Are political assasinations pointless?

“Assassination has never changed the history of the world.”
- Benjamin Disraeli, 1865, on the death of Abraham Lincoln

On the eve of the current Iraq war the US government actively sought to kill Saddam Hussein through targeted bombing- would it be any different if US managed to kill Saddam then? . A new working paper addresses political assasinations and its success- Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War” by Benjamin Jones, Northwestern University, and Benjamin Olken;

Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a new data set of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to 2004, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify assassination's effects. We find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts. The results document a contemporary source of institutional change, inform theories of conflict, and show that small sources of randomness can have a pronounced effect on history

The Economist also covered the paper;

The bad news for would-be Lee Harvey Oswalds is that the success rate is pretty poor. Only 59 of the 298 attempts resulted in the target's death, a hit rate of one in five. If you are planning to knock off a leader, it is far better to use a gun. Assassination attempts using firearms had a kill rate of around 30%, whereas those using bombs or other explosive devices worked only 7% of the time (but often harmed bystanders).

The good news for political leaders is that their chance of surviving office is improving. While the annual number of assassination attempts has been increasing (currently around one every two years), there are a lot more countries (and thus more leaders) than there were in the early 20th century. In the 1910s, a given leader had a 1% chance of being killed in any given year; today, the probability is around 0.3%.

Killing leaders does make a difference, but only in certain circumstances. Democracies seem to be able to cope with the loss of a president or prime minister. But in autocracies, a successful assassination was 13 percentage points more likely than a failed attempt to result in a transition to democracy. The “beneficial” impact of an autocrat's removal was still observable ten years later. However, given the low success rate of assassins, the gamble might not be worth it; autocrats who survived an attack tended to tighten their grip.

When it comes to wars, the effects are more subtle. Assassinations tend to hasten the end of intense wars (those with more than 1,000 battle deaths) but, prior to the second world war, made small-scale conflicts more intense. As for initiating conflicts, the academics find assassinations are irrelevant. So even if Franz Ferdinand had dodged the bullet, the first world war might have happened anyway

Excerpt from the conclusion;

In sum, these results show that assassinations affect political institutions and conflict. Whether or not assassinations change “the history of the world” in Disraeli’s words, they do appear to change the history of individual countries. Our tests provide evidence that small elements of randomness - the path of a bullet, the timing of an explosion, small shifts in a leader’s schedule - can result in substantial changes in national outcomes. The findings lend support to theoretical models of conflict that feature leadership and further suggest that individual autocrats appear to be cornerstones of national institutions, complementing the literature on institutional origins by showing an important component of institutional change that lies not in distant history but in contemporary hands.

Related;
A Data Base on Leaders 1875 - 2004