2025 Theses Bachelor's

War Outcomes and Leader Tenure: Defining a New Approach in Armenia and Beyond

Melkonyan, Victoria

This thesis examines the enduring question of how leaders who suffer poor war outcomes are able to remain in power. The paper introduces four new arguments based on the post-loss resilience of Armenian leader Nikol Pashinyan, a revolutionary leader and anocrat whose tenure has been marked by high GDP per capita growth and low participation in civil society, holding that each of these four characteristics is important to longer leader survival. Using a semiparametric Cox proportional hazards model, the paper captures the varying effects of different war outcomes on leaders depending on their regime type (defined in a new manner), their economic performance, the level of political activity or apathy in their countries, and whether or not they came into power through revolution. The results observed in the paper indicate that high growth and revolutionary beginnings play a significant role in moderating risks of ouster, in accordance with two hypotheses, though they are inconclusive as regards the impact of civil society participation levels. The results also demonstrate that anocracies are distinct from democracies or autocracies and do not experience the risks associated with either of the latter two regime categories.