Elderhood and compliance : how Aging Dictators affect civil wars

In democracies, civil wars are less likely to occur. According to the minimal approach to democracy, the reason is that opposition parties can reasonably expect to win the next elections. They therefore prefer to wait than to rebel. In dictatorships, waiting until the dictator dies is generally much more costly. This waiting period, however, is considerably shortened when the dictator is old. Therefore, the risk of domestic conflict should decrease along with the age of leaders. Based on 149 countries from 1946 to 2001, our empirical analysis shows that the leader’s age decreases the likelihood of civil war in dictatorships, but not in democratic regimes. More precisely, this is true in weakly institutionalized dictatorships, but not in authoritarian regime types which provide institutional ways of controlling and replacing the incumbent