ASUCCESSFUL LEADER ALWAYS PUTS THE WANTS OF his essential supporters before the needs of the people.¹ Without the support of his coalition a leader is nothing and is quickly swept away by a rival. But keeping the coalition content comes at a price when the leader’s control depends only on a few. More often than not, the coalition’s members get paid at the cost of the rest of society. Sure, a few autocrats become hall of famers who make their citizens better off. Most don’t. And those who don’t will spend their time in office running down their nation’s economy for their own and their coalition’s benefit. Eventually things get bad enough that some of the people tire of their burden. Then they too can threaten the survival of their leader.

Although not as omnipresent as the threat posed by the risk of coalition defection, if the people take to the streets en masse then they may succeed in overwhelming the power of the state. How to prevent and deal with such revolutionary threats is therefore a crucial lesson for dictators and for would-be revolutionaries that we must now confront.

To Protest or Not To Protest

In autocracies the people get a raw deal. Their labor provides tax revenues that leaders lavish on essential core supporters. Leaders provide them little beyond the essential minimal health care, primary education, and food to allow them to work. And if a small-coalition leader is fortunate enough to have another source of revenue, such as natural resources or a benevolent foreign donor, then he may even be able to do away with these minimal provisions. Autocrats certainly don’t provide political freedoms. Life for people in most small-coalition regimes is nasty, solitary, poor, brutish, and short. The people, seeing the hopeless path they are on, invariably want change. They want a government that provides for them and under which they can live secure, happy, and productive lives.

Why, having suffered long and hard, might they suddenly and often in multitudes rise up against their government? The answer resides in finding a crucial moment, a tipping point, at which life in the future under the existing government is expected to be sufficiently bad that it is worth their while to risk the undoubted costs of rebellion. They must believe that some few who have come forward first in rebellion have a decent chance of success and a decent chance of making the lives of ordinary people better.

There is a delicate balance here. If a regime excels at convincing people that stepping out of line means incredible misery and even death, it is unlikely to experience rebellion. Yes, life under such a government is horrendous, but the risk of failure in a revolt and the costs of that failure are way too high for people to rise up. They might be killed or imprisoned, and they might lose their job or home, even their children. That is why the Hitlers, Stalins, and Kim Jong Ils of the world manage to avoid revolt. If rule is really harsh, people are effectively deterred from rising up.

At first, a few especially bold individuals may rise up in revolt. They proclaim their intention to make their country a democracy. Every revolution and every mass movement begins with a promise of democratic reform, of a new government that will lift up the downtrodden and alleviate their suffering. That is an essential ingredient in getting the masses to take to the streets. Of course, it doesn’t always work.

The Chinese communists, for instance, declared the formation of a Chinese Soviet Republic on November 7, 1931. They said of their newly declared state,

It is the state of the suppressed workers, farmers, soldiers, and working mass. Its flag calls for the downfall of imperialism, the liquidation of landlords, the overthrow of the warlord government of the Nationalists. We shall establish a soviet government over the whole of China; we shall struggle for the interests of thousands of deprived workers, farmers, and soldiers and other suppressed masses; and to endeavor for peaceful unification of the whole of China.²

Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of Kenya’s independence movement and its first head of state, likewise declared during a meeting of the Kenya African Union (KAU) on July 26, 1952:

If we unite now, each and every one of us, and each tribe to another, we will cause the implementation in this country of that which the European calls democracy. True democracy has no colour distinction. It does not choose between black and white. We are here in this tremendous gathering under the K.A.U. flag to find which road leads us from darkness into democracy. In order to find it we Africans must first achieve the right to elect our own representatives. That is surely the first principle of democracy. We are the only race in Kenya which does not elect its own representatives in the Legislature and we are going to set about to rectify this situation.... It has never been known in history that a country prospers without equality. We despise bribery and corruption, those two words that the European repeatedly refers to. Bribery and corruption is prevalent in this country, but I am not surprised. As long as a people are held down, corruption is sure to rise and the only answer to this is a policy of equality.³

Noble words from both Mao Zedong and Jomo Kenyatta. Neither fulfilled his promises of equality, democracy, and liberty for the average Chinese or the average Kenyan. Nor did either leader eliminate corruption and special opportunities for their party faithful. Once most revolutionaries come to power, their inclination—if they can get away with it—is to be petty dictators. After all, the democratic institutions that engender the policies the people want also make it hard for leaders to survive in office. Leaders won’t acquiesce to the people’s wants unless the people can compel them. And when can the people compel an old dictator, seemingly set in his ways, or a recently victorious revolutionary, newly ensconced in power, to look out for them instead of for himself? The answer to that question is the answer to when regimes choose the road to democracy rather than to sustained autocracy.

Before deciding to gamble on the promises of revolutionaries, each prospective demonstrator must judge the costs and the risks of rebellion to be tolerable relative to the conditions expected without rebellion and relative to the gains expected with a successful uprising. Thus it is that middle-of-the-road dictators, like Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, the Soviet Union’s Gorbachev (but not Stalin) are more likely to experience a mass uprising than their worst fellow autocrats. That is not to say that when the people rise up they are right in thinking life will be better. They are taking a calculated risk. They surely understand that revolutionary success holds the prospect of betterment, but not all revolutionary movements end in democracy and not all result in an outpouring of public goods for the people.

Many revolutions end up simply replacing one autocracy with another. On some occasions the successor regime can actually be worse than its predecessor. This might well have been the case with Sergeant Doe’s deposition of Liberia’s True Whig government or Mao’s success against Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang government in China. But the hope of the people when they participate is that they will improve their lot, either by enlarging the winning coalition through democratization or at least by becoming part of the new coalition.

Nipping Mass Movements in the Bud

There are two diametrically opposed ways in which a leader can respond to the threat of a revolution. He can increase democracy, making the people so much better off that they no longer want to revolt. He can also increase dictatorship, making the people even more miserable than they were before while also depriving them of a credible chance of success in rising up against their government.

The extent of expected loyalty from the military is one critical factor that shapes the direction an incumbent takes in responding to a nascent threat. Leaders know that as isolated individuals the people are no threat to their government. That is precisely why government leaders are reluctant to let people freely assemble and organize against them. If the people find a way to take to the streets en masse, the incumbent will certainly need very loyal supporters willing to undertake the decidedly dirty work of suppressing the masses if he is to survive.

