Legitimation, cooptation, and repression and the survival of electoral autocracies

Abstract

Conceptualizing the “three pillars of stability”, Gerschewski (2013) proposes legitimation, cooptation and repression as the fundamental principles of lasting autocratic rule. Recent studies put this so-called WZB model to an empirical test and probe the effects these three factors have on regime survival in light of autocratic elections (Lueders and Croissant 2014). Their finding that the WZB model has only limited explanatory power in competitive autocracies has sparked a broader debate about the empirical application of the model as such (Kailitz and Tanneberg 2015; Lueders and Croissant 2015). Our paper contributes to this debate in several ways: (1) rather than analyzing each pillar’s e..