Comparative Politics Unit 2 Study Guide

Comparative Politics Unit 2

Lecture on Friday 2/7

February 07, 2025: 21st century authoritarianism: 

Defining our subjects: 

• Authoritarianism / non-democracy / dictatorship (these will be used interchangeably)

  • A small group of individuals exercises power; no right to choose leaders. 

  • Accountability to the public is compromised.

  • “Dictates “ to the people. 

  • Limit, to varying degrees, other public rights and freedoms. 

• But, lots of internal variation. 

“Non Democracies” = Junk drawers. 

Can we be more specific: 

• On a continuum? 

  • Typical focus in degree of competition

  • Electoral authoritarian / Competitive autocracies 

Challenges? 

• Single dimension might not be the most interesting (or consequential) difference.

• Changes in issues imply movements toward democracy. 

But these institutions (frequently in single-party regimes) make autocracies more durable, not less. 

Categorical Approaches: 

• Emphasize how the underlying conditions of dictatorships vary.

  • Does not mean ranked/ordered!

Could empathize: 

• Different ways governments are constituted.

• Differences in policy-making process. 

“Selectorate Theory” 

• NOT a theory about autocracies only

• All leaders are motivated by desire to gain and maintain office 

• The way to stay in power = distribute “goods” that keep people from defecting to challenges. 

• What is different? How leaders are selected! 

• Leaders are draw from the:

  • “Selectorate” - set of people who can play a role in selecting the leader (S) 

  • “Winning coalition” - the subset of the selectorate whose support is needed for a leader to stay in power. 

To stay in power, leaders must provide W, with enough “goods” to keep them satisfied.

• Public goods - things that everyone can consume. 

• Private goods - consumed only by a winning coalition. 

• If members don't get enough, they will “defect” to a challenger (they are going to vote for someone else). 

• Large “W” = ‘private goods’ are inefficient/impossible, so you must provide public goods. 

• Small “W” = leaders can use ‘private goods’ to buy loyalty. 

Helps make sense of when there is an “authoritarian advantage” regarding economic performance. 

Another Categorical Approach: 

• Distinguish based on structure and strategies of rule.

  • Who makes decisions

  • What groups support their leadership? 

Lecture on Monday 2/10

Another Categorical Approach

• Distinguish based on structure and strategies of rule

  • Who makes decisions?
    What group supports the leadership?

Party-based Regimes

• Single party organization controls access to political posts and shapes policy

• Prevents consolidation of power in the hands of origin leader

  • Power is “institutionalized” → means something is created or controlled by an organization, or is a common part of a culture or system

  • Constraints are in place to prevent someone from becoming too powerful

• The most democratic of dictatorships in appearance 

  • Not out of benevolence, power sharing institutions help keep regime insiders/elites satisfied

  • This is where we find mass elections, we know that these elections aren’t truly free and fair and competitive, we know that congress and the judiciary doesn’t act as a true effective checks and balances, but all of these institutions are there

  • Power sharing institutions: sharing power with other leaders in the party, such as the legislature, vice president, cabinet members, it is not benevolent, these are self-preservation strategies to make sure other elites do not overthrow. It is a form of loyalty 

  • These types of dictatorships tend to perform best. Byproduct of power sharing institutions

    • Longest lasting, fewest coup’s, highest growth

Personalist Regimes

• No autonomous institutions exist

• East Waitini - does not have modern political systems, most dictatorships have constitutions with presidency, congress, constitution, does something practical

• Single individual directs policy and controls access to political posts

  • Behavior and policy often erratic?

  • How does one keep insiders satisfied?

  • Two more bullets about these, check memo: about 20 minutes into class

Military Regimes

• Does not mean person in charge wears military uniform or has origins in the military, it means there is a group of military officers who collaboratively hold military power and drive policy decisions

• Many authoritarian leaders started in the military (e.g. Mobutu), but a military regime means something different than the military origin

• Group of officers hold power and control policy

• Collaborative model where professional military officers direct and implement policy

• Often emerges from coup d’etat even when the military claims to “defend democracy”, it is the military who leads these coup d’etats, resulting in military intervening, and thus a military regime

Monarchies

• Royal descent confers policy making power, access to political office, and control of the military

• Can resemble personalist regimes, but often make more checks on their power

• They do help solve succession crises, which is a fundamental dilemma!

