Dictators and sycophants: new DCU research sheds light on the logic of authoritarian rule and the origins of personality cults

Loyalty and rewards

However, research also shows that more sycophantic officials survive longer in office and are more likely to receive promotions. The analysis shed light on how dictators select and reward their loyalists, what loyalists must do to survive and advance, and how authoritarian politics actually works on a daily basis. It also reveals how personality cults can emerge from below, resulting in an increasingly personalized regime.

There is much literature that has examined the logic of these relationships between leaders and elites, concluding that autocrats tend to reward their subordinates based on how loyal they are to obtaining votes in elections; sometimes economic competence is also important. All of these studies have focused only on the material aspects, such as votes or economic growth, of what elites do in service of the dictator.

However, when most people think of authoritarian politics, they visualize something akin to iconic images of Soviet or Chinese party members praising Stalin or Mao during speeches at party congresses. Authoritarian politics is not just about getting votes or other material aspects, but also, often even more so, about non-material aspects such as blatantly praising the autocrat in his speeches – which most people consider it a common, everyday practice under authoritarianism. It is this aspect of authoritarianism that has been neglected until now.

Pioneering and innovative methods

In the past, in political science, it was very difficult to draw conclusions from speech, and researchers had to painstakingly go through newspaper editorials and draw conclusions. Now that the computational challenges of analyzing large amounts of textual data have been overcome, the co-authors have been able to apply these tools in a new context to advance our understanding of politics in autocracies, achieving publication in one of the best political science journals in the world. therefore.

One of the rapidly developing areas of the social sciences is leveraging advances in data science to answer important policy questions. Although computational tools have been successfully applied in other areas of social and political sciences, the study of dictatorships has until now largely neglected them. Dr. Baturo and his co-authors fill this gap in their research and intend to further advance our knowledge of personality cults, propaganda, and authoritarian legitimization by using these techniques in their future research.

Dr. Baturo and his co-authors intend to further advance our knowledge of personality cults, propaganda, and authoritarian legitimization using these techniques. Another recent study showed the conditions under which dictators emphasize their performance as leaders, their patriotic ideals, or resort to intimidation.

The authors

Dr Alexander Baturo is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law and Government at DCU. The article is co-authored with Dr Jakob Tolstrup from Aarhus University and Nikita Khokhlov, a doctoral student at DCU who is due to defend his thesis later this autumn. Dr. Baturo is also the editor of Personalism and Personalist Regimes, published by Oxford University Press in June this year.

For media inquiries related to this research, contact Conor O’Donovan at [email protected]