Assassin’s Aftermath: The Political Consequences of Leader Assassination

• In Event: Elites under Fire: Assassinations, Mutiny and Leadership Change

Abstract

What are the political consequences of assassination attempts against dictators and democratically-elected leaders? In this paper, we leverage improved original data on assassination attempts against dictators and democratically-elected leaders over the 1946 to 2020 period to test how assassination risk affects prospects for regime change, political instability (coups and protests), and armed conflict (civil war). Our contributions are twofold. First, we introduce a new dataset on leader assassinations that is not only more comprehensive (from 1946 to 2020) but also identifies successful and failed assassination attempts and different actors behind the assassination attempts. Second, we update the literature on the consequences of leader assassinations that are currently rare and limited in scope. We aim to improve the literature by analyzing how different regime conditions and assassination attempts influence the prospects of political instability such as coups, protests, civil wars, and regime changes.

Authors

• John Joseph Chin, Carnegie Mellon University

• Wonjun Song, Hanyang University

• Abel Escribà-Folch, Universitat Pompeu Fabra