“Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War”, 2009-07-01 (; backlinks; similar):
Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a new dataset of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875–129200420ya, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify the effects of assassination. We find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts. The results document a contemporary source of institutional change, inform theories of conflict, and show that small sources of randomness can have a pronounced effect on history.
…To implement this approach, we collected data on all publicly-reported assassination attempts for all national leaders since 1875. This produced 298 assassination attempts, of which 59 resulted in the leader’s death. We show that, conditional on an attempt taking place, whether the attack succeeds or fails in killing the leader appears uncorrelated with observable economic and political features of the national environment, suggesting that our basic identification strategy may be plausible.
We find that assassinations of autocrats produce substantial changes in the country’s institutions, while assassinations of democrats do not. In particular, transitions to democracy, as measured using the Polity IV dataset (2004), are 13% more likely following the assassination of an autocrat than following a failed attempt on an autocrat. Similarly, using data on leadership transitions from the Archigos dataset ( et al 2006), we find that the probability that subsequent leadership transitions occur through institutional means is 19% higher following the assassination of an autocrat than following the failed assassination of an autocrat. The effects on institutions extend over [long] periods, with evidence that the impacts are sustained at least 10 years later.