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Competitive Authoritarianism and Democratic Fevers
Rachel Lu recently made the case that our political discourse of late has been overwrought, leading to panic rather than prudence. Colorful rhetoric, she writes,
is a journalist’s friend, but let’s be honest. Most Americans have no experience of true political oppression. The din of our bellicose public square persuades us that the situation is desperate, when really that’s a sign of comparative health.
The rhetoric itself, she argues, disproves the notion that America is in a terminal condition, because passionate and public political debate is only possible in a vibrant democracy. She appeals throughout to metaphors of illness: A temperature is a sign that the body politic is fighting off infection, not an indication that it’s time to “go for the defibrillator.”
Yesterday, King Prawn opened a debate about her arguments. I exchanged a few thoughts with BrentB67 about the best way to describe our affliction, whatever it is. I agree with Rachel that it’s preposterous to use words like tyranny and despotism. Likening the IRS to a soft Gestapo empties both our imaginations and our vocabularies: Rather than emphasizing the danger of a politicized IRS, it trivializes the horror of Nazi totalitarianism.
Proving the enduring value of a political science degree — for the first time, ever — I wondered out loud if we should think about a condition described in the literature as competitive authoritarianism. Given that this is the political disease of the 21st century, perhaps it would be useful to ask ourselves what’s caused the outbreak — and even to ask whether we might have caught a touch of the bug.
The term comes from Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, who studied a type of regime that’s proliferated around the world in the post-Cold War era, much to the disappointment of those who hoped that the fall of the Berlin Wall had permanently settled humanity’s great political debates in favor of liberal democracy. “What began as a discussion of political scandals involving leaked tapes and autocrats in Peru and Ukraine,” they write, “led to a realization that the two countries’ regimes were surprisingly similar – and that we had no term for these regimes.”
And so they coined one. After carefully studying 35 similar regimes around the world, they came up with the term competitive authoritarianism. Such regimes are also described as illiberal democracies or hybrid regimes, and there’s much argument which term is best and what they describe, but in essence, they’re regimes that hold meaningful multiparty elections, but nonetheless engage in serious democratic abuse. The regimes in the countries they studied were competitive, they write,
in that opposition forces used democratic institutions to contest vigorously – and, on occasion, successfully – for power. Nevertheless, they were not democratic. Electoral manipulation, unfair media access, abuse of state resources, and varying degrees of harassment and violence skewed the playing field in favor of incumbents. In other words, competition was real but unfair.
The study of post–Cold War hybrid regimes, they continue, “was initially marked by a pronounced democratizing bias.”
Viewed through the lens of democratization, hybrid regimes were frequently categorized as flawed, incomplete, or “transitional” democracies. For example, Russia was treated as a case of “protracted” democratic transition during the 1990s, and its subsequent autocratic turn was characterized as a “failure to consolidate” democracy. Likewise, Cambodia was described as a “nascent democracy” that was “on the road to democratic consolidation”; Cameroon, Georgia, and Kazakhstan were labeled “democratizers”; and the Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville were called “would-be democracies.” Transitions that did not lead to democracy were characterized as “stalled” or “flawed.” Thus, Zambia was said to be “stuck in transition”; Albania was labeled a case of “permanent transition”; and Haiti was said to be undergoing a “long,” “ongoing,” and even “unending” transition. Such characterizations are misleading. The assumption that hybrid regimes are (or should be) moving in a democratic direction lacks empirical foundation.
To put it another way, Russia is not “on the wrong side of history.” In fact, it’s on the side that may be winning.
A level playing field, they write,
is implicit in most conceptualizations of democracy. Indeed, many characteristics of an uneven playing field could be subsumed into the dimensions of “free and fair elections” and “civil liberties.” However, there are at least two reasons to treat this attribute as a separate dimension. First, some aspects of an uneven playing field – such as skewed access to media and finance – have a major impact between elections and are thus often missed in evaluations of whether elections are free and fair. Second, some government actions that skew the playing field may not be viewed as civil-liberties violations. For example, whereas closing down a newspaper is a clear violation of civil liberties, de facto governing-party control of the private media – achieved through informal proxy or patronage arrangements – is not. Likewise, illicit government–business ties that create vast resource disparities vis-a-vis the opposition are not civil-liberties violations per se. Attention to the slope of the playing field thus highlights how regimes may be undemocratic even in the absence of overt fraud or civil-liberties violations.
