Why do People Follow Leaders? Evidence from 1936 Spain

Abstract

Why do people follow leaders? We address this question by studying the Spanish Coup of 1936, where the military split between rebels and loyalists. The 1936 chain of command largely broke down, but subordinates followed their former commanders. Officers who had served under rebel leaders before 1936 were thirteen percentage points more likely to join the rebellion, even though these leaders no longer held formal authority over them. Our identification strategy exploits rotation among military leaders to compare officers exposed to rebel leaders to their peers who served in the same posting a few years before or after. We show that our control and treatment samples are balanced in many covariates and that our findings are not driven by selection. We examine three channels through which past leaders might influence their former subordinates: coordination, indoctrination, and career concerns. Our evidence supports two channels: coordination (officers used their former leaders' choices to predict the coup's success) and career concerns (officers who followed successful coup leaders historically received faster promotions). We find no evidence for indoctrination.