Guilty by association
Patrons, purges, and promotions under personalism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24225142 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yumin Sheng (0000-0002-9870-8896, Wayne State University) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-09-30 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Peace Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-3433 • E-ISSN: 1460-3578 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jopres/xjag080 |
| OpenAlex | W7215129548 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 36 |
Mounting scholarship grapples with the causes and consequences of power personalization in autocracies. Prominent research suggests that as the personalist dictator amasses power, he tends to repress potential rivals from his inner circle to stave off mortal threats to his rule. Because military supporters of fallen elites are considered especially menacing to the dictator, they should be more susceptible to a similar fate than other officers, but little empirical work systematically studies authoritarian purges of secondary targets in the military. Drawing on monthly data from 1955–1976 on the leaders of the regional commands of the People's Liberation Army, I find China's regional military leaders hailing from patronage networks of disgraced top civilian and military leaders at the center were more likely to be purged or otherwise experienced more adverse career outcomes than their counterparts without such tainted associations amidst the consolidation and culmination of Mao's personalist rule.
authoritarian regimes · Chinese Communist Party · Mao Zedong · patronage networks · Personalism · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Chinese history and philosophy · Political Conflict and Governance
Mao’s Last Revolution
The Politics of Authoritarian Rule
Regime Threats and State Solutions
Political turnover and economic performance
Overreach
How Dictatorships Work
China Under Mao
China's Gilded Age
Event History Modeling
Bootstrap-Based Improvements for Inference with Clustered Errors
The North Korean Autocracy in Comparative Perspective
Patronage and authoritarian co-optation of the military
Do land revenue windfalls create a political resource curse? Evidence from China
Elite Threats and Punitive Violence in Autocratic Regimes
The Origins of Elected Strongmen
Locking in fair weather friends
Pathways to democratization in personalist dictatorships
Purging to Transform the Post-Colonial State
Does Performance Matter? Evaluating Political Selection Along the Chinese Administrative Ladder
Credible Power-Sharing and the Longevity of Authoritarian Rule
Strategic Logic of Elite Purges in Dictatorships
The Political Resource Blessing or Curse? Patronage Networks, Infrastructure Investment, and Economic Development in China
Reshaping the Threat Environment
How the Party Commands the Gun
The Rush to Personalize
To Purge or Not to Purge? An Individual-Level Quantitative Analysis of Elite Purges in Dictatorships
The Decline of Factions
Making Bureaucracy Work
Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type
Determinants of political purges in autocracies
The Guardianship Dilemma
Power Sharing and Authoritarian Stability
Getting Ahead in the Communist Party
| Highly cited | No |
|---|