Dictators, personalized security forces, and coups

Dictators rely on coercive forces to remain in office, as violence is the ultimate arbiter of power in these regimes. However, coercive forces also can remove the dictator from office in a coup. This presents the dictator with a dilemma. One way to address this dilemma is to personalize the security forces. This paper argues that personalizing the security forces decreases coup risk by: (a) linking the security elites’ fate more closely to the leader’s and (b) increasing the informational advantage the leader has over security elites. Using a new measure of the personalization of security apparatus, I show that personalization decreases coup risk in dictatorships, but this stabilizing effect of personalization disappears after the dictator’s exit from office. This study documents how dictators transform the security apparatus to stabilize their rule, with implications for how dictatorships survive and collapse.