Personalist dictatorship

In a personalist regime, the ruler has escaped the constraints that a ruling party, a military junta or a royal family would otherwise impose. He (almost all have been men) appoints and dismisses officials at will, often favouring relatives and members of his home region or ethnic group, controls the security services directly, and frequently builds a cult of personality. Institutions such as parties and legislatures may exist, but they serve the leader rather than constrain him.

Max Weber's category of patrimonial and 'sultanistic' rule, in which the state is treated as the ruler's household, was developed by Juan Linz and H. E. Chehabi (1998) for regimes such as Trujillo's Dominican Republic, the Somozas' Nicaragua, the Duvaliers' Haiti and the Shah's Iran. In rational-choice accounts, Milan Svolik (2012) treats personal autocracy as the outcome when a dictator wins the struggle for power with his allies: once the inner circle can no longer credibly threaten to remove him, he can accumulate more power. Geddes, Wright and Frantz measure personalisation as a matter of degree, through indicators such as whether the leader created a new party, controls appointments, and has purged the officer corps.

• Rotation and purges of officials so that no rival power base forms.
• Parallel or overlapping security forces loyal to the leader personally.
• Patronage financed by state revenue, often from natural resources.
• Weak or absent succession rules; heirs are often family members.

• Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko (1965–97); Uganda under Idi Amin (1971–79).
• Iraq under Saddam Hussein; Libya under Muammar Gaddafi.
• Turkmenistan under Saparmurat Niyazov, who renamed months after himself and his mother.
• North Korea combines a ruling party with dynastic personal rule.

Because loyalty matters more than competence and the leader faces no internal check, personalist regimes are prone to arbitrary violence: Amin's Uganda and Saddam's Iraq are among the most lethal regimes of the late twentieth century. Personalisation is also associated with erratic foreign policy and with conflict.

Defenders of strong individual leadership argue that it allows quick, decisive action; the comparative evidence suggests that it also allows quick, unchecked mistakes. Scholars debate whether personalism is a separate type or a dimension present in all regimes; recent work documents personalisation within parties and even democracies.

Personalist dictatorships have become more common since the end of the Cold War. Compared with other dictatorships they are more likely to end in violence or be replaced by another autocracy, and less likely to democratise.