We have met many leaders whose backers have deserted them at just such key times. When insurgents challenged Sergeant Doe in 1990, his soldiers terrorized and stole from the people of Liberia rather than combat the threat. In 1979, the shah of Iran was deposed when his soldiers joined the supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini. Similarly, President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines lost power in 1986 because his security forces defected. Russia’s Czar Nicholas was deposed when the people stormed his Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in 1917. The army, poorly paid and facing deployment to the front in World War I, declined to stop them. Many other crucial events in modern political history, from the French Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, also owe their occurrence to the failure of core supporters to suppress the people at critical moments. The recent so-called colored revolutions (Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004–2005, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2005), the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia, as well as the uprisings in Egypt are also manifestations of the same phenomenon.

In each case, coalition support evaporated at the key moment because the leader could no longer promise his or her supporters an adequate flow of rewards to justify their undertaking the dirty work required to keep the regime in place. The Russian czar, France’s Louis XVI, and the Soviet Union were all short of money with which to reward supporters. The Philippines’ Marcos and Iran’s shah were both known to be terminally ill. New leaders typically reshuffle their coalition, so key backers of the regime were uncertain whether they would be retained by the successor. Lacking assurance that they would continue to be rewarded they stood aside and allowed the people to rebel.

Revolutionary movements may seem spontaneous but we really need to understand that they arise when enough citizens believe they have a realistic chance of success. That is why successful autocrats make rebellion truly unattractive. They step in quickly to punish harshly those who first take to the streets. This is what we saw in Iran following the June 2009 presidential election. The regime quickly stepped in, beating, arresting, and killing protesters, until the people feared continuing to take to the streets.

A prudent dictator nips rebellion in the bud. That is why we have reiterated the claim that only people willing to engage in really nasty behavior should contemplate becoming dictators. The softhearted will find themselves ousted in the blink of an eye.

Protest in Democracy and Autocracy

Dissatisfaction with what a government is doing is an entirely different matter in democracies than it is in autocracies. In a democracy, protest is relatively cheap and easy. People have the freedom and, indeed, the right to assemble. They also have easy means through which to coordinate and organize. We know from earlier chapters that governments ruled by a large coalition produce lots of public goods, including a special set of such goods that fall under the general heading of freedoms. These include a free press, free speech, and freedom of assembly. These freedom goods make it much easier for large numbers of people to exchange information about how they feel about their government and to express objections to any policies they don’t like.

These freedoms also make protest easy. But since people like these freedoms, granting them can also dissipate their desire to bring down the government. Protests are common in democracies but revolts intending to overthrow the institutions of government are not. Democrats provide the policies people want because otherwise the people will protest, and when people can freely assemble there is little a leader can do to stop them except give them what they want. Sometimes, of course, democratic leaders fail to give the people what they want. Then people are likely to take to the streets to indicate their dislike of a particular policy. That’s what generally happens when a democracy goes to war, for example. Some people favor the decision and others oppose it. Those who oppose it frequently make their displeasure known by taking to the streets, and, if there are enough of them and if they protest for a sufficiently sustained time, they can provoke a policy change. Lyndon Johnson, for instance, chose not to seek reelection in the face of deep dissatisfaction with his Vietnam War policies.

In democracy, protest is about alerting leaders to the fact that the people are unhappy, and that, if changes in policy are not made, they’ll throw the rascals out. Yet in autocracy, protest has a deeper purpose: to bring down the very institutions of government and change the way the people are governed.

Autocrats dislike freedoms because they make it easy for people to learn of their shared misery and to collaborate with each other to rise up against the government. Given their druthers, autocrats eliminate freedom of assembly, a free press, and free speech whenever they can, thereby insulating themselves from the threat of the people. Unfortunately for autocrats, without the public goods benefits from these freedoms, people can find it hard to work effectively because they cannot easily exchange ideas even about how to improve the workplace. And if the people don’t work effectively, then the leader cannot collect tax revenues.

Autocrats must find the right balance. Without enough freedom the people are less productive and do little work, but give them too many freedoms and they pose a threat to the leader. The degree to which autocrats rely on taxation to fund the government limits the extent to which they can oppress the people.

Nations awash with natural resource wealth or lavished with foreign aid rarely democratize. They are the world’s most oppressive places. Their leaders have resources to reward their essential supporters without having to empower the people. In such societies, though the people really desire change, they cannot act upon these wants. Without the ability to assemble, coordinating against the government is difficult. What is more, the people know the leader can afford to pay the coalition to oppress them. With little chance of success, the people keep their heads down. Protest is rare and answered with even greater repression.

But what happens if the money dries up?

Take a look back at Figure 7.1, where we graphed Egypt’s foreign aid receipts through 2010. US aid to Egypt has been dropping as Egypt’s peace with Israel has aged and matured. The drop in aid has been substantial and that means Egypt’s former president, Hosni Mubarak, found himself in a weaker and weaker position when it came to buying the loyal support of the military. The global economic slowdown had compounded the importance of aid for the Egyptian regime. With money drying up, a chance was created for a rebellion against his government. And, indeed, in early 2011, Mubarak, facing a poor economy and decreased aid receipts, also faced a mass rebellion.

When autocrats lack abundant resources they have a more difficult time managing the people. First and foremost, leaders must pay their essential backers or they will be gone. Leaders without adequate revenues from aid, natural resources, or borrowing must obtain them by encouraging the people to work and by taxing them. Unfortunately for leaders, many of the public goods that increase productivity also improve the people’s ability to coordinate and, therefore, protest. Further, because the leader needs the tax revenues the workers provide, such protests are more likely to be met with concessions than in a resource-rich nation or one with huge cash reserves.

The factors that lead to rebellion are relatively uncomplicated. How much a leader does to enhance the welfare of the people by providing public goods determines the desire of the people to rebel. The level of freedom determines the ease with which they can act upon these desires by taking to the streets.

Yet, though high levels of either factor are in evidence in a host of countries around the world, protests remain rare. They require a spark.

Shocks Raise Revolts

Shocks that trigger protest come in many forms. On rare occasions protests happen spontaneously. But more often it requires an event to shake up the system and trigger protest. At the collapse of the Soviet Union and other communist states in Eastern Europe in 1989, contagion played a major role. Once one state fell, the people in the surrounding states realized that their state was perhaps no longer invulnerable. Free elections in Communist Poland triggered protests in East Germany. When it became clear that security forces would not obey East German leader Erich Honecker’s order to break up demonstrations, the protests grew. Successful protest in Germany spawned demonstrations in Czechoslovakia, and so on. As each state fell, it provided a yet stronger signal to the peoples of the remaining communist states. The states fell like dominos. And each was suffering from a poorly performing economy, so that the East European dictators could no longer assure private advantages to their supporters. Quite the contrary, they had been reduced to a state in which many of their henchmen understood it was better to abandon the dictator than go down in a blaze of glory with their failed regimes. Much the same story repeated itself in the Middle East in 2011. As Tunisia fell, the people of Egypt realized that their leader might also be vulnerable. So contagious was the belief that rebellion could succeed that the once rock-steady Middle East quickly became fertile ground for mass movements. People in Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere tried their luck.

