Franziska Keller Delivered a Lecture on 'Farewell Comrades! Power Struggle and Elite Removal in Single-Party Authoritarian Regimes'

On May 26 a research seminar on political economy took place at HSE. Franziska Keller (New York University) spoke on 'Farewell Comrades! Power Struggle and Elite Removal in Single-Party Authoritarian Regimes'. The report was co-authored by Wang Yuhua (University of Pennsylvania)

Abstract:

We present the first systematic effort to theorize and empirically test elite removal strategies in single-party authoritarian regimes using Social Network Analysis. We argue that authoritarian leaders face two challenges in removing powerful elites. First, removing powerful elites expose the leader to risks of a counterattack. Second, removing powerful elites could lead to party split. The leader’s best strategy is to start the attack from the periphery of the rival’s network—a pattern that we term “encircling.” Combining social network analysis of the recent anti-corruption campaigns in China, with two additional historic case studies, we demonstrate that the attacks in elite networks indeed follow an “encircling” pattern: individuals located further away from the network center were attacked earlier, until the centers gradually were surrounded by fallen individuals at which point the main targets were finally removed. Our study makes contributes to the study of single-party authoritarian regimes by switching the focus from inclusion to exclusion.