They note that it’s important to distinguish between competitive and noncompetitive authoritarianism:
We define full authoritarianism as a regime in which no viable channels exist for opposition to contest legally for executive power. This category includes closed regimes in which national-level democratic institutions do not exist (e.g., China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia) and hegemonic regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist on paper but are reduced to facade status in practice. In hegemonic regimes, elections are so marred by repression, candidate restrictions, and/or fraud that there is no uncertainty about their outcome. Much of the opposition is forced underground and leading critics are often imprisoned or exiled.
There’s now a huge literature about competitive authoritarianism, and no way for me easily to summarize all that’s been written about it. A good starting point is with the original book by Levitsky and Way, which you can read online. I’ll just quickly point out some important characteristics of such regimes:
- Assaults on civil liberties take more subtle forms, including “legal repression,” or the discretionary use of legal instruments – such as tax, libel, or defamation laws – to punish opponents. Although such repression may involve the technically correct application of the law, its use is selective and partisan rather than universal.
- Although “legal” and other repression under competitive authoritarianism is not severe enough to force the opposition underground or into exile, it clearly exceeds what is permissible in a democracy. By raising the cost of opposition activity (thereby convincing all but the boldest activists to remain on the sidelines) and critical media coverage (thereby encouraging self-censorship), even intermittent civil-liberties violations can seriously hinder the opposition’s capacity to organize and challenge the government.
- Incumbents use the state to create or maintain resource disparities that seriously hinder the opposition’s ability to compete. This may occur in several ways. First, incumbents may make direct partisan use of state resources. Incumbents also may use the state to monopolize access to private-sector finance. Governing parties may use discretionary control over credit, licenses, state contracts, and other resources to enrich themselves via party-owned enterprises, benefit crony- or proxy-owned firms that then contribute money back into party coffers, or corner the market in private sector donations. The state also may be used to deny opposition parties access to resources.
- When opposition parties lack access to media that reaches most of the population, there is no possibility of fair competition. Media access may be denied in several ways. Frequently, the most important disparities exist in access to broadcast media, combined with biased and partisan coverage. … Although independent newspapers and magazines may circulate freely, they generally reach only a small urban elite. … In other cases, private media is widespread but major media outlets are linked to the governing party – via proxy ownership, patronage, and other illicit means.
These regimes, they hold, are a genuinely novel, post-Cold War phenomenon. They don’t think this is a coincidence. They posit many reasons for their rise, but in essence, hold that it’s because the international environment changed, raising the minimum standard for regime acceptability. The new standard, however, was multiparty elections — not democracy.
Other researchers point out that authoritarians learned from the failure of totalitarianism: It’s too costly vigorously to repress an entire population, and it’s viewed internationally as bad form, creating a world of hassles for regime leaders. Soft authoritarianism is more cost-effective, and widely viewed as reasonably legitimate, or at least, no real cause for excluding and ostracising these leaders. Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman elaborate on this idea in a paper titled, How Modern Dictators Survive: Cooptation, Censorship, Propaganda, and Repression:
How do dictators hold onto power? The totalitarian tyrannies of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and others relied largely—although not exclusively—on mass terror and indoctrination. Although less ideological, many 20th Century military regimes—from Franco’s Spain to Pinochet’s Chile—used considerable violence to intimidate opponents of the regime. However, in recent decades, a less carnivorous form of authoritarian rule has emerged, one better adapted to the globalized media and sophisticated technologies of the 21st Century. From the Peru of Alberto Fujimori to the Hungary of Viktor Orban, illiberal regimes have managed to consolidate power without isolating their countries from the world economy or resorting to mass killings.
Instead of inaugurating “new orders,” such regimes simulate democracy, holding elections that they make sure to win, bribing and censoring the private press rather than abolishing it, and replacing ideology with an amorphous anti-Western resentment. Their leaders often enjoy genuine popularity—albeit after eliminating plausible rivals—that is based on “performance legitimacy,” a perceived competence at securing prosperity and defending the nation against external threats. State propaganda aims not to re-engineer human souls but to boost the leader’s ratings, which, so long as they remain high, are widely publicized. Political opponents are harassed and humiliated, accused of fabricated crimes, and encouraged to emigrate.