A massive natural disaster, an unanticipated succession crisis, or a global economic downturn that drives the autocrat’s local economy to the brink or beyond the brink of bankruptcy can also provide a rallying cry for protesters. Other shocks can be “planned”; that is, events or occasions chosen by an autocrat who misjudges the risks involved. One common example is a rigged election.

Dictators seem to like to hold elections. Whether they do so to satisfy international pressure (and gain more foreign aid), to dispel domestic unrest, or to gain a misleading sense of legitimacy, their preference is to rig the vote count. Elections are nice, but winning is nicer. Still, sometimes the people seize the moment of an election to shock the incumbent, voting so overwhelmingly for someone else that it is hard to cover up the true outcome.

Liberia’s Sergeant Doe was foolish enough to hold an election. In doing so, he provided the impetus for protest that he was lucky to survive. In 1985, Thomas Quiwonkpa challenged Samuel Doe after it took weeks for Liberia’s electoral commission to “count” the votes. Perhaps Quiwonkpa took the commission’s dalliance as a sign of popular support and equally a sign of the commission’s lack of support for him. As his insurgency approached the capital, Monrovia, the masses took to the streets against Doe’s government. Unfortunately for them, Doe’s essential supporters remained loyal. The costs of protest became very real. Doe’s soldiers killed hundreds in retribution.

In post-Soviet Eastern Europe, “legitimizing” elections helped to promote citizen uprisings. Rather than sustaining the regimes in power, elections created the opportunity to replace them. In 2004, the incumbent Ukrainian leader, Leonid Kuchma, having served two terms, decided, perhaps to the surprise of his essential backers, to respect the two-term limit and retire. His chosen successor was Viktor Yanukovych. The runup to the election looked like it came straight out of a John Le Carre spy novel, with the leading opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, allegedly poisoned with dioxin, which left him horribly disfigured.

In the first round of the elections in October each of the leading candidates received about 39 percent of the vote. This necessitated a runoff election on November 21, in which the official results differed greatly from exit polls. Even before the second round presidential runoff was complete, Yushchenko called for the people to take to the streets. The electoral commission declared Yanukovych the winner. However, protests mounted and the security forces withdrew. Eventually the Supreme Court ruled that given the high level of fraud, another ballot was needed. Yushchenko then won the election handsomely.

Coalition dynamics play a key role in explaining why the security forces allowed the people to take to the streets. The president was changing. Although the retiring incumbent, Kuchma, backed Yanukovych, he could not ensure core supporters within the security forces that they would be retained after the transition. As we saw with Louis XIV and many others, newly empowered leaders, even when they have been chosen by their predecessor, are wise to shake up their coalition, bring in their own loyalists, and dump many of their predecessor’s erstwhile backers. The security forces, being uncertain whether they would keep their long-run privileges, declined to attack the masses, hedging their bets about who would be more likely to reward them. Without force to control the masses on the street, Yanukovych’s supporters deserted. The people brought Yushchenko to power, but an essential factor in their willingness to take to the streets was the apparent lack of support for Yanukovych by the security forces.

Sometimes the shocks that spark revolt come as a total surprise. Natural disasters, while bringing misery to the people, can also empower them. One frequent consequence of earthquakes, hurricanes, and droughts is that vast numbers of people are forced from their homes. If they are permitted to gather in refugee camps, then they have the opportunity to organize against the government. You see, refugee camps have the unintended consequence of facilitating free assembly. Earthquakes, storms, and volcanoes can concentrate large numbers of desperate people with little to lose. They also can substantially weaken the state’s capacity to control the people.

On the morning of September 19, 1985, a large 8.1 magnitude earthquake occurred on the Michoacan fault in the Pacific Ocean about 350 kilometers from Mexico City. Mexico City is geologically vulnerable as it was built on the soft foundation of the remains of Lake Texcoco. The clay silts and sands that make up the lake bed plus the soil’s high water content led to liquefaction (wherein the ground behaves like a liquid) during the earthquake. The city was also built in the absence of democratic rule, so few building codes had been enforced. As a result, the distant quake caused enormous devastation throughout the city. The death toll is highly disputed, but is thought to be between 10,000 and 30,000 people. An additional 250,000 were made homeless. The government did virtually nothing. Left to rescue themselves, the people formed crews to dig for survivors and organized refugee camps.

Born of necessity, these camps became the foundation for an important political force in Mexico City. Instead of separate individuals unhappy with their government, the earthquake formed a concentrated mass of desperate people. Forced together into crowded camps, they shared their disillusionment with the government. Organizing a protest rally was suddenly relatively easy. Ready and willing participants were on hand and had little to lose. With the government largely absent, these social groups became important political forces that rapidly deployed as large antigovernment demonstrations. Unable to oppose these groups, the government sought to accommodate them. It is widely believed they played a key role in Mexico’s democratization.⁴

The story of Anastasio Somoza’s deposition in the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979 is broadly similar. In 1972, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake struck the capital of Managua, killing around 5,000 people and forcing about 250,000 homeless people into camps. Somoza and his cronies profited from disaster relief but did nothing to resettle the enormous number of homeless people who had gathered in refugee camps in the capital. These camps became organizing grounds for the activists who eventually ended Somoza’s reign.

Not all autocrats make the mistake of ignoring disasters or ignoring the creation of refugee camps. Consider the case of Myanmar in 2008. Than Shwe is the military leader of Burma (officially known as Myanmar). Although he has been described as an unremarkable man, he understands the essentials of staying in power.⁵ On May 2, 2008, a massive cyclone, named Nargis, swept across the Irrawaddy Delta in southern Burma causing havoc. The delta’s residents, mainly poor fishermen and farmers, received no warning of the coming storm. The storm destroyed entire towns and villages. The official death toll is 138,000, though other estimates suggest it might be as high as 500,000.

No one can blame Than Shwe for the storm or for the low-lying villages’ vulnerability to storm surge. However, Burma’s military regime provided no warning and did nothing to help the survivors, and for that they can be blamed. Indeed they did worse than nothing: they actively prevented help from being delivered. Many people in Rangoon, the major city in southern Burma that was itself heavily damaged by the storm, attempted to help those in the delta. They were not allowed. Small businessmen and traders were reduced to smuggling small amounts of food into what remained of towns and villages.