• Built in mechanism allowing these things to survive, critical moment when the leader dies, distinction to personalist regime

Does your view change if we add that in this country…

1. Presidents won on average (1) 89% of all votes cast → not a very competitive political environment, closed autocracy is on the other side of democracy

   1. What share did Ronald Regan have in reelection in 1984, the largest electoral landslide in modern day politics. Got 58.8% of the popular vote, that is a decisive victory

2. Legislatures never once overruled a President’s demands

3. Rival political parties never once held a majority in the legislature

Electoral Authoritarianism, or the “messy middle” 

• Also called electoral autocracy

• What do we do with regimes whose characteristics (like Mexico, India, El Salvador) do not comfortably fit one of those bins on the left or the right?

• These are not just isolated examples (data version)

• Miller (2020) says that it is a dominant regime / autocracy in the world 

• “Unfair” or “insufficiently free” BUT electoral competition is not meaningless

  • 1 in 5 autocratic elections result in the incumbent party losing

  • Typically when we think about elections in non-democracies, we think of the other 80%, the ⅘. What a surprise the Communist China Party won their village election → we say that sarcastically. However, there is 20% in authoritarian leadership that ends up losing. There is still a bit of competition.

  • Powerful evidence that these elections are somewhat competitive and outcomes are somewhat uncertain

  • Elections are not fully free, fair, and representative, or else it would fit our procedural definition of a democracy

  • Elections (and other supportive institutions) are not merely “window dressing” → something that looks nice from the outside but doesn’t actually have purpose

  • Elections are key sources for political power

There is one major category of “hybrid” regimes

Differ in how they deal with the electoral process

1. Electoral Authoritarian: “I’ll do as I please to win an election”

• Systems where leaders take advantage and manipulate institutions to ensure they win an election and retain power

2. Illiberal Democracy: “After winning elections, I’ll do as I please”

• Leaders may win an election through a competitive election but then start doing things out of order after 

Lecture on Wednesday 2/12

Shifting gears: how do autocracies survive? 

Absence of “supportive factors” for democratization, vs. unique attributes that facilitate authoritarian survival

Modernization and Nondemocratic Rule

• Endogenous and Exogenous versions

• MAJOR decline → many countries lack these supportive conditions (social, cultural, economic, and institutional transformations)

Alternative Version

• Modernization is uneven and causes instability

• Instability creates openings for strong leaders who create nondemocratic regimes to restore order

• Huntington’s view that the degree of government is more important than the form

Inequality Linkages (as previously defined)

• Does inequality → social divisions → grievances “emerged” by populist autocratic leaders

• We have growing evidence that as the global economy has changed, income inequality has increased, not only in countries such as the United States and western liberal democracies, but also in many other areas of the world

• Decreasing authoritarian leaders willingness to share power as income inequality increases more

• Income inequality leads to very powerful social divisions through political polarization, and can lead to class based grievances avenged by populist authoritarian leaders → will talk about this related to democratic backsliding next week

Linkage and Leverage Theory

• Premise authoritarian behavior depends on external constraints

• If you think about authoritarian countries nad leaders, they exist in a very wide array of environments. Some of these environments are extremely permissive for authoritarian leaders, able to resist outside pressures for political reform and democratization. Others, by contrast, are not. Others are more constrained and influenced by outside factors

• Linkage density of social, economic, and political ties, and volume of cross border flows

• Leverage government’s vulnerability to external democratizing pressures

• High leakage and high leverage increases probability of successful democratization

• Low leverage means western threats (sanctions, diplomatic pressure, etc) are insufficient, and electoral autocracies don’t reform

A General Theory of Survival

• Autocracies are threatened by

  • 1. Ordinary citizens whose non-compliance can take form of rebellion, protests

  • 2. Oppositional elites who organize resistance

  • 3. Splits in ruling elite → the individuals in charge of the particular party are all of a sudden tenuous cooperation with each other can split apart and destabilize the regime, causing it to collapse

• How do leaders manage these threats?

