When the leader of an autocratic regime loses power, one of three things happens. The incumbent leadership group is replaced by democratically elected leaders. Someone from the incumbent leadership group replaces him, and the regime persists. Or the incumbent leadership group loses control to a different group that replaces it with a new autocracy. Much scholarship exists on the first kind of transition, but little on transitions from one autocracy to another, though they make up about half of all regime changes. We introduce a new data set that facilitates the investigation of all three kinds of transition. It provides transition information for the 280 autocratic regimes in existence from 1946 to 2010. The data identify how regimes exit power, how much violence occurs during transitions, and whether the regimes that precede and succeed them are autocratic. We explain the data set and show how it differs from currently available data. The new data identify autocratic regime breakdowns regardless of whether the country democratizes, which makes possible the investigation of why the ouster of dictators sometimes leads to democracy but often does not, and many other questions. We present a number of examples to highlight how the new data can be used to explore questions about why dictators start wars and why autocratic breakdown sometimes results in the establishment of a new autocratic regime rather than democratization. We discuss the implications of these findings for the Arab Spring.

This article explores why authoritarian regimes create legislatures and then assesses their effect on economic growth and investment. In authoritarian regimes more dependent on domestic investment than natural resource revenue, the dictator creates a binding legislature as a credible constraint on the regime's confiscatory behavior. In regimes dependent on natural resource revenue, the nonbinding legislature serves as a mechanism for the dictator to bribe and split the opposition when he faces credible challenges to the regime. Using data from 121 authoritarian regimes from 1950 to 2002, the results indicate that binding legislatures have a positive impact on economic growth and domestic investment, while nonbinding legislatures have a negative impact on economic growth.

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, or by increasing rents to those who control the state, allowing elites to exclude others from power, and thereby reducing representativeness (Djankov, Montalvo, and Reynal-Querol 2008). 1 To understand how aid affects the likelihood of democratization, I propose a theory to explain how aid enters a dictator's decision over whether or not to democratize and show empirically that aid is not always inimical to democratization. I exploit the fact that aid comes from international donors to argue that the probability of receiving future aid depends on the likelihood of a dictator surviving in power-either as a dictator or Joseph Wright is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, Pond Lab, University Park, PA 16802 (josephgwright@gmail.com).An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. I thank Barbara Geddes, Jeffrey B. Lewis, Yuch Kono, Kevin Morrison, Jennifer Tobin, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. I am grateful to Jessica Weeks and Xun Cao for sharing data. I gratefully acknowledge financial support for this research from the UCLA Graduate Division and the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. All errors remain my own.1 Others argue that foreign aid props up dictators because Western donors value stability with dictator to democratic uncertainty (Brown 2001). by succeeding in competitive, multiparty elections should the dictator liberalize the regime. The basic intuition is that if future aid flows are in any way contingent on political liberalization, the likelihood of future aid declines as the dictator becomes less likely to survive political liberalization in power. Thus, dictators who stand little chance of surviving liberalization will not be swayed by promises of aid, but dictators who are likely to remain in power even if they liberalize may view the promise of future aid as an incentive to democratize. The effect of aid on democratization, therefore, will vary by factors that increase the chances of a dictator surviving political liberalization intact.The next section briefly reviews the literature on foreign aid and democratization. The following section proposes a model of how aid enters a dictator's decision over democratization. Next, I discuss the data and methods used to test the hypotheses. I then present the results of empirical models used to test the effect of foreign aid on democratization. In the empirical section, I use two measures of the dependent variable (democratization) and multiple operationalizations

This article uncovers a new mechanism linking oil wealth to autocratic regime survival: the investigation tests whether increases in oil wealth improve the survival of autocracies by lowering the chances of democratization, reducing the risk of transition to subsequent dictatorship, or both. Using a new measure of autocratic durability shows that, once models allow for unit effects, oil wealth promotes autocratic survival by lowering the risk of ouster by rival autocratic groups. Evidence also indicates that oil income increases military spending in dictatorships, which suggests that increasing oil wealth may deter coups that could have caused a regime collapse.

This paper examines whether economic sanctions destabilize authoritarian rulers. We argue that the effect of sanctions is mediated by the type of authoritarian regime against which sanctions are imposed. Because personalist regimes and monarchies are more sensitive to the loss of external sources of revenue (such as foreign aid and taxes on trade) to fund patronage, rulers in these regimes are more likely to be destabilized by sanctions than leaders in other types of regimes. In contrast, when dominant single-party and military regimes are subject to sanctions, they increase their tax revenues and reallocate their expenditures to increase their levels of cooptation and repression. Using data on sanction episodes and authoritarian regimes from 1960 to 1997 and selection-corrected survival models, we test whether sanctions destabilize authoritarian rulers in different types of regimes. We find that personalist dictators are more vulnerable to foreign pressure than other types of dictators. We also analyze the modes of authoritarian leader exit and find that sanctions increase the likelihood of a regular and an irregular change of ruler, such as a coup, in personalist regimes. In single-party and military regimes, however, sanctions have little effect on leadership stability.During his inaugural address in 2005, US President George W. Bush proclaimed that ''it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.'' 2 The general goal of ending tyranny has been shared by many of Western advanced democracies since the end of the Second World War. Yet there is little consensus over the most effective means to promote regime change and democratization.

Over the past two decades, donors increasingly link foreign aid to democracy objectives in Africa. This study investigates whether and how foreign aid influences specific outcomes associated with democratic transition and consolidation. Using an instrumental variables approach for the period from 1989 to 2008, we show that economic aid increases the likelihood of transition to multiparty politics, while democracy aid furthers democratic consolidation by reducing the incidence of multiparty failure and electoral misconduct. However, we find little evidence that either economic or democracy aid influences opposition support in multiparty elections. These findings have implications for understanding how donors allocate aid and the political consequences of foreign assistance in Africa.

This article examines how authoritarian parties and legislatures affect regime survival. While authoritarian legislatures increase the stability of dictators, political parties – even when devised to quell internal threats – can destabilize dictators. The main argument is that authoritarian parties influence the distribution of power in a subsequent new democracy by helping to protect the interests of authoritarian elites. These institutions thus increase the likelihood of democratization. Using a dataset of authoritarian regimes in 108 countries from 1946 to 2002 and accounting for simultaneity, the analysis models transitions to democracy and to a subsequent authoritarian regime. Results indicate that authoritarian legislatures are associated with a lower probability of transition to a subsequent dictatorship. Authoritarian parties, however, are associated with a higher likelihood of democratization