What drives politics in dictatorships? Milan W. Svolik argues authoritarian regimes must resolve two fundamental conflicts. Dictators face threats from the masses over which they rule - the problem ...of authoritarian control. Secondly from the elites with whom dictators rule - the problem of authoritarian power-sharing. Using the tools of game theory, Svolik explains why some dictators establish personal autocracy and stay in power for decades; why elsewhere leadership changes are regular and institutionalized, as in contemporary China; why some dictatorships are ruled by soldiers, as Uganda was under Idi Amin; why many authoritarian regimes, such as PRI-era Mexico, maintain regime-sanctioned political parties; and why a country's authoritarian past casts a long shadow over its prospects for democracy, as the unfolding events of the Arab Spring reveal. Svolik complements these and other historical case studies with the statistical analysis on institutions, leaders and ruling coalitions across dictatorships from 1946 to 2008.
Polarization versus Democracy Svolik, Milan W
Journal of democracy,
07/2019, Letnik:
30, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
When can we realistically expect ordinary people to check the authoritarian ambitions of elected politicians? An answer to this question is key to understanding the most prominent development in the ...dynamic of democratic survival since the end of the Cold War: the subversion of democracy by elected incumbents and its emergence as the most common form of democratic breakdown. This article proposes an explanation according to which political polarization undermines the public's ability to serve as a democratic check: In polarized electorates, voters are willing to trade off democratic principles for partisan interests. The article presents evidence that supports this claim; raises questions about the real-world relevance of conventional measures of support for democracy; and highlights the importance of understanding the role that ordinary people play in democratic backsliding.
Is support for democracy in the United States robust enough to deter undemocratic behavior by elected politicians? We develop a model of the public as a democratic check and evaluate it using two ...empirical strategies: an original, nationally representative candidate-choice experiment in which some politicians take positions that violate key democratic principles, and a natural experiment that occurred during Montana’s 2017 special election for the U.S. House. Our research design allows us to infer Americans’ willingness to trade-off democratic principles for other valid but potentially conflicting considerations such as political ideology, partisan loyalty, and policy preferences. We find the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing in several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence. Our findings echo classic arguments about the importance of political moderation and cross-cutting cleavages for democratic stability and highlight the dangers that polarization represents for democracy.
Why do some dictatorships establish institutions that may constrain their leaders? We argue that institutions promote the survival of dictatorships by facilitating authoritarian power-sharing. ...Specifically, institutions such as parties, legislatures, and advisory councils alleviate commitment and monitoring problems between the dictator and his allies caused by the secrecy in authoritarian governance. However, because authoritarian power-sharing succeeds only when it is backed by a credible threat of a rebellion by the dictator’s allies, institutions will be ineffective or break down when an imbalance of power within the ruling coalition undermines this threat’s credibility. Our arguments clarify the complex interaction between collective action, commitment, and monitoring problems in authoritarian governance. We use both historical and large-N data to assess new empirical predictions about the relationship between political institutions, leader survival, and the concentration of power in dictatorships.
This article develops a change-point model of democratic consolidation that conceives of consolidation as a latent quality to be inferred rather than measured directly. Consolidation is hypothesized ...to occur when a large, durable, and statistically significant decline in the risk of democratic breakdowns occurs at a well-defined point during a democracy's lifetime. This approach is applied to new data on democratic survival that distinguish between breakdowns due to military coups and incumbent takeovers. We find that the risk of an authoritarian reversal by either process differs both in its temporal dynamic and determinants. Crucially, new democracies consolidate against the risk of coups but not incumbent takeovers, suggesting that distinct mechanisms account for the vulnerability of new democracies to these alternative modes of breakdown.
