Personalist Regime

In our War and World Politics class, we have looked extensively at the ways in which leaders play a role in interstate conflict ranging from roles in national interest to how their beliefs and backgrounds affect the domestic and international political arena. One area that stood out to our group in particular was the section on authoritarian regimes and the initiation of conflict. Jessica Weeks’ research on the issue provides four classifications of authoritarian regimes that are organized by type of institution (personalist vs ruling elite) and type of leader/audience (military or civilian). From these divisions arose four main categories of nondemocratic institutions: the Boss, the Strongman, the Machine, or the Junta. Further, Weeks researched

Bosses and strongmen are similar in that they are personalist regimes with little power constraint. Where they differ, however, is in the type of leader/audience in power. Bosses are characterized by a civilian leader and strongmen are defined by a military leader. Thus, what we want to research is whether these distinctions in the type of leader/audience cause a variation in duration of conflict between the boss and strongman. In regard to our theoretical construction, we theorize that there will be variation in duration of conflict between the boss and the strongman. Once we conduct the research, we will then theorize as to why we see variation or why we do not. Our hypotheses will be generated based off our assumptions that the type of personalist leader (military or civilian) dictates the nature of the involved conflicts, the responses to conflicts, and therefore the duration of

And Sirin and Koch argue that autocratic leaders, specifically in personalist regimes, with smaller winning coalitions should be more willing to accept higher levels of casualties in military conflict because it is easier to allocate the costs outside their support base compared to those that have larger winning coalitions. This furthers the argument that personalist regimes - having the smallest winning coalition- are more tolerant to higher casualties, thus potentially resulting in a longer duration of conflict. Saddam Hussein, a prime example of this, was willing to accept more than thirty times the amount of casualties in the Gulf War than the Galtieri regime in the Falklands War. Hussein faced a smaller winning coalition than Galtieri, whose incumbency was largely dependent on the support of the military elite of Argentina. Lastly, one of the most important factors in conflict duration is a leader's fondness for repression (Sirin, Koch