The new-style dictators can brutally crush separatist rebellions and deploy paramilitaries against unarmed protesters. But compared to previous regimes, they use violence sparingly. They prefer the ankle bracelet to the Gulag. Maintaining power, for them, is less a matter of terrorizing victims than of manipulating beliefs about the world. Of course, shaping beliefs was also important for the old-style dictatorships, but violence came first. “Words are fine things, but muskets are even better,” Mussolini quipped. Recent tyrannies reverse the order. “We live on information,” Fujimori’s security chief Vladimir Montesinos confessed in one interview. “The addiction to information is like an addiction to drugs.” Montesinos paid million dollar bribes to television stations to skew their coverage. But killing members of the elite struck him as foolish: “Remember why Pinochet had his problems. We will not be so clumsy.” When dictators are accused of political murders these days, it often augurs the fall of the dictatorship.
We develop a model of dictatorship to capture the logic that governs the survival of such regimes. As in “career concerns” models of democratic politics, the ruler may be either competent or incompetent. Only the dictator and a subset of the public—“the informed elite”—observe his type directly. But citizens update their beliefs about this based on the information available to them from the state media, independent media, and their own living standards. Citizens’ living standards depend on the tax rate set by the dictator and on economic performance, itself a function of the leader’s competence and a stochastic shock. If enough citizens infer, based on these various signals, that the incumbent is incompetent, they rise up and overthrow him in a revolution. Members of the elite—if not coopted—would also prefer to replace an incompetent incumbent but cannot do so without the masses to back them up.
It’s worth it to read at least the book and the paper; if you’re curious about this, I can suggest a longer reading list.
Now, no one — but no one — describes the United States as a competitive authoritarian regime. But here are my questions for Ricochet.
1. Might this concept be useful in describing aspects of what we sense to be going wrong in the United States? Or is the United States so exceptional that it’s absurd to study other countries to spot trends and for comparison?
2. If you think it’s useful, would you agree that we see early warning signs of this pattern in America? In what way, exactly?
3. If you agree, would you conclude that contra Rachel, this is indeed reason to run around with our hair on fire, given the empirical evidence that this pattern tends to lead to a highly undesirable endpoint?
3. Why has this kind of regime proliferated in the aftermath of the Cold War? Levitsky and Way think the key reason is a change in international standards of legitimacy. But perhaps there are other causes? If so, might figuring out what they are, precisely, help us to understand what’s going on in America?
5. For the sake of the argument, say we accept the diagnosis: We’re suffering from early-onset competitive authoritarianism. What’s the most important thing to do to ensure the disease progresses no further? Which policies have best halted the progression of the disease elsewhere?
What policies, elsewhere, have led to metastasis?
Published in General, Politics
Democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s just participation (at some meaningful or seemingly meaningful level) by the citizens/subjects. What is all it’s cracked up to be is liberal democracy. The vote must be toward a very specific aim, namely individual liberty. Democracy is not a foundation but a structure built on a foundation of liberty. This was succinctly detailed in a couple of sentences in the Declaration, so it’s not a difficult or complex concept. But, that concept has been lost to or hidden from a great deal of our people.
At the close of the Constitutional Convention Ben Franklin said the proposed government:
Our people have become so corrupt (in many respects) so as to need despotic government because they are incapable of living under any other kind, specifically one in which they are responsible for the outcome of the exercise of their own God-given liberty.
We cannot get a better government until we get a better people. This is not a political problem which can be solved with legislation or by voting the right politicians into power.
So… do nothing.
My last word on Mukand and Rodrik – these words don’t mean what you think they do:
So by ‘liberal democracy’, they mean a democracy liberals (in the modern, American, sense) could love. Freedom of speech and other liberal (in the old, freedom, sense) values, not so much. (This is one with the tendency to describe as ‘competitively authoritarian’ those countries where modern liberal (i.e. illiberal) values do not have a monopoly on power.)
No, do effective things. Read history and philosophy. Learn the minds of the men who founded the nation. Teach your children. Talk to your neighbors. Convince your coworkers. Just throwing a tantrum in the voting booth will never be sufficient. This is where we take upon ourselves responsibility which is the flip side of liberty. Picking our authoritarian over their authoritarian still just leaves us with an authoritarian.
They, and Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s supporters, are the people who entertain, “inform” and educate the electorate, who administer its various levels of government and who work in the growing rent seeking “capitalist” sector. Romney’s 47%, now growing steadily.
The first three of your bullet points are a pretty good description of what’s going on in the U.S. Ask Ramesh Ponnoru about #1 and #2.
Contemplate a President Hillary, a President Bernie, or, as recent speculation has it, a victorious Kerry/Warren ticket in the light of the bullet points.
I don’t feel that conversation beyond this point will be productive.
