  Existing research has established that autocrats offer concessions to prevent
ouster by their inner circle. This paper examines how those concessions are
influenced by the relative uncertainty of an autocrat's inner circle about
remaining in that favored body. I take as my starting point the formal model of
political survival presented in Bueno de Mesquita et al.'s The Logic of
Political Survival. I extend the model to account for variation in the relative
uncertainty of an autocrat's inner circle. To make the math tractable, I
dispense with convention and introduce comparative statics across two models
with different formulations of uncertainty. This exercise reveals a set of
conditions under which to expect an increase in the concessions offered by an
autocrat, with implications for development and democracy. Those findings yield
a corresponding set of logical corollaries with potential to further our
understanding of authoritarian politics, including an unexamined facet of the
"dictator's dilemma" (Wintrobe 1990, 1998) and related incentives for members
of an inner circle to permit purges or act to destabilize their ranks. The
models also identify a source of policy volatility not found outside of
autocracies. Taken together, the findings suggest a need for more research on
elite uncertainty in autocracies.
