ABSTRACT
This work seeks to explain elite behaviour in authoritarian systems and proposes an explanation for why elites withdraw their support for the incumbent when faced with popular uprisings. Building upon foundations drawn from institutional authoritarianism and synthesised with local context from the substantial scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa, I argue that the elite supporting autocrats come from three distinct cadres: the military, the single-party and the personalist. Each of these cadres possesses their own distinct institutional interests and preferences towards regime change. Drawing on these interests, I construct a theoretical framework, which I assess through testing it against three variables. With an analytic narrative I find that the withdrawal of elite support is the consequence of long-term processes that see distinct cadres marginalised. First, increased incumbent preference for personalist elements destabilises regimes as the military and single-party cadres reconsider their positions. Second, neoliberal economic policies, implemented via structural adjustment, accelerated this personalisation as the state’s withdrawal from the economy. This in turn, affected the ability of the military and single-party elites to access patronage. Finally, I find that the degree of military involvement in the formal political sphere contributes to shaping the nature of the system that replaced the incumbent regime under examination.
