Elite Change without Regime Change: Authoritarian Persistence in Africa and the End of the Cold War

Abstract

Because the end of the Cold War failed to produce widespread democratic transitions, it is often viewed as having had only a superficial effect on Africa’s authoritarian regimes. We show this sentiment to be incorrect. Focusing on the elite coalitions undergirding autocracies, we argue that the end of the Cold War sparked profound changes in the constellation of alliances within regimes. It was an international event whose ripple effects altered the domestic political landscape and thereby enticed elite coalitions to transform and meet the new existential threat they faced. We demonstrate our argument using cabinets as a proxy for elite coalitions, showing that their composition drastically changed at the end of the Cold War. Africa’s authoritarian leaders dismissed many of the core members of their cabinets and increasingly appointed members of opposition parties to cabinet portfolios. Such changes, we argue, represent the dynamic responses that enabled autocracies to persist.

Essays on Business and Politics in Resource-abundant, Low-income Countries

“…Comparative political science shows that ruling elites in resource-rich, low-income countries employ both cooperative and fragmented strategies to maintain their personal grip on power and act in their own economic interests or lobby for affiliated firms (e.g. Arriola et al (2021), Meng (2021a), Stokes et al (2013), Szakonyi (2018), Truex (2014), and Woldense and Kroeger (2023)). However, these findings do not fully explain how 1 For instance, the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) database documents aid projects that aim to strengthen administrative capacities for documenting mineral and oil extraction across 60 low-to middle-income countries since 2001.…”