The expansion of power by incumbent political leaders has become the subject of increased scholarly attention. In democracies, this is known as ‘subversions by the ruling executive’, ‘executive aggrandizement’, or ‘autogolpe’; in autocracies, researchers study ‘personalization’, ‘transition to personal rulership’, or ‘power-grabbing’. While the terminological landscape is rich, there is little conceptual agreement of what leader-driven power expansion is (and is not). Furthermore, we still lack broad data that allow us to investigate the phenomenon systematically across democracy and autocracy. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, it offers a unified approach to study leader-driven power expansion – incumbent takeovers – across the political regime spectrum. Second, drawing from 11 datasets and original data collection and coding, we introduce a new, comprehensive dataset on 495 individual takeover events carried out by 279 political leaders in 132 countries in the period 1918–2019. We provide estimates of the takeover onset years, the time to takeover, the length of the takeover spells, and discuss the differences between distinct indicators, inter alia. Future research may leverage these data for a better understanding of the drivers of incumbent takeovers as well as the role of takeovers in regime change, civil wars, coups, and uprisings.

中文翻译：

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现有收购

现任政治领导人扩大权力已成为学术界日益关注的主题。在民主国家，这被称为“执政的行政部门的颠覆”、“行政扩张”或“autogolpe”；在专制国家，研究人员研究“个性化”、“向个人统治过渡”或“权力攫取”。虽然术语很丰富，但对于领导者驱动的权力扩张是（和不是）几乎没有概念上的一致。此外，我们仍然缺乏广泛的数据，使我们能够系统地调查民主和专制的现象。本文的贡献是双重的。首先，它提供了一种统一的方法来研究领导者驱动的权力扩张——现任接管——在整个政治体制范围内。二、取自11个数据集和原始数据采集编码，我们引入了一个新的综合数据集，该数据集包含 1918-2019 年期间 132 个国家的 279 位政治领导人进行的 495 次个人收购事件。我们提供了对收购开始年份、收购时间、收购期限的估计，并讨论了不同指标之间的差异等。未来的研究可能会利用这些数据更好地了解现有收购的驱动因素以及收购在政权更迭、内战、政变和起义中的作用。