Strategies of political control and regime survival in autocracies

How do autocrats establish political control? Understanding the strategies autocrats use to generate mass compliance and elite loyalty remains a central question in comparative politics. Despite substantial scholarship on this topic, ongoing research highlights the need for more comprehensive accounts of how autocrats combine different political control strategies, and which strategies are most important for explaining regime durability across diverse contexts and time periods. This article advances this line of research by integrating data from the Varieties of Democracy and Varieties of Indoctrination datasets to systematically map the use of six key strategies of repression, co-optation, and indoctrination across 229 regimes from 1946 to 2010. We then apply model-based clustering and Bayesian model stacking methods to uncover common patterns in the deployment of these strategies and identify which strategies best predict regime breakdown. The article's rich data, empirical approach, and findings lay the groundwork for more integrated inquiries into autocratic regime performance and longevity.