Saving Your Favorite Dictators: External Sponsorship of Authoritarian Regimes and Its Consequences
Open Access
- Author:
- Song, Won Jun
- Graduate Program:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 07, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Joseph Wright, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Joseph Wright, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Glenn Hunter Palmer, Committee Member
Douglas William Lemke, Committee Member
Dennis Coleman Jett, Outside Member - Keywords:
- political science
authoritarian regimes
autocracies
dictatorship
international relations
comparative politics
arms transfer
personalism
civil-military relations
security forces - Abstract:
- While the behavior of foreign actors during the upheavals of dictatorships receives much attention from international media, the academic literature has only recently begun to examine how and why outside interventions occur and its effects on autocratic regimes. I examine these topics in this five-chapter dissertation. In Chapter 2, I find that strategic importance largely explains arms transfers timed to bolster autocracies during domestic uprisings. However, during post-Cold War democratic uprisings, U.S. arms transfers drop in the short-term but quickly return to prior levels, especially when the Democratic Party is in power. In Chapter 3, I consider the relationship between foreign policies of great powers and dictator’s ability to amass personal power. Reliance on a foreign patron provides the dictator with room to personalize his security apparatus by protecting the regime from the backlash against coup-proofing efforts. This personalization process intensifies during the conflict years backed by a great power patron as dictators exploit battlefield performances as a pretext for purges. In Chapter 4, I analyze domestic implications of security forces personalization. I show that personalization decreases coup risk in dictatorships, but this stabilizing effect of personalization disappears after the dictator’s exit from office. This study documents how dictators transform the security apparatus to stabilize their rule, with implications for how dictatorships survive and collapse.