Abstract
Arno Tausch’s illustrious career spanned five very prolific decades. The topics he explored include political stability, militarization, terrorism, and political violence, to name a few. In this essay, we honor his legacy with research that investigates why governments declare a state of emergency. Scholars see in these events instances of political instability. We argue that emergencies can create potential opportunities for executives to reshape the balance of power in their favor. However, the opportunity dynamics they open, either through extra-constitutional means (e.g., a coup or auto-coup) or autocratization, vary by regime type and are contingent on the personalization of executive power within a regime. In tending to this heterogeneity in regimes’ invocations of emergencies, we follow Arno Tausch’s exemplary use of quantitative analysis to answer complicated questions. Arno Tausch relied on both deductive and inductive methodologies. We first use an inductive approach to uncover meaningful patterns. We then conduct a nonlinear analysis of state-of-emergency (SOE) episodes from 1950 to 2010. Our findings indicate that multiparty dictatorships produce significantly more SOEs compared to democracies. However, they witness fewer SOEs in the presence of more powerful executives. The latter are also more likely to trigger an autocratization episode.