The Leadership Succession Project

Fredrik Bynander & Paul 't Hart

However good and powerful they may be, all leaders have a limited "sell by" date. They get old, weary and sick. They get out of tune with the times, or anesthetized by their own power. Sooner or later they become embarrassments to the people who put them in office, or those who keep them there.

A leader that stays on for too long provides a painful spectacle. Think of the mummy-like appearance of the communist gerontocrats in the Soviet Union and China throughout the seventies and eighties. Think of the dying FDR pursuing a 4th term in 1944. Or remember the sheer bewilderment of Honecker, Ceauceascu and other East European communist leaders when confronted with the popular uprisings of 1989. And have mercy on pope John Paul II, a gravely ill leader who is not allowed to step down.

One of the charming features of democracy is that it seldom gets as far as in the examples described above. At the very least its rules for the acquisition and transition of political power limit the duration of these farces and dramas. Machiavelli already recognised in his Discorsi that a robust mechanism for the selection of leaders is essential for the success of the state. He ascribed the power of the Roman republic to the fact that the highest authority came to rest with the consuls, who did not inherit their position or obtained it by clever manipulation or violent coups, but gained it in free elections. They were always preeminent persons. This, according to Machiavelli (1991: 155), was essential because `two competent rulers that succeed one another can achieve great things.’

In a democracy, the populace can rid itself in an orderly and peaceful fashion from political elites that it no longer appreciates. According to many other political theorists this constitutes no less than the very essence of democracy: the periodic opportunity for citizens to `throw the rascals out.’ A democracy, unlike other political regimes, has built-in `stop rules’  that protect society against incompetent or authoritarian leaders.

In short, leader succession is a delicate thing. Its political risks are apparently high. Why should all this be the case?  And why are some transitions so catastrophic while others appear to be smooth and successful? These are the central questions of this project. Paradoxically, despite the fact that leader successions are a hotly debated and intensely reported issue in the daily practice of every political system, there is a remarkable dearth of systematic research on this topic. (At least as far as leader succession in democratic systems is concerned: Kremlinologists, Peking watchers and their likes have been feverishly active in studying the turnover of leaders in communist systems).

This project provides an attempt to prepare the groundwork for the cross-national and longitudinal comparative research we propose to undertake on this topic in years to come. It sketches the contours of a conceptual language needed to study (i.e. describe, explain, evaluate) leader succession, and offers a preliminary typology of both leader and successor behavior prior to and following successions.

Publications and papers                             Methods                                       Database