The international community rallied to offer assistance. As tens, or possibly hundreds, of thousands of people died of hunger and thirst in the aftermath of the storm, ships full of disaster relief supplies sat off the coast. The military junta refused to allow relief workers in. Visas were almost impossible to obtain. Information was extremely scarce. The government requested aid, but asked that it be in the form of bilateral government-to-government assistance. Effectively, Than Shwe was saying, “send cash, but you can’t come in.”

About a week after the disaster, the army started entering the larger towns and villages of the delta. They were not there to help. They were there to disperse survivors who had congregated in schools and temples. Even though their numbers rarely exceeded a few hundred, survivors were expelled from their shelters and told to return home. It mattered little that, in most cases, their entire village had been destroyed and they had no food, water, clothing, or shelter to return to. Indeed, one report observed,

Survivors were loaded onto boats and ferried back to the destroyed villages they had recently escaped from. In some areas the clearances happened quickly; as the emergency phase was now officially over, the authorities wanted people back in their villages by June 2, when the next school term was scheduled to begin. But survivors had no idea what they were returning to; was there even anything left at places they had once called home? And how would they get food and water there?⁶

The government did not even attempt to answer these questions.

In the PBS documentary, Eyes of the Storm, a senior Burmese general is seen addressing a group of survivors.⁷ Starving and destitute, they ask for a handful of rice. The general tells them that he is here now (but still he makes no offer of assistance) and that they must go back to their village and “work hard.” While the army seized (and sold on the black market) the few relief supplies allowed in, the people were told they could eat frogs. Effectively the government told these survivors to go away and die quietly: inhumane in the extreme, but good small-coalition politics. Dead people cannot protest.

Are Disasters Always Disasters for Government Survival?

Earthquakes and other disasters shake up political systems. However, the nature of the shakeup is very different under different institutions. Democratic leaders are very sensitive to disaster-related casualties. Allowing people to die reveals serious policy failure. Democrats need to deliver good public policy to reward their large number of backers. When they fail to do so, they are liable to be removed. Disaster-related deaths result in protest and in the removal of leaders in democracies.

To illustrate the difference in political responses to poor disaster relief in a non-democratic and democratic setting, we contrast Cyclone Nargis with Hurricane Katrina. Katrina struck the US Gulf Coast in August 2005. This was the most costly natural disaster in US history, with damages estimated at $81 billion. The death toll was 1,836.

The government, from President George W. Bush down to New Orleans’s mayor, Ray Nagin, stood accused of mismanagement and lack of leadership. Nagin delayed the evacuation order for the city until nineteen hours before the storm struck. As a result many people became trapped. Then, once the New Orleans Superdome football stadium was set up as an emergency center, it became overwhelmed when 30,000 rather than the anticipated 800 people showed up. Federal disaster relief was slow in arriving. Many of the casualties were the sick and elderly who were overcome by heat and dehydration.

The tenure of US leaders was seriously jeopardized by the disaster. Many observers think Katrina contributed significantly to the Republican Party’s midterm electoral losses in 2006 and their significant losses, including the presidency, in 2008. Yet, while it is clear that the situation could have been handled much better, it bears no resemblance to Cyclone Nargis. In contrast, despite having allowed at least 138,000 people to die, Than Shwe felt sufficiently well entrenched to allow a farcical election in 2010, which the government-backed parties won easily (at least according to official sources).

As seen in the cases of Mexico and Nicaragua, disasters can serve as rallying points in autocracies. Disasters can concentrate opponents of the regime, making it easier for them to coordinate. Yet the death toll from disasters has relatively little effect on a dictator’s chance of staying in power. Indeed, if anything, large numbers of people dying in disasters actually enhance the political survival of autocratic leaders.

As we know, autocrats don’t buy political support with efficient public policy. Resources spent saving the lives of the people cannot be spent on cronies. In addition, as we have seen, autocrats are skilled at exploiting the international community. By letting more people die they may in fact be able to extract more relief assistance. The implications of these results are frightening. Small wonder, then, that far more people die in natural disasters in autocracies than in democracies.

Letting people die is good governance in autocracy, but it is disastrous for the tenure of democrats. Although a detailed statistical analysis of the relationship between disasters,⁸ deaths and leader tenure is complex, we compared what happens in a country when 200 or more people die in a magnitude 5+ earthquake, to what happens in the same size earthquake if fewer people die. In particular, we looked at the effect of such circumstances on the odds of a country’s leader being removed from office within two years following the earthquake.

An earthquake alone does not threaten the survival of democrats. However, if there are more than 200 people killed by the quake then a democratic leader is almost certain to be removed from office. Under normal circumstances, any democrat has a 40 percent chance of being ousted from office in any two-year period. But for a democrat whose country suffered 200 or more deaths in an earthquake, those odds rise to 91 percent. We believe this is the case because democratic leaders are supposed to deliver effective public policies, and those effective policies include ensuring good building codes are enforced and excellent rescue and recovery is implemented following a natural disaster. The death of many in such a disaster is a signal to everyone else that the leadership has not done an adequate job of protecting the people and so out go the leaders.

Autocrats are less vulnerable to removal than democrats and earthquake related deaths have little effect on their hold on power. Over a typical two-year period, 22 percent of autocrats lose power. If their country suffers a magnitude 5 or greater earthquake in the first year of this two-year window, the dictator’s risk of being removed goes up to 30 percent. However, the autocrat’s risk of removal is reduced to 24 percent if the earthquake killed more than 200 people. Earthquakes pose a threat to autocratic leaders when people are forced into refugee camps and can organize against the regime. People dying from an earthquake can’t organize and so they do not endanger a dictator’s survival in office. As might be expected, given these facts and the incentives they suggest, instances of 200 or more people dying in earthquakes is much more common in autocracies than democracies.⁹

Not all disasters are equal in the eyes of autocrats. Dictators are particularly wary of natural disasters when they occur in politically and economically important centers. Disaster management in China emphasizes this point. When an earthquake struck the remote province of Qinghai in 2010, the Chinese government’s response was, at best, halfhearted. In contrast, its handling of disaster relief in the wake of a 2008 earthquake in Sichuan won the approval of much of the international community. The differences are stark and driven by politics. The Sichuan quake occurred in an economically and politically important center where a massed protest could potentially threaten the government. Qinghai is remote and of little political importance. Protest there would do little to threaten the government. The government did much less to assist people who could not threaten them.

