He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Purges: How Dictators Fight to Survive, and shared the following:
From page 99:Visit Edward Goldring's website.Despite the challenges of predicting purges, however, there are factors that are systematically associated with elite purges in dictatorships around the world. The previous chapter provided a series of general theoretical arguments that suggested that dictators purge elites for purposes related to consolidation, punishment, and scapegoating. Assuming that dictators wish to stay in power, chapter 3 proposed that dictators purge military elites to consolidate power, they punish disloyal military elites to reduce the likelihood of future challenges to the dictator, and they scapegoat civilian elites as a form of blame avoidance to alleviate threats to their position from the regime’s citizens.Page 99 is broadly characteristic of Purges. It challenges the prior conventional wisdom, among some scholars, that purges are idiosyncratic and cannot be predicted, and it sets out the three main arguments that are proposed and tested in the book’s main empirical chapters. However, while the book takes a scientific approach to studying purges under autocracy, which this page typifies, in my view, it undersells the details on purges that I attempted to include throughout the book to bring the subject matter to life.
In Purges, at least the first two of the three main arguments may seem somewhat obvious (that dictators purge elites to consolidate power and to punish disloyalty). However, what amazed me when I first started working on the book was how scholars had assumptions about why dictators purge elites, which were specific to the country that they focused on. What was lacking was a book that set out the main reasons why dictators across the world purge elites and then tests whether dictators are successful at using purges for those purposes. This book attempts to fill that gap.
--Marshal Zeringue
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