Replication Data for "Playing the Sycophant Card: The Logic and Consequences of Professing Loyalty to the Autocrat"

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 non-material 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 semi-supervised 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 tradeoff.

尽管忠诚-能力框架（loyalty-competence framework）在威权政治（authoritarian politics）研究中占据核心地位，但现有学界仅聚焦于精英为独裁者效劳时的物质层面行为。然而，诸如在公开演讲中阿谀奉承独裁者这类威权体制下常见的日常实践的非物质层面，却长期被研究者忽视。
我们提出一套新颖的理论体系，用以阐释精英在何种条件下会‘过度颂扬’统治者并模仿其修辞策略，以及此类行为能否为他们带来正向回报。我们通过半监督文本分析（semi-supervised text analysis）与一套涵盖近1000份俄罗斯州长年度立法致辞的原创数据集，对该理论的实证推论展开检验。
与‘精英间阿谀行为趋同’的普遍学术假设相悖，我们发现，在政治与经济层面均处于弱势且缺乏替代性职业路径的州长，其阿谀奉承的表现更为突出，且这类州长的在职任期更长。
本研究结果对于理解个人崇拜（personality cults）的形成机制，以及独裁者如何应对忠诚-能力权衡（loyalty-competence tradeoff）具有重要的理论启示意义。