The Dictator as Discriminating Monopsonist; and the Rally Effect in Wartime Ukraine

Abstract

This dissertation engages with questions from the study of authoritarianism and international conflict. Most authoritarian regimes today are multi-party authoritarian regimes, often with a dominant party that shapes policy and controls the flow of rents, and one or more parties in ``loyal'' opposition. This leads to a puzzle: how does the presence of multiple parties benefit the authoritarian leader, and why would someone join a loyal opposition party instead of the dominant party? I present a new model of the authoritarian regime as a discriminating monopsonist. By providing elites expressive benefits and rents through the choice of political parties, authoritarian regimes economize on the purchase of regime support. I test this theory by analyzing party switching by Duma deputies in Russia in 2006-2007 and find preliminary support for the model's expectations. The second question examines the ``rally ‘round the flag'' effect in Ukraine following Russia's 2014 invasion. It adds to the existing literature by asking how ethnic identity and conflict proximity relate to attitudes towards the home state and the adversary. Using a lab-based implicit association test (IAT) and survey, we examine whether implicit biases, reflexive preferences that are hard to manipulate, match explicitly stated preferences for either Ukraine or Russia. We find that, on average, ethnic Ukrainians and Russians in Ukraine are explicitly and implicitly pro-Ukraine, although we observe slightly lower levels of pro-Ukraine bias among ethnic Russians. This study was first published in International Studies Quarterly (Erlich & Garner, 2021).