In comparison to democratic political systems, we know very little about how dictatorships work. Who are the key political actors? Where does the locus of power rest? What determines leadership behavior-and survival?

Erica Frantz and Natasha Ezrow argue that dictatorships are not regimes driven by the whims of a single individual. Frantz and Ezrow reveal how leader-elite relations are strongly influenced by the nature of the political institutions in a regime, and in turn how those relations profoundly affect both domestic and foreign policy. Combining cross-national quantitative analyses with a selection of case studies, they uniquely explore the internal architecture of authoritarian government.