I examine a fundamental problem of politics in authoritarian regimes: the dictator and the ruling coalition must share power and govern in an environment where political influence must be backed by a ...credible threat of violence. I develop a model of authoritarian politics in which power sharing is complicated by this conflict of interest: by exploiting his position, the dictator may acquire more power at the expense of the ruling coalition, which may attempt to deter such opportunism by threatening to stage a coup. Two power-sharing regimes, contested and established dictatorships, may emerge as a result of strategic behavior by the dictator and the ruling coalition. This theory accounts for the large variation in the duration of dictators' tenures and the concentration of power in dictatorships over time, and it contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of power sharing and accountability in authoritarian regimes.
Why does the military intervene in the politics of some countries but remain under firm civilian control in others? The paper argues that the origins of military intervention in politics lie in a ...fundamental moral hazard problem associated with authoritarian repression. Dictators must deter those who are excluded from power from challenging them. When underlying, polity-wide conflict results in threats to the regime that take the particular form of mass, organized, and potentially violent opposition, the military is the only force capable of defeating them. The military exploits this pivotal position by demanding greater institutional autonomy as well as a say in policy, and it threatens to intervene if the civilian leadership departs from a subsequent compromise on these issues. A game-theoretic analysis of such contracting on violence implies that the likelihood of military intervention in politics should be greatest at intermediate levels of mass threats. Original, large-N data on military intervention support these claims.
This article explains why dissatisfaction with the performance of individual politicians in new democracies often turns into disillusionment with democracy as a political system. The demands on ...elections as an instrument of political accountability are much greater in new than established democracies: politicians have yet to form reputations, a condition that facilitates the entry into politics of undesirable candidates who view this period as their "one-time opportunity to get rich." After a repeatedly disappointing government performance, voters may rationally conclude that "all politicians are crooks" and stop discriminating among them, to which all politicians rationally respond by "acting like crooks," even if most may be willing to perform well in office if given appropriate incentives. Such an expectation-driven failure of accountability, which I call the "trap of pessimistic expectations," may precipitate the breakdown of democracy. Once politicians establish reputations for good performance, however, these act as barriers to the entry into politics of low-quality politicians. The resulting improvement in government performance reinforces voters' belief that democracy can deliver accountability, a process that I associate with democratic consolidation. These arguments provide theoretical microfoundations for several prominent empirical associations between the economic performance of new democracies, public attitudes toward democracy, and democratic stability.
Voting Against Autocracy Svolik, Milan W
World politics,
10/2023, Letnik:
75, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
When and how do voters punish politicians for subverting democracy? To investigate the role of the public in democratic backsliding, I develop a conceptual framework that differentiates among three ...mechanisms: vote switching, backlash, and disengagement. The first mechanism entails defection by voters from a candidate who undermines democracy to one who does not; the latter two mechanisms entail transitions between voting and abstention. I estimate the magnitude of each mechanism by combining evidence from a series of original survey experiments, traditional surveys, and a quasi-experiment afforded by the rerun of the 2019 Istanbul mayoral election, in which the governing party, akp, attempted to overturn the result of an election that it had lost. I find that although vote switching and backlash contributed to the akp's eventual defeat the most, each of the three mechanisms served as a democratic check in some subset of the Istanbul electorate. Persuasion, mobilization, and even demobilization are all viable tools for curbing the authoritarian tendencies of elected politicians.
Formal Models of Nondemocratic Politics Gehlbach, Scott; Sonin, Konstantin; Svolik, Milan W
Annual review of political science,
05/2016, Letnik:
19, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The last decade has witnessed growing interest among political scientists and economists in nondemocratic politics. This trend has been reflected in increasingly rigorous game-theoretic modeling of ...its various aspects: regime persistence and breakdown, ruling-coalition formation and leadership change, protests and repression, formal institutions and elections, and censorship and media control. We review this research agenda, focusing on the foundational assumptions and political intuition behind key models. Our survey reveals a field populated by disparate models of particular mechanisms that nonetheless share two major analytical themes: asymmetries of information and commitment problems. We propose that future models move toward a genuinely comparative study of authoritarian institutions.
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