Popular imagination pictures a dictator's rise as tanks in the street. In practice, political scientists who study authoritarian regimes point to a much smaller set of recurring pathways, most of which start inside the existing system rather than outside it. Understanding which path a leader took usually explains a great deal about how they hold on afterward.
1. The classic coup
The most familiar route: military or security officers move against a sitting government, often citing instability, corruption or a national emergency. Research on coups since 1946 has found that in the overwhelming majority of attempts, serving members of the security apparatus were directly involved, which is one reason regimes born this way tend to reward the military heavily in their first years in power. Coups are also frequently followed by rushed power concentration, as a leader moves quickly to sideline the same factions that helped install him.
2. The self-coup, or autogolpe
A subtler and increasingly common path is the autogolpe, a leader who reaches power through legitimate elections and then dismantles the checks on their own office from the inside. Political scientist Maxwell Cameron has described the logic plainly: presidents use self-coups to pursue policies that an independent legislature or judiciary would otherwise block. The best known case remains Peru's Alberto Fujimori, who in 1992 used military backing to shut down congress and the courts after his own party held barely a fifth of parliamentary seats, a move widely credited with cementing the term in political science. Because the leader is already in office when it happens, a self-coup can look almost bureaucratic from the outside, an emergency decree here, a court-packing bill there, until the outcome is identical to a putsch.
3. Competitive elections, hollowed out
A third path skips the drama entirely. A leader wins a real, contested election, then uses the machinery of the state, courts, media regulators, electoral commissions, to make sure the next contest is never quite fair again. Scholars of what is often called competitive authoritarianism have documented how this produces regimes that hold votes, count ballots, and still are not democracies in any meaningful sense, because the opposition never competes on equal footing. Vladimir Putin and Paul Kagame both illustrate variations of this path: elections continue, margins stay implausibly large, and the space for a genuine challenger quietly disappears between cycles.
4. Inheritance and dynastic succession
The fourth path requires no seizure at all. Power simply passes from father to son, or from a founding leader to a chosen successor inside a one-party system. Xi Jinping's rise through the Chinese Communist Party's internal succession machinery, and hereditary transfers of power in states such as North Korea, show how a regime can renew its leadership indefinitely without ever holding a genuine popular contest. This path tends to produce the most durable regimes of all, since legitimacy is generated internally, by the party or the family, rather than contested externally.
Why the path matters later
The route to power shapes the tools available afterward. A leader who arrived through a coup usually owes the military and has to keep paying that debt. A leader who arrived through a self-coup has already shown a willingness to gut institutions and rarely stops there. A leader who hollowed out elections has to keep the ritual of voting alive, which constrains them in small but real ways. And a leader who inherited power through a party or family structure answers to that structure, not to the public, which is a very different kind of vulnerability.
None of these paths is disappearing. If anything, the self-coup and the hollowed-out election have become more common than the tank-in-the-street coup, precisely because they are harder to sanction and slower to trigger international alarm.