I’ve obviously misunderstood (and very likely mischaracterized, uncharitably) your point. My calling it a tantrum was rude and does not further dialogue. I reacted poorly to you reducing my entire statement to “do nothing.”
What I’ve understood you to be saying is that the key thing is to vote for the right person/people. I merely meant to convey the idea that this will be insufficient, especially if there’s not a majority with you or if the vote goes to further erode liberty rather than protect it.
Democracies tyrannize by definition: the Majority dictates to the Minority. This is not so much a problem if either 1) the Majority and Minority do not think too much differently from each other, or 2) the Majority makes accommodation for the different view of the Minority.
When neither of these obtains, it is time to have a two-state solution, one for the Majority and one for the Minority. Even better is to “marketize government”, meaning let citizens choose among government service providers – thus buying into the prescriptions of their government of choice. If you favor the Democrat Party program, you would get it; if not, you would get the Republic Party program.
I’m sympathetic to the view that better politics is necessary, but we don’t have the sufficient conditions. In fact, some of the institutions that once built up our people now shepherd them into dependency and resentment.
We used to have good threads on this topic pre-Romney 2012. I remember one where Mollie conveyed the story of a career officer turned executive who was turning his attention to this topic via the formation of clergy and church workers. As I get closer to retirement, I find myself moving that way.
It seemed like we were capable of a 50 state solution at one point, but then our federal government went national. This problem is one of the several our founders hoped to remedy structurally in the constitution, but the petty tyrants of the left simply can’t leave others alone.
Being a political scientist, I’m well aware of their lack of creativity, so the fact that Political Scientists ™ thought the post-Cold-War Autocracies were “new” might just mean that they were new to them. I’m not seeing anything more impressive than the old distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian forms of government. We’ve seen authoritarian government at least as far back as the early 19th century, if not back into pre-history. Certainly the Enlightened Monarchs who Kant defended justified their behavior with plebiscites and appeals to the people, so long as the people mouthed the right words. Augustus left the people alone, so long as they mouthed the right words. What drove the early Empire crazy about Christians was the Christian refusal to just mouth the words about the deification of the emperor. The aberration was the Totalitarian moment of the mid-20th century, where the dictators wanted you not only to mouth the words, but actually believe them. We got so used to them, we forgot there were other kinds.
Nonetheless, a string of Latin American autocrats, not to mention several Asian autocrats, and in Europe, Franco, were basically Authoritarian, not Totalitarian. Fujimori didn’t care what your politics were, so long as you didn’t threaten the peace or his regime until after the civil war was over. Franco engaged in violence during the civil war, but was largely peaceful afterwards so long as you didn’t try to break up the country.
We have a gift here in the US. called the Constitution. I found something I printed out awhile ago about the first to arrive to the colonies – why they fled, their beliefs and how our Founders intended for our country to stand the test of time against enemies foreign and domestic. They set about forming a government based on Biblical principals.
We have gotten away from this for some time – we are witnessing worldwide, the results of greed, immorality, sloth, the deadly sins that have always been the downfall of many countries. We can embrace the fast-changing, modern world, but if we lose our soul, we will fall like the rest. I like a glass half full view, like Rachel presented. A new president or election won’t save us. It has to be personal – getting back to We The People. If we don’t…
the remedy will be imposed upon us, as the fallout from greed and power will ripple into every part of our lives. We will be forced to go back to the basics – but the Mercy Seat can be painful and last a long time, depending on how sick we’ve become. We cannot escape the effects from the turmoil that we are witnessing across the globe, but we can go back to our gift for getting back on our feet.
The key novelty isn’t the “authoritarian” part, it’s the “competitive” part.
Don’t think marketizing government works if it is geographically based, because Democrats and Republicans are intermingled too much. You have to have the two-state solution in situ. If Dems want to dedicate more of their income to social welfare than Reps, there is no reason they should not have that option even if there is a sitting Rep President and Congress. Likewise, if Reps want to only honor traditional marriage, that should be their prerogative. Etc., etc….
You get rid of the former when you make the latter real. There is no real competition, say like in the marketplace. Once you bring about real competition, you lose the bad kind of authoritarianism – namely the coercion of the minority. If the majority wants to be subject to lots of authority (think Democrats), no reason they shouldn’t have that option.
“We” are two different people now. Time to change the language to read: “We The (Two Different) People…” Then everything will be fine.
I contend that dems don’t want to dedicate more of their income to anything other than their own pleasures. They want to dedicate more of your an my income to things while theirs is left alone.
