Personalist Rule in Sub Saharan Africa: The Impact of Personalism on Regime Transitions after the Cold War - defended on 8 January 2018 at the Faculty of Political Science & Journalism, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan.
Doctoral dissertation of Jeroen Van den Bosch, submitted to the Department of International Relations, Faculty of Political Science & Journalism, Adam Mickiewicz University
Prepared under supervision of: Prof. zw. dr hab. Andrzej Gałganek Auxiliary promoter: Dr Paweł Stachowiak
©Jeroen Van den Bosch 2018
Reviews
This work has been transformed into a monograph, published by Routledge in 2021. More info in the link below:
This research focuses on personalist regimes (also called personalist rule or personalism); in particular on their behavior and the impact they have on regime transitions.
Personalist dictatorship or one-man rule is an especially vindictive form of autocracy in which power is concentrated in the hands of a very small elite. Their dictators have such a prominent position that they are almost considered the bodily incarnation of their regimes: Idi Amin in Uganda, Mariam Mengistu in Ethiopia, Joseph Mobutu in Zaire, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan, Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, Muhammad Suharto in Indonesia, the three generations of the Kim family in North Korea, and many others. These regimes are most stereotypical when one thinks of dictatorships, but they are only a subset of the global political biotope.
It proved conceptually difficult to pin down the exact nature of personalism. Scholars are divided in how to classify the phenomenon. Some treat personalism as a characteristic of political regimes, others as a separate regime type. In order to make the concept operational as a research object, I proposed a middle way. Since all authoritarian regimes (save monarchies) have a slight tendency to personalize over time, and since they can have a military, single party or even multiparty regime organization, I concur with scholars like M. Svolik or J. Gandhi that personal rule is a characteristic of many authoritarian regimes. On the other hand, I do agree with B. Geddes, N. Ezrow, E. Franz, J. Wright and others that once a threshold of power centralization has been reached, other regime characteristics fade to the background and the regime behavior will be dominated by the dynamics of personalism. This particular, identifiable kind of divergent behavior is sufficiently distinguishable and can thereby correctly be classified separately.
So, in my research I consider them a characteristic that can be present in various sorts of regime types, but at the same time acknowledge the similarities in their behavior as to identify them as an independent type. Such an approach accounts for their widely divergent forms that can be observed across the globe, but nonetheless does not diminish the unity of this group by treating them as an ideal type with a distinct form of behavior. They differ from non-personalist regimes in their relative longevity, which stands in contrast to their fragility due to their lack of effective institutions. Personalist regimes use more repression. Also are they more predatory in their economic policies and more corrupt, which is explained by their leaders’ limited “exit-options” and their “short time horizons” or – in other words – the structural insecurity these leaders face and the high costs of losing office, usually death or exile
From many examples in the literature I noticed that personalist regimes usually break down in a wave of violence and are usually succeeded by another personalist regime. Descriptive data confirms that personalist regimes are the least likely to democratize. After having established this connection, I’ve found that even leading scholars in this field did not have a conclusive explanation for this phenomenon.
My dissertation investigates exactly this connection between the behavior of such personalist regimes and the impact they have on transition processes. The main research question of this dissertation is to find if these regimes structurally alter the societies and states they govern, which in turn makes democratization unlikely; or if they are just prone to violent collapse, which by itself could explains the obstacles of creating democratic regimes after personalist regime breakdown. So, if there exists evidence for structural factors then, which are they? And if the causal factor is merely these regimes’ behavior during transitions, to what degree do they differ from each other? In other words, do all personalist regimes behave the same even if they possess different institutions?
The limits of a PhD dissertation forced me to concentrate solely on one region. Even while the theoretical parts of my work are universal and do not discriminate between regions, I decided to focus on Sub Saharan Africa for two main raisons: First, Sub Saharan Africa has the largest concentration of personalist regimes in the world; secondly, to constrain my focus to one region would better control for a minimal homogeneity regarding the selection of cases because of my decision to investigate personalist regime behavior through theory-building. Future research might reevaluate this thesis’ explanatory power by applying it to other regions, but adding this task here would be impossible given the timespan of a doctoral study, nor could it fit in the space of one dissertation, without the loss of empirical robustness. In order to make the research object relevant to contemporary research on Africa, I decided to focus on transitions from personalist rule after the Cold War.
The main research questions of this dissertation have been stated as follows:
Q1. What is the impact of personalist dictatorships on regime transitions in Africa?
Q2. What are these regimes’ greatest impediments to democratization?