Strategic gerontocracy: why nondemocratic systems produce older leaders Raul Magni Berton 1 • Sophie Panel 2 Received: 13 March 2017 / Accepted: 5 April 2017 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract One characteristic of nondemocratic regimes is that leaders cannot be removed from office by legal means: in most authoritarian regimes, no institutional way of dis- missing incompetent rulers is available, and overthrowing them is costly. Anticipating this, people who have a say in the selection of the leader are likely to resort to alternative strategies to limit his tenure. In this paper, we examine empirically the ‘‘strategic geron- tocracy’’ hypothesis: Because selecting aging leaders is a convenient way of reducing their expected time in office, gerontocracy will become a likely outcome whenever leaders are expected to rule for life. We test this hypothesis using data on political leaders for the period from 1960 to 2008, and find that dictators have shorter life expectancies than democrats at the time they take office. We also observe variations in the life expectancies of dictators: those who are selected by consent are on average closer to death than those who seize power in an irregular manner. This finding suggests that gerontocracy is a consequence of the choice process, since it disappears when dictators self-select into leadership positions. Keywords Gerontocracy Á Democracy Á Dictatorship Á Leadership selection Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11127-017-0449-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Raul Magni Berton raul.magniberton@iepg.fr Sophie Panel sophie.panel@scpobx.fr 1 Sciences Po Grenoble, PACTE, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, 1030 av. centrale, 38400 Saint-Martin-d’He `res, France 2 Sciences Po Bordeaux, Centre Emile Durkheim, 11 alle ´e Ausone, 33600 Pessac, France 123 Public Choice DOI 10.1007/s11127-017-0449-5