January/February 2020 173
ANNA GRZYMALA-BUSSE is Michelle and
Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies
and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Free-
man Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Paths to Power
The Rise and Fall of Dictators
Anna Grzymala-Busse
How Dictatorships Work
BY BARBARA GEDDES, JOSEPH
WRIGHT, AND ERICA FRANTZ.
Cambridge University Press, 2018, 270 pp.
T
he world is in an illiberal phase.
In recent years, dictators have
strengthened their grip on many
countries. Several democracies have
witnessed the rise of authoritarian-
minded leaders and movements. These
trends make the task of understanding
dictatorial rule all the more important.
The research on autocracy is vast: the
term “authoritarian” garners more than
800,000 citations on Google Scholar.
But most analyses of the subject tend to
either focus on the emergence and fall of
dictatorships or examine their internal
workings. Few examine both the rise of
autocracies and how they rule.
In How Dictatorships Work, the political
scientists Barbara Geddes, Joseph
Wright, and Erica Frantz offer a correc-
tive, revealing not only how autocrats
win and lose power but also how they
wield it. They bring a wealth of new data
to the table, following autocracies from
cradle to grave and meticulously testing
the received wisdom against hard num-
bers. How Dictatorships Work masterfully
illustrates the paths autocrats take to
power and the ways in which they keep it.
Few dictators have a clear strategy, but
the ones who seize control of a country’s
security forces or build ruling political
parties tend to stay on top.THE ANATOMY OF DICTATORSHIP
Geddes, Wright, and Frantz define
autocracies as regimes in which elections
do not determine who leads or in which
democratically elected leaders change the
rules of the game to eliminate the compe-
tition. In their view, a regime either is or
is not an autocracy. To compose their
study, the authors drew on a database of
280 autocratic regimes that took power
between 1945 and 2010. The data were
first collected by Geddes and then greatly
expanded by Wright and Frantz.
Their first major finding is that 45
percent of authoritarian regimes in this
period were the result of coups. (Dicta-
torships also tend to emerge when
foreign powers prop up an unelected
ruler or when elected parties change the
rules to preclude further free elections—a
move that Geddes, Wright, and Frantz
term “authoritarianization.”) Militaries
and political parties are the groups most
likely to seize power. But for all their
professional experience, these elites
frequently have no detailed plans for how
to exercise the power they have seized.
Contrary to what one might expect,
coups rarely defend the interests of
economic elites, nor do they generally
emerge from popular movements.
Instead, Geddes, Wright, and Frantz find
that many coups grow out of the griev-
ances of military officers—those who have
been excluded from promotion on the
basis of their ethnicity, for example. It
doesn’t take many conspirators to carry