Why Political Assassinations Often Succeed

The assassination attempt on Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico is part of a wave of political violence directed at leaders around the world. The leader of the Democratic Party of Korea, Lee Jae-myung, was stabbed in the neck by an assailant in January, while Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was killed in August of last year, to cite just two examples.

Are assassinations characteristic of a specific stage of economic development? Do assassinations successfully change the course of history? What is the going rate on the black market for an assassination attempt?

Those are a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast that we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: Are assassinations characteristic of a specific stage of economic development? And is the same thing true of other types of political violence?

Adam Tooze: I think this is a really fascinating question and has led me down multiple different rabbit holes. Maybe we can get a grip on this by distinguishing different types of killings that we could call assassinations. If you think of assassination as political coup-style killing, so an inside job, it really is as old as there’s been political organization and some sort of rules against just killing in general. And so, I mean, I think that one of the first Egyptian pharaohs, Pharaoh Teti, who ruled in the 23rd century BCE, may have succumbed to an inside job. And that then rumbles through history all the way down to the present day. It’s quite commonplace in the course of military coups that the incumbent ends up dead. So that has a sort of history that’s almost timeless, I think, as a mechanism for resolving political dispute. I’m not keen on that kind of argument, but it’s pretty hard to really see any period of history where it didn’t happen.

Assassination in war, like targeted sniping of the other side’s king or general or whatever, has a more checkered history in that for long periods, it was normal in the sense that kings and generals were involved in general combat. So the last king probably to be shot off his horse in combat was Charles XII of Sweden fighting Peter the Great in Russia in 1718, what was then the Russian Empire in 1718. And then in the 18th, 19th, and for much of the 20th century, targeted killing of the political leaders of the other side really went out of fashion. I mean, it was considered, broadly speaking, against the rules of war of the 18th, 19th century. It wasn’t something that you did. You could kill the other side’s soldiers, but you didn’t try and snipe Napoleon. That wasn’t fair at all. Nelson, the commander of the British fleet at Trafalgar, was shot. And so in that kind of close-quarter fighting, it was more normal. But then in the 20th century, those norms disintegrated, so that Hitler was targeted both by the British and the American Secret Service. Senior Nazis, Heydrich was executed by a British hit squad with the Czech resistance. And then, in the wars of the 20th century, for instance, the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] leadership were systematically targeted by Mossad and were themselves, of course, engaged in terrorism against the Israeli state. And in the new age of drone warfare, it’s become the standard mode of operation. So targeted killing by drone has become the principal way in which America wages its wars at long range against both formal and informal opponents. So Saddam Hussein, for instance, was hunted down without compunction, as though he was just any other kind of target.

The political dimension is the one which I think does take modern politics to get you there. And I think probably the origin of this does lie in religion, though. And to that extent it goes back quite a long way, indeed, to the origin of the term “assassin,” which comes out of an obscure phase in the history of Islam, which goes well above my pay grade in terms of scholarship. But it’s basically the Islamic sect, which are, I believe, a breakaway from Shiitism, who became notorious in the early Middle Ages for their self-defensive strategy of assassination. And apparently the word “assassin” derives from a corruption of hashish, because they were not just assassins but notorious for their legendary drug consumption. And so we get assassin by way of a series of derivations. And so that points to a millennial history, even, of that kind of politically motivated assassination. It isn’t quite the modernist line that I thought. Because, yes, when one thinks of the bomb-throwing anarchist assassin, for instance, it does point one to a rather modern history. But I think taken in the large, we would have to say it’s a fairly regular occurrence of human politics. It’s one, after all, that’s kind of a temptingly efficient way of dealing with your problem. Why not just go to the head of the snake and cut it off?

CA: It seems like assassins are motivated by a desire to change history. On basic terms, are they correct? Do assassinations successfully change the course of events?

AT: I think there’s a really interesting study that you found, actually, by Jones and Olken, that was published in 2009, where they look at a systematic data set of the evidence on both attempted and failed assassination attempts since 1875, of which they found 298 cases, 59 of which actually resulted in the killing of a leader. And what they asked was what impact did this have on regime type? So then they used one of these, like the polity database, which is a database which spans several centuries and ranks countries in terms of autocracy and democracy. If listeners have seen those statistical graphs which show the, you know, the relative share of the world’s population that live under autocracies as opposed to democracy, it’s that kind of database. And then they’ve used a Correlates of War-type database on armed conflict. And so what they’ve asked is, in these cases where you’ve got 298 assassinations, 59 of which are successful, what impact does it have on regime type in the aftermath, and what impact does it have on the incidents of organized violence? And unsurprisingly, perhaps, they find that successful assassinations tend to lead to at least a temporary upsurge in low-level violence. So people go for guns, and this changes the name of the political game.

