hear and all the excesses, narcissism and paranoia that go with it. Even though there have been periods when this regime type did not use to be the most common, it is now rivaling traditional party-based dictatorships since 2010 (Geddes et al., 2012a: 7-8).1 What the author considers striking, however, is not so much their number as the variety of regimes that have been classified as personalist dictatorships.
When it comes to classifying regimes, B. Geddes is one of the prominent scholars that has given renewed impetus to the study of dictatorships and their variations within the tradition of polychotomous classifications (not underrating the impact of other (recent) approaches such as Boix et al. (2012), Alvarez et al. (1996), Cheibub et al. (2009), Levitsky and Way (2010), Schedler (2006), etc.). She uses a categorical approach to identify and separate regime types, which has mostly been...