➜ authoritarian systems do not provide any official mechanism by which the people can hold the government accountable for its actions and policies.
➜ many factors can influence the manner in which authoritarianism emerges and endures, including economic, social, religious, and historical conditions.
➜ authoritarian systems primarily use coercion and cooptation to maintain rule and legitimacy, with strong patterns of state corporatism and patron-clientelism.
➜ authoritarian systems can take many forms, including military rule, personal rule, one-party states, and theocratic rule.
Authoritarian rule, in a sense, has existed since the beginning of human government. It is in essence, nondemocratic rule. Democracy (as defined in the previous chapter) is a political system that has existed only since the twentieth century. After all, even in the histories of modern liberal democratic states like the United States and United Kingdom, the “common man” who didn’t own much property was only given the right to vote in elections in the early and mid-nineteenth century; minority nations and races were excluded from the process before this time, and female suffrage rights did not come about until the twentieth century. However, states with democratic tendencies have been on an ever expanding path of increasing participation, increasing input, and increasing suffrage for all of their citizens since their establishment. Authoritarian regimes are distinguished by the way they invest political authority into a small group of individuals who exercise this authority without any constitutional responsibility to the public. More than any other characteristic, the evidence of authoritarianism is that the people do not have a viable constitutional mechanism to remove one government and replace it with another. Prior to the eighteenth century, it could be said that all political regimes in the world were basically authoritarian, though some to greater extent than others. In the modern world, authoritarian regimes are on the wane globally, but some states are showing a resurgence in authoritarian tendencies. No two authoritarian systems are alike. Some regimes stage elections to determine the winner, yet rig the process to favor the ruling elite. Some put on a façade of an election that is meant to look democratic, but will never actually be accurately counted. Others do not even bother with the façade. In this chapter, we will examine the causes, methods, and results of authoritarian rule.
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Authoritarian systems do not give the people a formal or regular opportunity to change the government and replace it with another.
Before going any further, clarification is required: authoritarianism is not the same thing as totalitarianism. Totalitarian regimes attempt to control and dominate every aspect of their people’s lives, including their career choices, family life, and their political and religious beliefs. Totalitarian regimes emerged in many European states in the 1920s and 1930s, most famously in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mussolini’s Italy. The Cultural Revolution in China from 1966 to 1976 is also frequently cited as a totalitarian system. Other than those few exceptions, most authoritarian regimes are decisively not totalitarian. While the political elites stay in political power regardless of the will of the public, they will still for the most part stay out of the everyday lives of their subjects. People in most authoritarian regimes are still often free to marry whom they want, choose where to live and what to do for work, and continue practicing their religious beliefs (though there are certainly many cases where they may not).
While no factor can be singled out or attributed as the “cause” of authoritarianism, there are some common factors that authoritarian societies tend to possess.
Wealthier societies of the developed world are almost universally liberal democracies today. Widely distributed wealth among a large middle class deeply undermines authoritarian systems, as people with their own wealth have a “stake” in the political decisions of the state, and thus a strong desire for their demands to be heard in policymaking. They also have the means, the time, and the education level to take political action through civil society. The history of the developed world after the Industrial Revolution has proven the degree to which a large middle class makes nondemocratic rule nearly impossible to maintain.
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Massive economic inequality can contribute to authoritarianism, while a large and broad middle class would undermine authoritarian rule.
By contrast, societies with widespread poverty and deep inequality have two likely political paths, both of which result in authoritarian rule. In one scenario, the few in the wealthy elite will use the power of the state to suppress demands for reform, and hold onto their positions on top, resorting to tyranny or potentially to violence. In the other scenario, the “have-nots” organize a movement to seize control of the state from the elites, possibly through revolutionary violence, and forcibly redistribute the wealth of the old elite.
The impact of political culture cannot be overstated in the emergence of democratic or authoritarian regimes. Societies, with their long histories of political development, have gradually created rules and tendencies around how politics are assumed to operate. Some societies have existed for thousands of years with deeply rooted authoritarian practices that emerged out of necessity for security and survival. Statism, or the tendency to trust in the state for security and provision of basic needs, for example, emerged in Russia after centuries of foreign invasion and oppression. Early Muscovite tsars exerted strong and forcible political and military authority to bring about Russian independence from Mongol rule, and Russians have come to trust the state for protection from invasion from all manner of other foreign enemies in the last two centuries, from the French in the Napoleonic Wars to NATO and the nuclear threat during the Cold War. Countries like England, with the benefit of the protection offered by its island geography, were never similarly at risk of foreign occupation as the Russians were, and England was able to develop its own constitutional system over time.
