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When Islamic extremists assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat hoping to end the secular regime he led, another military officer and dominant-party official from Sadat's inner circle, Hosni Mubarak, quickly replaced him. The regime continued, controlled by the same leadership group and following the same basic rules. But not all authoritarian leadership changes follow this pattern. When Zine Ben Ali, the dictator of Tunisia until January 2011, fled the country after weeks of protests, military and civilian elites who had previously supported his rule cooperated to move the country toward democracy. In contrast, the Shah of Iran's ouster by similar protests in 1979 resulted in the seizure and consolidation of power by a radically different autocratic regime led by Muslim clerics. These examples illustrate the three possible outcomes when a dictator is ousted: regime survival under new leadership, democratization, and replacement by a new autocratic regime. Many studies have investigated democratization. Multi-country investigation of the other two outcomes, however, is more rare,1though case studies show that these outcomes have important consequences. Yet in the nearly 75 years since World War II, only about 45 percent of leadership changes in autocracies led to regime change, and more than half of regime breakdowns were transitions from one autocracy to another. In other words, fewer than one-quarter of leadership changes resulted in democratization.
We introduce new data that make possible the investigation of the other two outcomes and other previously difficult subjects. Among these is the question raised by the Arab Spring: under what circumstances is the ouster of a dictator likely to lead to renewed autocracy or chaos rather than democratization? As the Arab Spring unfolded, activists and journalists responded with exuberance to the prospect of democratization in countries long oppressed by autocratic rule. Observers with longer memories, however, worried about whether the ferment would lead to democracy, future instability, or reinvigorated dictatorship, as happened after the Shah of Iran's ouster. Lucan Way raises exactly this question.2He suggests using the 1989-1991 post-communist transitions to make predictions about the Arab Spring. The new data, however, enable scholars to base expectations on the experience of...