Leader Succession and Civil War
Andrej Kokkonen|Anders Sundell
Leadership succession is a perennial source of instability in autocratic regimes. Despite this, it has remained curiously understudied phenomenon political science. In this article, we compile novel and comprehensive dataset on civil war Europe combine with data the fate monarchs 28 states over 800 years to investigate how affected risk war. Exploiting natural deaths identify exogenous variation successions, find that successions substantially increased The wars could, however, be mitigated by hereditary arrangements (i.e., primogeniture—the principle letting oldest son inherit throne). When monarchies replaced elective Europe, declined drastically. Our results point importance succession, institutions governing it, for stability
Comparative Political Studies