Control vs. Electoral Performance: Why Personalist Rulers Choose Local Governors

This study investigates why rulers choose local governors in multilevel personalist electoral autocracies. It argues that personalist rulers face the trade-off between maintaining political control and ensuring electoral performance. To manage this trade-off, a personalist ruler selects a local successor under two conditions: when the regional elite is highly cohesive and when the appointee does not pose a threat to the ruler’s control over the region. Such an appointee, being locally embedded, is able to maintain the cohesion of regional elite structures and thus ensure their stable functioning following a gubernatorial replacement. The article evaluates this argument by studying the appointment of a local governor in one Russian region. It employs social network analysis using a biographical dataset of elite connections in Kaluga Oblast in 2020 and 2024. The results support the proposed argument and offer new insights into elite management strategies in multilevel personalist autocracies. They suggest that the ruler adopts a complex strategy when selecting regional executives.