Responding to Revolution or Its Threat

Whether because of an unforeseen earthquake, a succession crisis, or a financial meltdown, the threat of rebellion can rise, striking a leader like a lightning bolt. What then is the right response to such a threat? History teaches us that some crack down hard on rebels; some succumb to them; and some reform on their own. The rules governing politics help us understand how different circumstances lead to different choices among these options.

Successful rebellions, mass movements, and revolutions are not commonplace, but neither are they extremely rare. Successful rebellions that turn into democracy are pretty rare but they do happen. What characterizes revolutions or revolutionaries who actually do what they promise: create a democracy to try to better the lives of the people? And what characterizes revolutions that don’t take off or revolutionaries who don’t democratize! We start with our old friend, General Than Shwe of Burma.

The Than Schwe government makes sure that the people of Burma are kept poor, isolated, and ignorant. There is no free press. The people are not allowed to congregate. Few foreigners are allowed in, and those that are, are constantly watched by the police. All these actions are designed to make it hard for the people to coordinate and organize against the government. The people are desperate for change, but the government makes it virtually impossible for them to achieve it. In a telling 2005 account of how unhappy the people are, a journalist for the Economist magazine recalls how they were continually asking him how the United States could be prevailed upon to invade: “the prospect of a foreign invasion is a fond hope, not a fear.”¹⁰ The people of Burma want to be the next Iraq! With such demand for change, it is little wonder that Shwe is terrified of protest and that he focuses his attention on preventing it.

Than Shwe, like many others, takes the autocrat’s preferred path to eliminating the threat from mass political movements. He suppresses the people. He doesn’t need to buy them off because Burma is blessed, or cursed, depending upon your point of view, with natural resources. Burma is a huge exporter of natural gas, hardwood, gems, gold, copper, and iron.¹¹ For instance, it is thought to earn about $345 million through the annual export of 1.4–1.6 million cubic meters of hardwood, much of it extremely valuable teak. We use the term “thought to” because it is hard to know the figures for sure. For instance, in 2001, China reported that it imported 514,000 cubic meters of wood from Burma, but Burma only records exports of 3,240 cubic meters. Presumably the income from the unaccounted-for hardwood lines the pockets of the generals, rather than funding the welfare of the people. It certainly does not fund infrastructure. Indeed, the timber industry’s attempts to process its products before export have been nearly completely stymied by the absence of infrastructure. Of course the absence of roads makes it even more difficult for the people to assemble and threaten the government. This became particularly true after 2005, when the government moved the capital to a remote mountain location where few citizens are allowed to visit.

Burma is also the world’s major producer of jade and rubies. Gem auctions in 2007 are thought to have earned the nation $370 million. Yet Burma’s biggest export earner is natural gas. Currently the offshore natural gas fields generate between $1–1.5 billion. These earnings are likely to increase over the next few years with the development of additional fields and the opening of a pipeline to ship gas directly to China. Little of this money makes its way into the government’s economic accounts. The official exchange rate is 6 kyaks to the dollar. However, the real rate is around two hundred times higher. This means the regime can deposit all gas export earnings in government accounts at the official exchange rate and still keep 99.5 percent of the money for themselves.

Burma is poor. Than Shwe is rich! He is a fortunate leader. Since he does not rely on the labor of the people he can suppress them ruthlessly. This means that despite the miserable conditions they endure, the people cannot easily rebel. And if they do, Shwe has the resources to buy the army’s loyalty and ensure that he stays on in power.

In February 2007, various newspapers reported on a minor demonstration in Burma. Fifteen people (or twenty-five, depending upon reports) congregated to protest. Their demands were for basic human rights. Within thirty minutes, many of them, along with a number of journalists covering the protest, were arrested. The regime perceives any kind of protest as a potential threat to its survival, and with good reason. General Ne Win seized power in a coup in 1962 and implemented a socialist agenda. Protests and riots erupted in 1988. On August 8, 1988 (8/8/1988—a lucky set of numbers in many Asian cultures), troops fired at demonstrators killing thousands. Protest over these atrocities forced Ne Win to resign and agree to elections scheduled for 1990. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National Party for Democracy was the landslide winner, taking 58.7 percent of the popular vote and capturing 392 out of 492 seats. However, with demonstrations and protests under control, the military simply ignored the results and carried on ruling.

Than Shwe came to power in 1992. His regime stamped out the protest of February 2007 immediately. However, the junta’s fear of protest was justified by events in August 2007. Following an announcement of fuel price increases, on August 19 about 500 protestors, led by many of the student protest leaders who had been active in 1988, took to the streets. These protests continued over a number of days. Participation soon dwindled to double digits as the army engaged in widespread arrests, but in September these protests reignited when several hundred monks marched. The army beat the monks. Two monks were chained to a lamppost and beaten. One allegedly died.

Monks are revered in Burma. The violence against them generated further protest. A government delegation was trapped for six hours by protesters. Across Burma monks took the symbolic act of overturning their alms bowls against the government, a ritual known as thabeik hmauk. Religious services were denied to all members of the military. Across the country groups of monks began to march. These protests grew daily. People began to talk of a Saffron Revolution, saffron being the color of the monk’s robes. This was precisely what Than Shwe feared most.

On September 25 the government ordered a crackdown. Protesters were attacked, first with rubber bullets, then with live ammunition and whips. The army also raided monasteries and carried monks away at night. Many of the remaining monks were dispersed to their villages to prevent them from congregating. After three days the protests had completely ended. Although government forces utterly crushed all opposition, it was a costly operation. The esteem in which monks are held meant many soldiers were reluctant to harm them. There were fears that the army might not be willing to attack temples. In the end they were, but it no doubt cost the regime lots of resources to buy such loyalty.

Inhumane as Shwe’s actions were, they represented good autocratic politics. He survived to rule another day. Nor is Shwe alone in placing being a leader ahead of being a good human being. Life is miserable for the people in resource-rich autocracies the world over. In these regimes, governments prevent the people from coordinating. Their lives are isolated, miserable, and unproductive. But revolution and protest are not hopeless acts, as the next set of examples make clear.

Power to the People

A few of history’s revolutionaries stand out for their success not only in overthrowing a nasty regime, but in creating a people-friendly government in its place. America’s George Washington, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Philippines’ Corazon Aquino are a few cases in point. Perhaps even more interestingly, a few leaders threatened with revolution have also democratized as the path to keep themselves in power. Ghana’s Jerry John “J. J.” Rawlings is a perfect example. Common threads run through each of these democratizers—common threads that are absent from revolutions that replaced one dictator with another, such as occurred under Mao Zedong in China, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Porfirio Diaz in Mexico, and Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya.