While religion does not automatically push a society toward democracy or authoritarianism, some religions are more prone to nondemocratic tendencies than others. Catholicism and Islam, for example, establish formal religious hierarchies that must be respected by adherents to the faith, and advancement up the “ladder” of authority in each is determined by those who are already on the inside. Countries with longstanding ties to Catholicism and Islam have been much slower to develop democracy than countries rooted in Protestant denominations of Christianity. Protestant denominations, after all, emerged directly as a result of challenge to existing institutional authority, and emerged during the eighteenth century with an emphasis on freedom of religious choice and religious toleration, which have translated into acceptance of democratic values. Islamic culture, by contrast, often characterizes the liberal democratic Western tradition as egocentric and individualistic, and destructive toward godliness.
While no two regimes employ identical mechanisms for exerting control over their political subjects, there are common identifiable patterns in their methods. It is important to note that these methods are also used by democratic regimes when necessary to implement a policy decision or maintain legitimacy, but they are more consistently observable in authoritarian systems, and they are frequently lacking the basic protections of civil liberties in the manner they are used.
Some regimes use coercion, which essentially means force, to compel people to submit to the regime. The tactics of coercion can include surveillance of perceived dissidents, as China employs through government agents who follow the regime’s critics, and Internet monitors who track people’s activities. It can also include brute force by the security services; notable examples are China’s actions against demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the Tlateloco Plaza Massacre of 1968 in Mexico.
While democratic regimes have free and independent media outlets that may investigate and criticize the conduct and policy decisions of those in power, authoritarian regimes use a variety of mechanisms to restrict the independence of the media to report news that could be problematic for the government. These methods can include:
It is important to remember that while state ownership sometimes implies state control and private ownership would seem to imply independence, those implications are not universally true. For example, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is state-owned, but it is not state controlled. Since its establishment in 1927, it has freely reported events in Britain and around the world independently, without government interference. Meanwhile, many privately owned media outlets in Russia still report from a perspective friendly to the Kremlin for fear of various forms of reprisals.
Civil society describes all the various organized groups people choose to join for the sake of a common interest. These include religious organizations, interest groups, clubs, charitable organizations, labor unions, professional organizations, and many others. Authoritarian regimes limit people’s ability to form such groups, organize independent opposition, or voice their concerns freely in many ways. These can include but are not limited to:
An independent civil society that can organize freely is a critical component of liberal democracy, as it allows the people to express their interests, organize to call attention to issues of concern, and demand state action at times. Authoritarian regimes limit their ability to organize and express dissenting views to preserve the status quo.
Since most authoritarian regimes still stage elections (for the sake of enhancing their claims to having the legitimate right to rule), there will be opposition parties, movements, and candidates that emerge to challenge the ruling party and leaders at election time. Authoritarian regimes use many methods to prevent these opposition groups from competing for power fairly, in an effort to guarantee victory for the party in power. These methods include but are not limited to:
Perhaps the most consistent tactic authoritarian regimes use is that of cooptation, or bringing groups and individuals into a beneficial relationship with the state so they do not challenge the legitimacy of the regime. One common form of this strategy is state corporatism, often shortened simply to corporatism. As described in the previous chapter on democracy, democratic systems have a pluralistic relationship between civil society organizations and the state’s institutions. In corporatist states, by contrast, the ruling party makes itself the mediator between the interests of business and labor, along with other competing interests. The state, therefore, plays a crucial role in deciding who will “win” conflicts between civil society interests, and who will be invited to the negotiations with the state. This tends to result in motivating civil society interests to avoid criticism of the state and to work with it cooperatively, in hopes of accomplishing some of its issue concerns and to avoid exclusion from the process. Examples of state corporatism will appear in all six countries of study, though Britain and Mexico have largely embraced pluralism during their respective democratic transitions, and Russia, China, Iran, and Nigeria all still demonstrate strong corporatist tendencies.
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Authoritarian regimes use state corporatism and patron-client politics to control civil society and build a network of support from elites.
Another strategy of cooptation is patron-clientelism, or clientelism for short. Rulers in authoritarian systems can place people into key positions of power with official authority, which can often be used (or abused) for personal gain. Those individuals are also entrusted to empower people into positions of bureaucratic authority beneath them, and so on. The result is often the existence of a large hierarchical pyramid of loyalty and favor-trading that makes challenging the unified power of the state very difficult. Control of a particularly valuable national resource, such as oil, can make patron-clientelism that much more effective in preserving the state’s authoritarian dominance.
