Incumbent takeovers

Abstract

The expansion of power by incumbent political leaders has become the subject of increased scholarly attention. In democracies, this is known as ‘subversions by the ruling executive’, ‘executive aggrandizement’, or ‘autogolpe’; in autocracies, researchers study ‘personalization’, ‘transition to personal rulership’, or ‘power-grabbing’. While the terminological landscape is rich, there is little conceptual agreement of what leader-driven power expansion is (and is not). Furthermore, we still lack broad data that allow us to investigate the phenomenon systematically across democracy and autocracy. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, it offers a unified approach to study leader-driven power expansion – incumbent takeovers – across the political regime spectrum. Second, drawing from 11 datasets and original data collection and coding, we introduce a new, comprehensive dataset on 495 individual takeover events carried out by 279 political leaders in 132 countries in the period 1918–2019. We provide estimates of the takeover onset years, the time to takeover, the length of the takeover spells, and discuss the differences between distinct indicators, inter alia. Future research may leverage these data for a better understanding of the drivers of incumbent takeovers as well as the role of takeovers in regime change, civil wars, coups, and uprisings.