Strategic Replacements and Popular Support: Political Consequences of Authoritarian Replacement of Elected Officials

This article presents a game-theoretic model to analyze a hybrid form of governance, combining competitive local elections with the central government’s unilateral power to intervene and replace elected officials. The equilibrium analysis highlights the implications of the central government’s trade-off between local officials’ competence and their partisan affiliation. I show that the key consequences of this trade-off include (1) strategic retentions of underperforming opposition incumbents and (2) replacements of proregime incumbents, even when their expected competence exceeds that of their electoral replacements. I demonstrate, then, that this institutional framework induces a higher proportion of replaced opposition officials compared to copartisans of the regime and encourages the population to electorally support candidates affiliated with the central government party in prior open-seat elections. The observed local electoral performance of the regime, under the influence of this hybrid institution, consistently surpasses its true popularity, even in the presence of competitive elections.