Leaders’ experience and the transition from populism to dictatorship

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ABSTRACT A growing body of research shows that although populists draw on mass support to weaken executive constraints, they rarely transition to personalist autocracy. This raises the question of how and why only a few populist leaders have been able to leverage mass support to establish personal authoritarian rule? Whereas previous studies have addressed this in terms of deep social and economic crises or the durability of formal and informal democratic institutions, we focus on the agency of populist leaders themselves. Specifically, we theorize that more experienced leaders are better able to capture state institutions and ultimately establish authoritarian rule, particularly if they inherit more malleable institutions at entry into office. We present a newly enlarged dataset of populist rule, which confirms that the transition to full dictatorship is rare. We find that political experience has a robust positive association with full democratic reversals, while controlling for other factors. Moreover, this relationship is pronounced in contexts where institutional regulations are less rigid. However, we find little evidence of an independent effect of a priori institutional weakness on democratic survival. Our findings have implications for the literatures on populism, democratic backsliding, and political leadership.