Maya Hamdi

Why do some authoritarian regimes preside over catastrophic state collapse while others maintain functional institutions for decades? This paper argues that personalist dictatorship rule concentrated in a single leader who governs through loyalty rather than institutional constraints generates distinct mechanisms of state weakening that other authoritarian subtypes do not share. Drawing on Acemoglu's model of state strength, I identify four interconnected causal mechanisms: administrative politicization (loyalty-based appointments displace professional competence), security fragmentation (coup-proofing reduces coercive capacity), predatory rent-seeking (resources are diverted to clientelistic networks at the expense of public goods), and legitimacy erosion (citizens withdraw support when high extraction meets low provision). These mechanisms form a self-reinforcing cycle that accelerates institutional decay over time. However, following Meng (2020), the argument is conditional: personalist rulers who invest in institutionalization building parties, regularizing succession, and creating durable bureaucratic structures may slow or reverse this decay. To test both the main and conditional hypotheses, I employ a two-phase mixed-methods design. Phase 1 uses large-N statistical analysis of all authoritarian regimes globally from 1946 to 2010, with state failure operationalized using the Political Instability Task Force dataset. Phase 2 uses process tracing on three Sub-Saharan African cases: Zaire under Mobutu (catastrophic failure), Kenya under Moi (no failure), and Rwanda under Kagame (high institutionalization, increased state capacity). Coarsened exact matching reduces selection bias, while rare-events logistic regression (King & Zeng, 2001) addresses the methodological challenges of modeling infrequent failures. Preliminary evidence suggests that personalist regimes exhibit significantly greater decline in bureaucratic professionalism, higher risk of internal conflict, and deteriorating fiscal performance compared to military or single-party regimes. Nevertheless, the Rwanda case indicates that institutionalization can offset these decay mechanisms, offering both theoretical nuance and policy-relevant insight. The paper concludes by addressing endogeneity concerns, discussing external validity for post-2010 cases (Russia, Turkey, Hungary), and outlining implications for understanding strongman politics in an era of democratic backsliding.

Division of labor is often based on an individual’s intellectual, cognitive and physical abilities. While this concept exists across all species, it has a unique social and economic significance for humans, as it determines not only an individual’s role, but also their social and economic status. From ancient Greece until the 21st century, economists sought balance between market efficiency and worker well-being. This paper examines how the division of labor as a fundamental criterion of social behavior has evolved across eras and impacted socioeconomic structures. To do so, the paper begins with Plato’s theories with respect to the division of labor and their influence on subsequent thinkers. That discussion is followed by an analysis of David Ricardo’s theories regarding comparative advantage and its effect on labor economics and international trade. The third part of the analysis explores Karl Marx’s critiques of the division of labor in the capitalist model and concludes with Thorstein Veblen’s critique of social satisfaction in a capitalist economy.