Policy Failure and Political Survival: The Contribution of Political Institutions

The authors advance a theory of the effects of political institutions on state policy. The theory explains how political institutions affect the ability of leaders to maintain themselves in office, why some political systems are more prone to policy failure than others, and why autocrats create mass political systems. The key characteristics of institutions in this theory are the sizes of a polity's selectorate and winning coalition. The authors derive hypotheses from the theory and test those hypotheses using a data set covering more than 2,700 leaders from all states in the period from 1816 to 1990. The statistical tests demonstrate that (1) large winning coalitions are associated with enhanced economic growth, (2) tenure is shortened by a large winning coalition but lengthened by a large selectorate, and (3) in the face of policy failure, leaders with a large selectorate are more likely to survive than those in systems with a large winning coalition. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of these results.