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.
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.
Formal Models of Nondemocratic Politics Gehlbach, Scott; Sonin, Konstantin; Svolik, Milan W
Annual review of political science,
05/2016, Volume:
19, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
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.
Most electoral fraud is not conducted centrally by incumbents but rather locally by a multitude of political operatives. How does an incumbent ensure that his agents deliver fraud when needed and as ...much as is needed? We address this and related puzzles in the political organization of electoral fraud by studying the perverse consequences of incentive conflicts between incumbents and their local agents. These incentive conflicts result in a herd dynamic among the agents that tends to either oversupply or undersupply fraud, rarely delivering the amount of fraud that would be optimal from the incumbent’s point of view. Our analysis of the political organization of electoral fraud explains why even popular incumbents often preside over seemingly unnecessary fraud, why fraud sometimes fails to deliver victories, and it predicts that the extent of fraud should be increasing in both the incumbent’s genuine support and reported results across precincts. A statistical analysis of anomalies in precinct-level results from the 2011–2012 Russian legislative and presidential elections provides preliminary support for our key claims.
When and how do third-party actors—most prominently electoral commissions, courts, and observers—contribute to the integrity of the electoral process? We approach these questions by studying how ...third-party actors shape politicians’ incentives to comply with the outcomes of elections. Third parties are most beneficial in close elections, when the threat of a post-election confrontation alone fails to ensure self-enforcing compliance with election outcomes. Our analysis highlights that third parties do not need to be impartial to be politically consequential, that it is third parties with a moderate pro-incumbent bias that will be acceptable to not only the opposition but also the incumbent, and that incumbents adopt politically consequential third-party institutions when they fear that their narrow victory might result in a costly post-election confrontation. Extensions of our model address the role of repression and urban bias, examine the differences between commissions, courts, and observers, and clarify not only the potential but also the limits to institutional solutions to the problem of electoral compliance in new and transitioning democracies.
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