Winners, losers, and puppets: Deposed leaders and foreign policy compliance

This dissertation examines the relationships between regime type, external depositions, and foreign policy compliance by examining bilateral trade, alliance portfolios, and voting patterns in the UN General Assembly in post-intervention dyadic relations. Building on recent theoretical literature in international relations on leaders' incentives and how these vary in different regime types, it argues that more democratic states are more constrained in their ability to cooperate in post-intervention periods because of domestic constraints. Moreover, we should expect non-democracies to comply more following external depositions on trade, security ties, and UN voting given their lack of (or lesser) accountability to domestic audiences.; Leaders in various regime types rely on different sizes of groups for their survival in power and they should reward these groups in order to maintain their seat. Furthermore, leaders can end their tenure in numerous ways and the probability of those occurring changes in different regime types. I show that the more democratic a state is, the more likely its leader to lose her seat in a constitutional manner whereas in non-democracies the leader is more likely to end her tenure by either an external deposition, or an internal deposition, assassination or natural death.; These arguments are supported by a range of statistical analyses of all leaders in the 20th century in all independent states in the international system. The findings indicate that even though bilateral ties might improve following external depositions those will most probably be short term effects the more democratic the target state is. The findings are consistent when we analyze all cases in which the United States has deposed foreign rivals and all cases of depositions in the 20th century.