Corruption is a concept closely related to patron-clientelism and patron-client networks. While most people have a general understanding of what corruption implies, it has a very specific definition in political science. Understanding corruption first requires an understanding of the difference between power and authority. Power is the ability to compel or otherwise motivate people to take actions that they otherwise would not. Authority involves an official position with a defined role and jurisdiction that the state has entrusted an individual with. For example, a teacher has the power to motivate or compel certain behaviors from his students, such as listening quietly to a lecture or completing reading assignments the students might not otherwise be inclined to read. In this case, the main source of the power of this teacher is the teacher’s authority, as the one entrusted by the state to assign a grade and determine the student’s eligibility for credit in the class (and ultimately graduation from school). Not all power requires authority, however. Powerful groups of terrorists or rebel fighters can compel entire territories to submit to their demands, despite having no official authority whatsoever. Wealthy individuals and businesses in democracies can use their money to exert strong influences on the political process through campaign donations, advertising, and lobbying, even if they have no official role in the state.
What corruption means, specifically, is the abuse of a position of authority for personal gain. If the teacher in the example above were to sell students the grade they desired for a particular price, that behavior would be clearly corrupt. Corruption is frequently endemic in patron-client networks, as it is often understood to be part of the “benefits” of loyalty to the regime in exchange for the position of authority.
More common to totalitarianism, some authoritarian regimes will attempt to portray the leader as some sort of near perfected version of the nation’s aspirations, embodying the wisdom, strength, and spirit of the people more generally. The leader becomes a unifying symbol of the pride and patriotism of the people, which can help underscore the legitimacy of the authoritarian regime. Examples from the countries of study include Mao Zedong in China, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, and the Stalinist Soviet Union until Stalin’s death in 1953.
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Although authoritarian regimes all have certain features in common, some are ruled by an individual, some are ruled by the military, some are ruled by a single political party, and some are ruled by religious authorities.
While authoritarian systems have many features in common with one another, the institutions that act as the basis of rule are often as different as their methods.
Systems based on personal rule do not possess any clear rules or regime boundaries to constrain the ruler. The regime can be reshaped to the interests of the ruler as he or she sees fit. Historical absolute monarchies of Europe would fit this definition, as well as many resource-rich developing states today where a particular royal family or revolutionary leader uses the resources to build a patrimonial patron-client network of loyalists throughout the state.
Military rule usually comes as the result of a coup d’état (sometimes called a coup, for short), which occurs when the military of a particular state decides to remove the civil authorities from within and take control of the state itself. At that point, military leaders become policy-making and enforcing agents of the state. Nigeria from 1966 to 1999 endured at least seven successful coups resulting in military rule. Many of these military leaders would promise reform and democracy during and immediately after the coup, only to become engaged in the same or greater corruption as the previous leaders.
In a one-party state, also known as a dominant-party system, only one political party is either legally or practically able to compete for and exercise political power. In some cases, this restriction is built into the rules of the regime, such as in China, where only the Chinese Communist Party is allowed to exercise policymaking power by law. In other cases, the ruling party takes steps to ensure an easy victory every election day. Mexico was ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) from 1929 to 2000 by operating a massive patron-client network and coopting potential rivals into the regime. When necessary, they would simply rig election results through ballot box stuffing or other election day irregularities to guarantee they would stay in power. Modern Russia has combined a basically competitive multiparty election with substantial restrictions on civil liberties (such as freedom of speech and the press) in order to prevent other parties from challenging the United Russia Party for power. This has prompted the creation of a new term, illiberal democracy, to describe those regimes that have the institutional process of elections to determine the winners, but lack pluralism, civil liberties, and other fundamental features of liberal democracy.
The intention of a theocracy is rule by God, but practically, the power is held by religious leaders, and so a theocratic regime entrusts rule of the state to clerical religious authorities simultaneously with their religious role. Rules of the regime and laws passed by the government are often required to be consistent with religious doctrines asserted by clerics. In Iran, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the country has been an Islamic Republic, in which supreme political authority rests with the Supreme Leader, a senior cleric chosen by a body of fellow clerics known as the Assembly of Religious Experts. All but one president of Iran since the revolution has been a cleric, as well. The Supreme Leader’s interpretation of Shari’ah, a body of fundamental Islamic political law, serves as the supreme law of the land.
Despite the trend of democratization across many parts of the world in recent decades, authoritarianism has proven to be highly resilient and resistant to change. Political cultures that have been ingrained with authoritarian tendencies for many centuries are not likely to reform their institutions quickly, and even when political changes come through rapid coups or revolutions, many of those same authoritarian tendencies continue to emerge.
*Note: Terms with an asterisk (*) are those that consistently appear on the AP Comparative Government and Politics exam as tested concepts.
Authoritarian regimes are most specifically defined as those systems that
An authoritarian regime would be significantly undermined by the presence of
State corporatist systems
The regimes of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were noteworthy in the building of legitimacy through the use of
An illiberal or transitional democracy would
Countries with strong political cultures of statism
Patron-client networks in government
Corruption could be defined as
Which of the following countries had an extensive history of coups d’état and military rule through the late twentieth century?
Theocracy could best be understood as