Democratic revolutions are most often fought by people who cannot count on great natural resource wealth to sustain them once they overthrow the predecessor regime. These “good” revolutionaries just are not as lucky as Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi or Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev. Although contagion prompted an extreme threat to Qaddafi’s political survival in 2011, his oil wealth gave him a substantial fighting chance against the rebels. He had the money to buy soldiers and keep them loyal, something his resource-poor Tunisian and Egyptian neighbors did not. They, like good revolutionaries, had to rely on the productivity of the people to generate the revenues they needed to reward supporters. To encourage the people to work productively, good revolutionary leaders needed to increase the people’s freedoms. If the people can meet and talk then they can earn more. As a very simple example, if farmers have access to telephones, newspapers, and radios, then they can find out about market prices. This allows them to take the crops to the right markets at the right time. Roads and transport networks reduce transaction costs. Given the ability to earn more, farmers work harder and the economy improves. Unfortunately, for a leader, those same freedoms allow people to organize. The same media, telecommunications, and roads that increase productivity also make it much easier for the same farmers to hear about antigovernment demonstrations and join them. In much the same way that Mexico City’s 1985 earthquake lowered the barriers for coordination and organization, increasing the public good of freedom makes protest more likely.

In the latter half of the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev faced a dilemma. The economy of the Soviet Union was failing. Without additional resources he could not continue to pay his essential backers. He might have turned to oil—of which Russia has plenty—to save the day, but oil prices were depressed in those years. His best shot at keeping rebellion at bay was to liberalize the Soviet economy, even though that also meant giving the people more power over their lives. Gorbachev showed himself willing to take that risk.

Some might suggest that Gorbachev is a better person than Burma’s General Shwe. Probably he is, although we cannot help but notice that he cracked down on constitutionally protected secessionist movements in Azerbaijan, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The Soviet military response to the efforts of the people in those republics to gain their freedom is hardly the response of an enlightened leader. The Soviet “black beret” militia killed fourteen and injured 150 people in Lithuania.¹² A week later, 4 more people were killed and twenty injured when Soviet forces cracked down on Latvia’s efforts to attain independence.¹³

Why did the enlightened Gorbachev take these harsh actions? He was responding to political pressure from within his coalition. Topranking Soviet military officers together with others urged Gorbachev to impose direct Kremlin rule in breakaway provinces. They wrote in an open letter that was circulated at the Congress of People’s Deputies, “If constitutional methods prove ineffective against separatists, criminal speculators and the paramilitary forces that are continuing to spill the blood of the people, we suggest instituting a state of emergency and presidential rule in zones of major conflicts.”¹⁴ Gorbachev understood the political risks of ignoring key military and political figures in his coalition of essentials.

Gorbachev’s failure to quash the secessionist movements was a significant contributor to the decision by hardliners in his government to launch a coup that overthrew him. He was restored to power—briefly—when the people, backed by Boris Yeltsin, occupied Red Square and forced the coup makers to retreat. But for Gorbachev the damage was done. He returned to power, recognized the independence of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, only to find himself unable to sustain his government or even the existence of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was formally dissolved three months later.

Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika, aimed at restructuring the Soviet political and economic system, can be understood as his effort to increase the government’s revenue to forestall just such problems as the secessionist movements and their political aftermath. It didn’t work out for him or the Soviet form of government, but that is what it means to take risks. Sometimes they turn out your way and sometimes they don’t.

Today Russia is backsliding away from democratization. While under Boris Yeltsin’s post-Gorbachev government Russia maintained free and competitive elections, that is much less true today. Vladimir Putin, former head of the Soviet secret police (the KGB) and Yeltsin’s immediate successor, moved the political system sharply back from its emerging dependence on a large coalition and good governance. He made it much more difficult for opposition parties to compete by severely restricting freedom of assembly. He made it much more difficult for opposition candidates to get their message across by nationalizing television and much of the print media. He made it much more difficult for people to articulate their dissatisfaction by making it a crime to make public arguments that disparaged the government. In short, he systematically reduced the availability of freedoms that compel a democratic government to attend to the wishes of the people. Why could he do this? As we have noted, Russia is awash in oil wealth. During Putin’s time, unlike poor Gorbachev’s, oil prices were at record highs so he could pay key backers to help him quash opposition, and possibly even have enough extra money from oil to keep the people happy enough that they don’t rebel against their loss of freedom.

The expansion of freedoms is a sure sign of impending democratization. Economic necessity is one factor that produces such a concession. Another is coming to power already on the back of a large coalition. This was George Washington’s, Nelson Mandela’s, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s circumstance. For different reasons, each started out with a big coalition and was pretty much locked into trying to sustain it at least for a while as a necessity if their government was to survive.

When Washington became president of the United States, the term “United States” was treated as a plural noun. Back then people identified more strongly with their state than with the nation. Washington headed an army that depended on recruits from thirteen distinct colonies, each with their own government and each paying for their military contingents out of their own pocketbooks. Washington needed the support of a broad base of colonists and so he was stuck with a large coalition from the get-go. In that circumstance he had to do what large coalition leaders do—disproportionately deliver public goods rather than private benefits. First among these public goods was the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing the very freedoms that are central to democratic, large-coalition governance. Without these, the colonies could not agree to ratify the constitution and serve under a single, unified government.

Nelson Mandela’s story is not much different. His political movement, the African National Congress (ANC), spent decades fighting the white-dominated apartheid regimes of South Africa. Despite their efforts and the protracted use of violence, they were unable to grow strong enough to overthrow their oppressors through force. Nelson Mandela, who served twenty-seven years in prison for his antigovernment stance and who refused early release from prison on the condition of eschewing violence, eventually saw another way.

Possibly due to the effects of sanctions, the South African economy went into a sharp decline during the 1980s. In 1980, per capita income was $3,463. But by 1993, the year in which F. W. de Klerk’s apartheid regime passed a new constitution paving the way for elections for all races, it had fallen to $2,903.¹⁵ De Klerk, and his long-term predecessor, Pik Botha, were in trouble because with the economy in decline they did not have sufficient resources to buy the continued loyalty required to keep the people suppressed. Under those conditions, more money was needed to sustain the government. That money could only be gotten from the people and many of them were already rebelling against the apartheid government. Faced with very tough circumstances, the apartheid regime had a choice: fight to the bitter end or cut a deal with Mandela. They—and he—chose the latter course.

