The Heir's Discount: Hamilton's Rule, Socioemotional Wealth Theory, and Why Political Science Has Modeled Elite Acceptance of Dynastic Succession Without Modeling the Ruler's Own Preference for It

Jason Brownlee's "Hereditary Succession in Modern Autocracies" (2007) remains the field's central empirical treatment of dynastic succession in nonmonarchical autocracies: an original dataset of 258 post–World War II autocrats, of whom only nine successfully transferred power to a hereditary successor. Brownlee's explanation, extending Gordon Tullock's hypothesis, is a rational-choice account of elite coordination — hereditary succession functions as a focal point that spares non-familial elites a destructive leadership struggle, and elites accept it precisely where no prior institution, such as a ruling party, already serves that coordinating function. This theory, rigorously tested and empirically supported, explains why elites go along with a hereditary succession once offered. It treats the ruler's own preference for a blood heir as a background given, not a variable requiring its own causal account. This paper supplies the missing model for the succession case specifically, using two pieces of formal apparatus already available — one from this corpus, one from an adjacent field that has already done the relevant work at a smaller scale and simply never been extended upward to the state. The first is Hamilton's Rule: a biological child carries relatedness r = 0.5 to the parent, meaning the child's success or survival returns fitness value to the ruler discounted by half rather than by the near-total discount an unrelated successor's success would carry. This alone, independent of Tullock's elite-coordination logic, predicts that a ruler will favor a blood heir over an equally or even somewhat more competent non-kin candidate across a real, quantifiable zone of competence difference. The second is socioemotional wealth theory (Gómez-Mejía et al. 2007), the dominant framework in family-business research, which finds that family firm owners systematically accept reduced financial performance and elevated business risk to preserve the affective, identity-constitutive value of keeping control within the family — a finding replicated across firms and countries, developed independently of political science and, though recently given its own evolutionary-psychological grounding at firm scale (Yu, Stanley, Li, Eddleston, & Kellermanns, 2020), never yet extended to the state. This paper argues dynastic autocracy is that extension's missing large-N case: the same preference, already shown at firm scale to track relatedness continuously rather than merely as a family/non-family binary, recurring at state scale where Brownlee's own data documents the behavior but Tullock's own theory does not explain the ruler's side of it. The paper further argues dynastic succession draws on both self-directed and other-directed attachment simultaneously, a combination structurally harder to override than ordinary favoritism toward a talented non-kin protégé. The paper closes by testing this account against two objections — that it merely restates an existing institutional account of hereditary rule, and that it merely restates an existing evolutionary account of family-firm succession — and shows in each case precisely where this paper's claim diverges from, rather than duplicates, the literature it draws on, before testing the account against a third objection from recent behavioral-genetics research.