Also, I think we’re structurally incapable of this sort of arrangement. Opt in/out clauses in laws simply don’t work well when there’s equality before the law. It just opens the system up to a new gamesmanship.
Two rejoinders:
1.) If my description of the post-war autocracies is sufficient, then they were just “authoritarian” and therefore they cannot be evidence for a different type of authoritarianism.
2.) What, exactly, does “competitive” gain us in explanatory power? They are authoritarian regimes with elections? So was Napoleon’s. So was Augustus’. So was Stalin’s. Totalitarian regimes rigging elections is like dictatorship 101.
Dr. Berlinski,
Just because the Iran “Deal?” has made most of the world feel betrayed by the United States, while the IRS, Obamacare lies, Reset With the Russians, Arab Spring, Benghazi, and Private Clinton Server / Clinton Cash, scandals have made most of the American People feel betrayed,, doesn’t mean that we need to panic.
I am not upset. (Somebody please shoot Milo! NOW!!)
Regards,
Jim
“Equality before the Law” would apply separately. When man and women divorce because of irreconcilable differences, they no longer share each other’s income “equally”.
The problem right now is that, when Republicans gain control and advance their agenda – they necessarily deprive Democrats of their own agenda. It is a zero-sum game mostly. It doesn’t have to be. As soon as we transform public discussion over to how both parties can gain by an election of Republicans, political hostility ramps down a notch. There is no reason Republicans can’t support Dems getting what they want as long as Reps don’t have to buy-in/pay for it.
This is similar to my “opt out” proposal. People should be able to choose their regulatory or other government interface.
[Personal attacks are a violation of Ricochet’s Code of Conduct.]
I have to take major issue with this. When you have ideologies competing over the very structure of the nation, of course the agendas cancel each other out. The Dems want more authority to micromanage, more authority to dictate, more regulation of practically everything, and open restrictions (set by themselves, of course) on fundamental rights (free speech and bearing arms). How on earth is this not a zero sum game?
1. Might this concept be useful in describing aspects of what we sense to be going wrong in the United States?
No. As noted, I don’t think the concept describes anything, but even if it did, the important qualification of an autocracy is that power is in few hands. For all Obama’s dictatorial ambition, he needs the cover of the Congress, the Courts, the agencies, and the people to act. Our problem is not that power is being consolidated, it is that so few people are using the power they have to resist that consolidation.
2. If you think it’s useful, would you agree that we see early warning signs of this pattern in America?
No. What we are seeing is the realization that it is easy to hamstring the counter-acting powers in America. If the separation of powers is weak, then it becomes feasible to contemplate the elected dictator, but that dictator still rides the tiger of public opinion. The question then becomes, what controls public opinion?
3. If you agree, would you conclude that contra Rachel, this is indeed reason to run around with our hair on fire, given the empirical evidence that this pattern tends to lead to a highly undesirable endpoint?
Define “running around with our hair on fire.” Will electing Trump help? Probably not. He’s an attempt to substitute our elected dictator for their elected dictator, and he’ll either do something to set the people off, or do nothing.
4. Why has this kind of regime proliferated in the aftermath of the Cold War?
Dictators have always justified themselves as the vanguards and protectors of the people. This is hardly new. Most of the worst governments in the world hardly concern themselves with international legitimacy (yes, I’m sure Idi Amin went to bed every night just shaking at the thought of UN disapproval -and Quaddafi sat on the Human Rights Council with the firm belief that the Sword of Damocles hung above him). Rather, the tools of propaganda and repression have simply changed -technology may be part of this, but 50 years experience with PsyOps during the cold war made the puppet masters very good at what they did. When people object to a specific policy, deflect them. When people oppose the regime, treat them as enemies of the people, not enemies of the state. Constantly hammer on what everyone knows and everyone believes, until everyone says it, until so many have said it that everyone believes, whether they do or not. You don’t want to stand out, do you? You’d attract the mob, and after all, the state is asking so little of you…
5. For the sake of the argument, say we accept the diagnosis: We’re suffering from early-onset competitive authoritarianism.
No idea. Breaking the mobs might be a good start. New look at destroying the undersea cables?
No, they’re not rigged. That’s the point and the novelty.
There are lots of ways to rig an election. Our media does quite a number on us.
Because you can grant them that paradigm. Getting them their own government is 90% of what they want. That they would lose the ability to control Republicans as well is ridding themselves of a bad habit they could learn to do without.