Abstract

Is personal power hereditable in autocracies? Given the discretion that autocrats often have to alter the formal rules of the game, personal power is key for understanding political development in nondemocracies. However, recent scholarship has ignored this question. To fill this gap we exploit the random timing of natural deaths for a set of European monarchs to show that leaders with longer tenures tended to be succeeded by their sons and had successors that were less frequently deposed and less likely to face parliamentary constraints. We show that the effect of tenure on successor deposal is at least as large as the one associated with succession orders—an institution that has received recent attention in the literature. Our results are consistent with a theoretical account we develop wherein leaders accumulate political power the longer they are in office, which then determines patterns of succession, stability, and institutional development in autocracies.