With authoritarian rulers ascendant in many parts of the world, one wonders what must happen for their nations to liberalize.
The likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) are entrenched, experienced and not unpopular — so should their opponents simply resign themselves to an open-ended period of illiberal rule?
University of California, Los Angeles political scientist Daniel Treisman says that is not necessarily the case.
For a academic paper, he analyzed 218 episodes of democratization between 1800 and 2015, and found they were, with some exceptions — such as Danish King Frederick VII’s voluntary acceptance of a constitution in 1848 — the result of authoritarian rulers’ mistakes in seeking to hold on to power.
The list of these errors is both a useful handbook for authoritarians and a useful reminder that even the most capable of them are fallible, with disastrous consequences for their regimes.
Treisman says deliberate liberalization — whether to forestall a revolution, motivate people to fight a foreign invader, defeat competing elite groups or make a pact with them — only occurred in up to a third of the cases. In the rest, democratization was an accident: As they set off a chain of events, rulers did not intend to relinquish power.
Some of them — such as former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev — have admitted as much.
Treisman’s list of mistakes is worth citing in full.
There are five basic ones:
Hubris: An authoritarian ruler underestimates the opposition’s strength and fails to compromise or suppress it before it is too late.
King Louis Philippe of France was deposed in 1848 after, as Treisman puts it, turning “a series of reform banquets into revolution by refusing even mild concessions.”
Former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was making a routine speech when he realized he was being overthrown.
Former Indonesian president Muhammad Suharto believed he could get the nation under control right up to the moment of his resignation.
Needless risk: A ruler calls a vote which he “fails to manipulate sufficiently” — like former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988, when he lost a plebiscite on whether he should be allowed to stay in power — or starts a war he cannot win — like former Argentine president Leopoldo Galtieri with the Falklands conflict of 1982.
Slippery slope: That is Gorbachev’s case — a ruler starts reforms to prop up the regime, but ends up undermining it.
Trusting a traitor: This is not always a mistake made by the dictator themself, although it was in the case of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who chose Spanish King Juan Carlos, the dismantler of fascism, as his successor.
In Gorbachev’s case, it was the Politburo — the regime’s elite — that picked the wrong man to preserve its power.
Counterproductive violence: Not suppressing the opposition when necessary can be a sign of hubris in a dictator, but overreacting is also a grave mistake.
The example Treisman gives is former Bangladeshi president Hussain Muhammad Ershad, who was forced to resign by an uprising that started after police shot an opposition activist at a rally, but the error was also made by former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2013, when his riot police descended on a few hundred peacefully protesting students and brutally beat them, setting off the much bigger protests that resulted in Yanukovych’s ouster.
These are all very human errors of judgement.
Dictators are people, too, and sometimes they will act on imperfect information or erroneous gut feeling, but Treisman makes the point that they might be prone to such errors precisely because they are dictators.
They will be fooled by polls which people do not answer sincerely, taken in by their own propaganda — like former Malawian president Hastings Banda, who called and lost a referendum in 1993 because he had been impressed by the high turnout at rallies in his support, even though people had been forced to attend them — and sometimes they rule for so long that their mental faculties are less sharp than at the outset.
I have a particular interest in watching Putin for any of the errors on Treisman’s list. So far, it is as if he had read the paper before Treisman wrote it.
His suppression has been timely and cleverly measured, his election manipulation always sufficient, his temporary successor, former Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, avoided the liberal slippery slope and he has only started wars against much weaker rivals.
He helps his regime’s propaganda by treating it as truth, but he does not buy it to the point of losing vigilance.
In next year’s election, which he apparently intends to win, he is keeping his main opponent, Alexei Navalny, out of the race, mindful that modern technology allows a rival to loosen media restrictions — something Treisman notes can lead a hubristic dictator to an electoral loss — but even Putin, after 17 years in power, is in danger of making a miscalculation one day, perhaps finally misreading the mood of the increasingly cynical Russian public that keeps registering support for him in largely worthless polls.
It is easy to imagine the choleric Erdogan getting into an armed conflict Turkey cannot sustain or using disproportional violence as Turks’ patience with his reprisals wear thin.
It is a possibility, although a remote one, that, after Xi’s power consolidation, the Chinese Communist Party would opt for a more liberal successor and he will not be able to hold the reins as tightly.
Treisman notes that in 85 percent of the episodes he studied, democratization was preceded by mass unrest.
Sooner or later, people tend to get tired of regimes in which they have little say. Then, it only takes a misstep from the one person at the center of such a regime.
Dictators often overestimate the external danger to their power, the plots of foreign or exiled enemies.
In the final analysis, they are the biggest threat to themselves.
Leonid Bershidsky was the founding editor of Russian business daily Vedomosti and the opinion Web site Slon.ru.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this