Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a
new data set of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to
2004, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of
assassination attempts to identify assassination’s effects. We find that, on
average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves
toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of
small-scale conflicts. The results document a contemporary source of
institutional change, inform theories of conflict, and show that small
sources of randomness can have a pronounced effect on history.
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