The large-coalition compromise deal with Mandela and his ANC meant allowing all South Africans equal rights. In practice, this meant that the voting majority was turned over to the very people who were most discriminated against during the years of apartheid. As a result, the country became more democratic and its people freer. Whether it will last as the ANC’s interests come more and more to dominate the government remains to be seen. There is the real danger down the road that unless the opposition wins office and leadership is swapped back and forth between different political parties, South Africa could go the way of Zimbabwe. Like South Africa, Zimbabwe started out on a positive path to democracy based on a large-coalition deal between Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU, Robert Mugabe’s ZANU party, and Ian Smith’s white-only UDI government. But once Mugabe became sufficiently entrenched, he, like Putin in Russia, was able to overturn the progress toward democratization. He plunged Zimbabwe back into the role of a corrupt, rent-seeking, small-coalition regime that serves the interest of the few at the expense of the many, black and white.

The successes of Washington, Mandela, and others were duplicated from a very different starting place in the case of Ghana. There revolution did not lead to democracy so much as the anticipation of revolution did.

Ghana’s J. J. Rawlings understood well that liberalizing Ghana’s economy and empowering the people could endanger his hold on power. But he also recognized that liberalization did not mean that the people would inevitably end up revolting or that the coalition will turn on its leader. Rawlings became the poster boy for the IMF and World Bank. He implemented the economic reforms they prescribed, invigorated the economy, instituted democratic reforms, and after serving two terms as president of Ghana he stepped down. But that is not how he started out. And the people were not as happy with him as this rosy picture would suggest; at least not if you believe what Adu Boahen, a professor and leading political opponent, had to say.

Boahen recounted Rawlings’s explanation for the seeming passivity of the Ghanaian people. As he observed,

According to Rawlings, ‘The people have faced and continue to face hardship. Naturally, people will grumble. But the fact that Ghanaians have been able to put up with shortages, transport difficulties and low salaries, and other problems without any major protest, is an indication of their confidence in our integrity, the integrity and good intensions of the PNDC [Provisional Nations Defense Council] government. Visitors from other countries have commented that in their countries there would be riots if conditions were similar to those here. But the people know that they are not suffering to make a corrupt government rich at all, we are suffering in order to concentrate all our resources in the building of a just and prosperous society.’

To this, Boahen responded, “I am afraid that I do not agree with Rawlings’ explanation of the passivity of Ghanaians. We have not protested or staged riots not because we trust the PNDC but because we fear the PNDC! We are afraid of being detained, liquidated or dragged before the CVC or NIC or being subjected to all sorts of molestation. . . . They have been [protesting] but in a very subtle and quiet way—hence the culture of silence.”¹⁶ Boahen portrays Ghana in 1989 as permeated by oppression. Yet by 1989 things were much better than they had been, as evidenced by the fact that Boahen could make such speeches in the first place.

Rawlings’s seizure of power on January 11, 1982, is often described in almost biblical terms. Via his initials, “J.J.,” he was sometimes referred to as “Junior Jesus.” And this was his second coming. He had been the figurehead for a military revolt in 1979. Rawlings had movie star looks and exuded charisma. But charm was not what kept him in power. Oppression and rich rewards for supporters are the staples of leadership in small-coalition systems and Rawlings was no exception. In the first six months of his rule, 180 people were killed and a thousand more were arrested and tortured. His loyal soldiers were renowned for their thuggish brutality and Rawlings bought their loyalty through a massive increase in military spending. Despite a collapse of the economy and a complete meltdown of government finances, J.J. knew whose support he needed and paid them first.

Rawlings had a talent for preventing protest. He stifled any free press by restricting the supply of paper. His supporters meanwhile infiltrated the trade unions and effectively made strikes impossible for many years. He avoided free assembly at every turn. Events a year into his rule demonstrate his considerable organizational talents. In January 1983, Nigeria announced the expulsion of 1.4 million Ghanaians working in Nigeria. In a few weeks 10 percent of the population, most of them young adults, flooded back into a poverty-stricken Ghana. The prospects of hundreds of thousands of disgruntled and unemployed people milling around the capital terrified many in the government, some of whom advocated closing the border to prevent them from arriving. Instead, Rawlings welcomed them with open arms, but almost immediately ensured the returnees were transported back to their home villages. His massive transport undertaking avoided the camps that overwhelmed Mexico and Nicaragua. And it was a much more humane approach than Shwe’s.

Rawlings’s fundamental problem was that Ghana was broke and the economy had nearly completely collapsed. Ghana’s food production was the second lowest in Africa, ahead only of Chad. Rigged exchange rates lay at the heart of Ghana’s economic problems and its system of political rewards. The official exchange rate for Ghana’s currency, the cedi, was much higher than the black market rate. Essential backers were allowed to exchange money at the official exchange rate and then convert it on the street. Unfortunately this eroded the incentives of farmers. By the early 1980s, it often cost farmers more for fuel to take goods to markets than they earned by selling them. Seventy percent of the crops that did make it to market were carried on people’s heads. Smuggling crops across the border to the Ivory Coast became the norm. The government responded by making smuggling a capital crime. With little being produced for export, Ghana had exhausted its capacity to borrow and was going bankrupt.

Rawlings had a big problem. He had seized power and wanted to pursue a revolutionary socialist agenda, but he needed money. As Naomi Chazan phrased it, “the question was no longer where resources were located but if they existed at all.”¹⁷ To start with, Rawlings closed all the universities and had the students help bring in the harvests. But such measures were not enough. The people were hungry. Ghana had insufficient funds to pay for food imports and to pay the army. As a good rule-abiding autocrat, Rawlings knew his priorities: pay the army! Soon the term Rawlings necklace became a popular euphemism for the protruding collarbones common among the emaciated people. He approached the Soviet Union, but they had their own financial problems and, despite his move to the political left, they declined to support him.

J.J. was between a rock and a hard place. He needed money and the only place left to get it was to encourage the people to get back to work. At the beginning of 1983 he enacted a radical reversal of policy. The cedi was allowed to devalue. Producer prices paid to farmers were also increased, and subsidies for gas, electricity, and health care were cut. International financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank were delighted to have an adherent to their policies, but many of his closest allies were not. This policy switch was also accompanied by a change in personnel. Rawlings orchestrated a coup, making it a fait accompli before his targets could organize and retaliate. Overnight his closest supporters found themselves without influence. Some, such as J. Amartey Kwei, would be executed (allegedly for his part in a notorious murder of judges). Others, such as the radical student activist, Chris Atim, fled into exile.

