The Politics of Dictatorship

In comparison to democratic political systems, we know very little about how dictatorships work. Who are the key political actors? Where does the locus of power rest? What determines leadership behavior--and survival? Erica Frantz and Natasha Ezrow argue that dictatorships are not regimes driven by the whims of a single individual. Frantz and Ezrow reveal how leader-elite relations are strongly influenced by the nature of the political institutions in a regime, and in turn how those relations profoundly affect both domestic and foreign policy. Combining cross-national quantitative analyses with a selection of case studies, they uniquely explore the internal architecture of authoritarian government.