Playing the sycophant card: The logic and consequences of professing loyalty to the autocrat

Abstract

Despite the centrality of the loyalty–competence framework in research on authoritarian politics, scholars have only focused on material aspects of what elites do in their service to the dictator. Yet nonmaterial aspects such as sycophantically praising the autocrat in speech—a common, everyday practice under authoritarianism, have been ignored. We propose a novel theory to explain under what conditions elites “overpraise” the ruler and imitate his rhetoric, and whether they will be rewarded. We test the empirical implications through semisupervised text analysis and an original dataset of almost 1000 annual legislative addresses of Russian governors. Contrary to common assumptions that sycophancy is uniform across elites, we find that governors who are politically and economically vulnerable and without alternative career paths behave more sycophantically and show that they survive in office longer. Our results have important implications for how personality cults develop and how dictators navigate the loyalty–competence trade-off.