The Price of Incompetence: Security Failures and Selective Accountability in Autocracies

Do dictators hold their cabinet ministers accountable for policy failures, and do such failures push them to appoint more competent replacements? Existing research emphasizes loyalty as the dominant logic of authoritarian elite management, yet many cabinet portfolios carry responsibilities critical to regime survival. We argue that interior ministers, who oversee internal security and counter-terrorism, offer a revealing test of whether performance matters when the stakes are highest. Using an original dataset of more than 1,000 interior ministers across autocracies from 1970 to 2014, we show that deadly terrorism significantly increases the likelihood of ministerial dismissal. Yet, these crises do not lead dictators to appoint successors whose backgrounds signal greater security expertise. The result is a pattern of selective accountability: dictators punish visible failure but do not invest in preventing its recurrence. This asymmetry helps explain why authoritarian regimes often struggle to build effective security apparatuses despite acute survival pressures.