Autocratic regimes can collapse if they employ stabilization strategies that do not meet the conditions for success. This is the conclusion of the latest evaluation study of autocratic stabilization strategies, which puts forward the thesis of strategic governance failure (Kater 2024). In this analysis, the thesis and the underlying research design are applied to the contrasting phenomenon of regime stability. For the period under review from 1980 to 2010, seven fsQCA analyses of 71 autocratic regimes that survived and collapsed are used to test whether effective and efficient combinations of stabilization strategies and their framework conditions are sufficient conditions for the outcome of autocratic regime stability. The study concludes that the thesis of strategic controllability provides an explanatory pathway for 17 of 27 stable autocratic regimes. Based on the results, the compensation thesis according to Gerschewski et al. (2013) is extended to the framework conditions of autocratic stabilization strategies. This allows a distinction to be made between stabilization strategies that require compensation and those that are capable of compensation. Autocratic regime stability can thus be explained more precisely.
