How Retired Autocrats Keep Successors From Consolidating Power

Why Retired Leaders Matter?

Autocratic regimes often hinge on informal arrangements as much as formal rules. Junyan Jiang, Tianyang Xi, and Haojun Xie investigate how retired or former leaders—those who have stepped down but remain politically salient—shape the power of their successors. The authors argue that ageing or retired leaders create an important, though temporary, informal constraint on incumbents as they manage succession and elite relations.

How Power Is Measured and Identified

The study develops a novel, large-scale measure of political influence using the Google Ngram text corpus to capture mentions and prominence of leaders and elites across a global sample of autocracies. To isolate causal effects, the authors exploit within-incumbent variation in the influence of former leaders—comparing periods when a former leader is more versus less salient while the same incumbent remains in office—thereby reducing confounding from cross-national differences in regime type or leader traits.

What the Authors Did (Methods at a Glance)

• Built a new text-based indicator of elite prominence from a massive digitized book corpus (Google Ngram).
• Assembled a global sample of autocratic leaders and their contemporaneous elites.
• Used a research design that leverages variation over time within the same incumbent’s tenure to identify the effect of former leaders’ lingering influence.

Key Findings

• Incumbent autocrats have a more limited ability to consolidate power when influential former leaders are present and salient.
• The constraining effect is especially strong for unilateral control over high-level personnel decisions: incumbents are less able to appoint or remove senior military and civilian officials when prominent former leaders remain influential.
• These constraints are characterized as informal and situational—effective while the former leader retains salience, but not necessarily durable institutional checks.

What This Means for Autocracies

The paper shows that informal, personal legacies matter for elite bargaining and the balance of power in authoritarian regimes. By highlighting how retired leaders can act as de facto veto players over personnel reshuffles, Jiang, Xi, and Xie illuminate a mechanism of power-sharing that helps explain variation in consolidation and institutional change across autocracies.