But what they also find is that successful assassinations of authoritarian leaders tend, broadly speaking, on average, to lead to a slightly higher probability of transition to democratic conditions. So it would seem that this large-scale study empirically demonstrates the logic of revolutionary left-wing action, namely kill an authoritarian leader and you have to weather the storm of a higher level of violence that follows, but statistically speaking, your likelihood of emerging with a democratic system is somewhat higher. It depends how you take the polity measure and whether that’s really a left-wing policy or simply a progressive policy. I don’t know. But it certainly suggests that assassinations do make a difference. Unsurprisingly, they make the biggest difference in regimes which tend as a structural problem to have the succession question open. In other words, what do you do after the dictator is a key problem for dictatorships. Democracies just sort of shrug and move on and elect somebody else. Kennedy’s killed, you put Johnson in, right? It’s not the end of the world, it just vindicates the mechanism. Whereas if you kill a dictator, it’s not obvious what happens next, because so often those regimes are really ultimately centered on that individual. So they’re more fragile and they’re more open to change as a result. So I think it, broadly speaking, kind of convincingly confirms one’s intuitions.

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CA: What is the going rate on the black market for an assassination attempt? And how does that price even get established in the first place?

AT: There’s a couple of academic studies which focused on Australia and Britain, which came to the sobering conclusion that killing people is surprisingly cheap. Cheap in the sense that the value of human lives, if measured by life insurance and so on, runs into the millions, and the average or median cost among attested cases that came to trial of assassins was in the sort of $10,000 to $20,000 range to have somebody killed. Now those are in a sense the less successful cases, because those are the ones that came to trial. And as the authors of the studies point out, you know, highly successful, highly professional assassins presumably get caught less. So they may cost more, and this data may be biased. But a key thing about both those markets is that they’re not large enough. The vast majority of cases captured by the law are crimes of passion, essentially: People wanting to have their intimate partners killed. That seems to be the main motive in those.

But their data is only really a few hundred cases over several decades. So these are extremely, as micro-economists would say, imperfect markets for murder. They suffer from what, apparently, micro-economists call the double-virginity problem, which is that both the person contracting the killer and the killer may have rather little experience of actually transacting on this issue. And so price formation is very imperfect, right? This is the language of a micro-economist. So I thought to myself, this is silly. Let’s go to somewhere where contract killing is routine and where prices can be quite clearly established.

So let’s go to a place with a very large-scale organized crime problem like Mexico, where tens of thousands of people are killed by assassination, and where, in fact, we can get quite a lot of price data, and it’s fairly well established. And it points in the same direction, which is that in a place like that, where there are many people who engage in killing for small payments or, indeed, none at all with their part of gangs—it’s part of a loyalty proof. The price is ridiculously low. You know, in an advanced economy, $10,000 to $20,000. In Mexico, it can go down as low as $50 to $100. It’s a day’s work, essentially, for a bunch of young men, young kids on motorbikes who will kill somebody. In Mexico as well, though, there is a high-end market for assassination where if you want to kill a police chief, in one attested case, the going rate was more like that in Australia or Britain, which was about $20,000. But the cartels pay peanuts. And even in, you know, more, complicated cases, there’s been instances where they’ve hired U.S. soldiers, Marines, for $5,000 to $10,000. You can well imagine a professional soldier with particular skills hard up in his luck being offered a deal he couldn’t refuse by a cartel. And that would put you in that kind of range. So in those cases, you know, killing is very much part of a repertoire of crime, which could start with people-smuggling or with kidnapping. And outright murder, then, just becomes part of a spectrum of activity. The threshold is not that large. The double-virginity problem doesn’t exist, because both contracting to kill and agreeing to kill, bargaining to kill, are routine activities carried out almost on a daily basis.

What these prices tend to reflect is that the parties to the bargain, both those contracting and those agreeing to kill, clearly, broadly speaking, assume they’re not going to get caught, because otherwise you would think, given the life-destroying consequences of agreeing to this bargain, that it would be much higher. Or conversely, perhaps in a drug- and gang-dominated environment, the opportunity cost, in other words, your expectation of your life is so low that even these kinds of minimal payments seem reasonable.