It is telling that by 1985, Rawlings was the only remaining member of the original ruling PNDC council. As a further sign of the direction Rawlings’s administration was taking, that council swelled from six members to ten. No leader voluntarily increases the number of people to whom he is beholden unless he thinks that doing so will help him stay in power.

As is to be expected, Rawlings was a reluctant democrat. He simply had few options left. He needed money. To get it, he implemented policies that empowered the people. Gradually, they could demand more. “Rawlings was a victim of his own success.” He had given the people a voice by liberalizing the economy and opening the airwaves. There was the perception of increased confidence. With the economic crisis resolved the people began to feel “we can do this without someone telling us what to do.”¹⁸

As we have seen, by 1989 Boahen felt comfortable openly criticizing Rawlings. Even he had to admit reforms had improved the economy. The “Rawlings necklace” had been replaced by the “Rawlings waistcoat (a fat belly).” Having to implement policies to keep the masses happy, Rawlings allowed a gradual expansion of the coalition to accompany the expansion in public goods. In 1988 and 1989 local elections were allowed. Rather than provoke mass protest, Rawlings stayed one step ahead. As a loose affiliation of political interests coalesced into the Movement for Freedom and Justice and called for multiparty elections, Rawlings defused their thunder by organizing elections while the opposition was still disorganized. In the 1991 presidential election he decisively defeated Adu Boahen, who ran as the leader of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). Although there were some discrepancies, international observers declared the results basically fair.

Elections have been basically fair ever since. Rawlings and his National Democratic Congress party won again in 1996, beating John Kufuor. In 2000, Rawlings stepped down and John Kufuor went on to serve the constitutional limit of two terms. In 2008 the NDC candidate, Atta Mills, became president in a highly competitive election.

Rawlings needed money and his only way of getting it was to empower the people. By allowing the people to assemble and communicate he increased their productivity. But he also made it easier for them to coordinate and organize against him. He successfully avoided protest and revolution only by remaining one step ahead of the people in terms of granting concessions. Yet he could not avoid protest indefinitely. In 1995 between 50,000 and 100,000 people joined Kume preko, or “We have had enough” marches through downtown Accra, the capital. Although the government sought to prevent these marches, the courts overruled them. An independent judiciary encourages entrepreneurial zeal, but it also protects the civil liberties of the people.

Today Ghana is an economically vibrant democracy. Its transition from autocracy to democracy took place under the leadership of the larger than life J. J. Rawlings. Yet it should be remembered that he was a reluctant democrat. Had he had the resources he would have perpetuated his socialist revolution. Ghana recently developed an offshore oilfield. Had these funds been available to J.J., or had the Soviets had the resources to back him, then it is likely he would still be in power and Ghana would be a much poorer and more oppressive land.

Revolutionary moments often arise, as we saw in the cases of Ghana, South Africa, and the Soviet Union, when an economy is near collapse—so near, in fact, that the leadership can no longer buy the military’s loyalty. Such circumstances are practically inevitable in the life of the vast majority of autocracies. Their rent-seeking, corrupt, inefficient economic ways assure it.

At such moments the threatened government is more than likely to blame the international community for their woes. After all, in exchange for policy concessions, oppressive leaders have been able to borrow on relatively easy terms from rich foreign governments and the international banks they control. Now these governments face crushing debt obligations and no money to pay them. Getting more money becomes difficult exactly because they are in such danger of defaulting on their debts. And what do many well-intentioned people cry out for them: debt forgiveness.

We must repeat what we have indicated earlier. Financial crises, from an autocratic leader’s perspective, are political crises. The leader hasn’t cared a whit about destroying his country’s economy by stealing from the public. Now that money is in such short supply that he can’t maintain his coalition’s loyalty there is a moment of opportunity for political change. Forgive the debts and the leader will just start borrowing again to pay his cronies and keep himself in power. Nicolas Van de Walle compares the fates of regimes in Benin and Zambia with Cameroon and Ivory Coast during crises.¹⁹ In the former cases, international financial institutions withdrew support and the nations democratized. In the latter cases, France stepped in with financial support and no reform occurred.

So the first policy recommendation for outside observers when a dictator faces national bankruptcy, and the protests likely to follow in its train is this: don’t save the dictator; don’t forgive indebtedness unless the dictator first actually puts his hold on power at real risk by permitting freedom of assembly, a free press, freedom to create opposition parties, and free, competitive elections in which the incumbent’s party is given no advantages in campaign funds, rallies, or anything else. Only after such freedoms and real political competition are in place might any debt forgiveness be considered. Even the least hint of a fraudulent election and of cutbacks in freedom should be met by turning off the flow of funds.

Foreign aid, as we have seen, is a boon to petty dictators and to democratic donor citizens and leaders. That makes persuading people to cut off aid to help promote democratization very difficult indeed. But if the opportunity arises it should be seized. Just as with debt forgiveness or new loans, foreign aid should be tied to the actuality of political reform and not to its promise. When leaders put themselves at risk of being thrown out by the people, then they show themselves worthy of aid. When leaders allow their books to be audited to detect and publicize corruption, then they are good candidates for aid designed to improve the well-being of their people. Those who refuse to make politics competitive and to expose and correct corruption will just steal aid and should not get it if there is not an overwhelming national security justification for continuing aid.

When a succession in leaders takes place, whether through revolution or through the unexpected death or retirement of the person in power, then there is a window of opportunity for real democratic change. We have seen that the early part of an incumbent’s time in office is the riskiest in terms of the new leader being deposed. This is especially true for autocrats. Indeed, they have a strong incentive to pretend to be democratic in their first couple of years exactly because for that first period in office democrats have a better chance of surviving than autocrats. We have seen just such reforms coming out of Cuba, for instance, as Raul Castro took over from his brother Fidel. Raul needed to consolidate his hold on power, reassure his backers that he could provide for them, and to do that he had to get Cuba’s economy to grow. Solution: introduce some economic competition and a few political acts of liberalization. Today Cubans can take greater advantage of private businesses than was true at any time since the revolution. They can have cell phones and some access to the Internet, expanding their reach for information and their ability to coordinate with fellow Cubans even when they are not face-to-face. But will these reforms last once Raul, or any newly ensconced autocrat, consolidates his control over the flow of money and the loyalty of his key backers? Probably not, unless the international community exploits its brief window of opportunity. It can do so by tying economic assistance to a lock-in of political liberalization.

All the methods mentioned above are exactly the tools that liberal governments can adopt to promote lock-in of democratic reforms. But do they have the will to do it? That, sadly, is unlikely—and for that problem we have not yet found a cure.