Challenging the Loyalty-Competency Trade-Off in Autocratic Cabinets - A quantitative study analysing competency dynamics of cabinets in autocratic regimes

Abstract

Even autocrats are forced to rely on their political allies to remain in power. Min- isters make up a considerable share of these allies in any political regime, and their competency can both aid and threaten the incumbent autocrat’s rule. Consequently, the study of how autocrats balance the trade-off between loyalty and competence in their cabinet appointments is of great importance when aiming to understand the dynamics of autocratic rule. One strain of the existing literature argues that leaders in autocracies reward competence less than democracies. Scholars supporting this argument claim that autocrats will replace competent ministers with less competent ones over time, as the more competent ministers are less likely to be loyal to the autocrat. This competency can be defined as political competency, measured by ministers’ political experience, and technical competency, measured by ministers’ education. Challenging this proposed narrative, I argue that autocrats value technically competent ministers, and will not replace these subordinates as their time in power increases. The case of politically competent ministers, however, is more complex. To analyse how competency levels of cabinets change under the rule of an incumbent, I leverage newly collected data on 45 autocratic countries between 1966 and 2020 from the novel Paths to Power dataset. In contradiction with the theoretical literature on the loyalty-competency trade-off, I find no systematic replacement of technically competent ministers with less competent ones. My analyses reveal that, on average, the share of politically competent ministers in autocratic cabinets decreases over time under the same incumbent. In conclusion, autocrats seem not to fear techni- cally competent ministers, but the preference for politically competent ministers is more complex and regime-dependent. My findings move the literature forward by highlighting the importance of disaggregating the concept of competency and the need for further theoretical development on autocrats’ personnel preferences.