Paper abstract:

Since the 2016 death of long-ruling personalist dictator Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan has introduced a series of economic reforms aimed at privatizing state-owned companies, liberalizing the agriculture sector, enhancing international trade and modifying the tax system. Ten years prior, the death of Turkmenistan’s personalist dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov, resulted in no significant reforms. These divergent experiences raise questions regarding the conditions under which a dictator’s death can spur economic reform. Although recent work has revealed that institutional constraints and structural power dynamics shape economic policymaking in authoritarian regimes, there has been little effort to understand dynamism in authoritarian economic policy or to understand the drivers behind economic reform in autocratic regimes. This paper advances two propositions: 1) in general, an autocrat’s death is unlikely to provoke economic liberalization, and in fact may lead to economic restrictions and 2) in specific cases, the reshuffling of elites following a succession will encourage reform as a tool by insiders to target rival elites. The paper finds support for the first proposition through an analysis of economic policies in a global set of autocracies that have experienced dictator death. The paper then examines the second proposition through two sets of paired comparisons of states that have experienced dictator death. Specifically, two Central Asian states that vary in the degree and relative liberalization of reforms (the aforementioned Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) are compared with two sub-Saharan African states that likewise vary (Gabon, which instituted significant reforms, and Guinea, which did not). Initial analysis identifies the structure of elite networks prior to leadership death as a potential determinant of relative economic reform.