Arid-zone states cycle rulers while preserving the governing structure intact.

Evidence

It is a system of rotating corporate elites, in which the personnel changes but the structure remains the same. The city provides the tribesmen with the technical and cultural equipment on which they have come to rely: the tribesmen, or rather some of them, provide the city with government and defence, whilst the rest of the tribes govern themselves, and also constitute the permanent threat which keeps the city subservient to its temporary and rotated rulers. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1989

Categorization

• XREF: A structural-functionalist model of political stability that offers a counterpoint to Saramago’s Hobbesian collapse — governance here survives because succession is routinized.