New Insights On Africa's Autocratic Past.

That is, even in regimes in which formal institutions played key roles, state resources and power were not only distributed according to the clear, formal criteria laid out by these institutions and as is necessary to promote mutual elite expectations and regime stability via elite power-sharing. Unlike personalist autocracies, single-party autocracies regimes were considered highly institutionalized with all regime matters occurring through formal channels that existed apart from, and superseded, the autocrat. Classifying authoritarian regimes: Africa and beyond As autocracy took root soon after the independence era, contemporaneous scholarship documented the ways in which these regimes operated, and specifically, how they dealt with the problem of power-sharing among the ruling elite. While leaders of personalist regimes share spoils and power as well, they do so through highly unstable personalistic ties - 'access to office and the fruits of office depends much more on the discretion of an individual leader' - that leads to systematically weaker regimes. [Extracted from the article]