Three Pillars of Autocratic Survival: Legitimation, Repression, and Co-optation

All Autocracies Must Build a Legitimizing Basis

• A “legitimizing idea”, or reason for being

• But just as sources of legitimacy can differ, legitimizing basis can also differ

Legitimation in Other Forms: Personality Cults as generating obedience

• Examples: Kim Jung Un in North Korea when his dad died, Soviet Union, sincere acts of grief when the dear leader dies 

Even the most ridiculous personality cults can serve a strategic purpose

• Autocrats face a “loyalty” - competence tradeoff

  • Too competent of subordinates, greater risk of overthrow

• But autocrats can’t know exactly how “loyal” that subordinates really are

• “Adverse selection” - when one party for a transaction has more information than the other

  • Example: buying a used car, the seller knows more about the car than you do

• You want your workers to be both loyal and competent, if individual members of your ruling party are too competent than they may use their added competence to organize some opposition to you or remove you from power

• Autocrats don't actually know how loyal their subordinates are

Lecture Friday 2/14

Adverse selection example:

• The used car market

• Sellers know more about the quality of used cars from buyers

• Buyers know this, so are unlikely to offer high prices

• Even sellers of high quality cars will not participate because the information differences prevent the market from working well

• No way to convince people that your car is not a used car dud, it is a high quality car, which is called an adverse selection problem

  • From an economic standpoint, the market for used cars tends to collapse, what you know vs. what a potential buyer knows (information differences)  prevents the market from working correctly

How does the used car market resolve this problem?

• To solve this, used car sellers send “signals” about the quality

How do you send a “signal” of your loyalty? And how do dictators make sure they are only selecting “loyal” subordinates?

• Let Vladimir Putin score 7 goals on you 

• Dye hair gray

• Say embarrassing things

• Make a fool of yourself, buy into cult of personality to demonstrate loyalty

• Strategic tool to solve the adverse selection problem

Repression - raising the “costs”

• Actual or threatened physical violence against individuals or groups, designed to impose a cost and deter specific activities

• “Backbone” of autocracies, largely by absence of electoral accountability

Why Repress? Because it works!

• More repressive, lower the risk of collapse

• Mechanisms

  • Increases costs of opposing regime

  • Reduce collective action, especially popular protest

  • Key is often to enhance perceptions of willingness to repress 

• Authoritarian regimes are intelligent where they will use repression (force) to maintain control and deter people from these actions / overthrow

• Convince a sufficient number of people that you will use violence to prevent these things from happening in the first place - repression works largely by diffusing challenges to authoritarian regime survival, and sometimes it is just the perception that is needed → convince people that they would be willing to do it

  • Only actually using repression in the worst case scenario. Not all autocracies rely on that violence on many occasions

Repression has costs too

• Increases odds that isolated acts of resistance will escalate

• Autocrats are hesitant to use repression because although it is effective, it is difficult to see if out-of-scale resistance that are destabilizing for authoritarian regimes

• More repression reduces citizens willingness to convey information out of fear of reprisal

  • Essentially convey information and be honest with regimes about a whole host of things - their attitudes, beliefs, views towards the government

    • Authoritarian regimes are bad at having accurate understandings and information about the society they govern. Repression can lead to leaders operating under faulty trends and views of citizens that they govern and rule over.

    • Make mistakes, by making policies they think citizens will like but they have actually been lying because of this fear

  • Highly repressive leaders often operate from faulty understanding of econ, political trends, and can make policy miscalculations

  • Requires empowering security services, which may turn on the regime

    • Heavily relying on these security services to do the repressing (example: secret police with Vladimir Putin to shooting people) → who could end up to turn on you and overthrow the leader themself

How have 21st century dictatorships legitimacy and repression pillars changed?

• Overt “legitimizing basis” is personality cults, fear and violence

• Informational “legitimizing basis” in economic performance

• Changed in its ability to govern and manage the economy

  • Informational Autocrats

Two related trends in “repression”

1. Transnational repression

• Use of technology(surveillance technology in particular), geopolitical clout, and vast security apparatus to repress political dissidents abroad

• Repression is moving from something that is domestic to things that happen to dissidents who live in other countries, which emerges the transnational repression → a growth in 21st century dictatorships

Example: In August, the Rwandan government abducted Paul Rusebagina, the real-life hero of the Oscar-nominated film “Hotel Rwanda”, while he was traveling through the United Arab Emirates. After being held at

Smart “transnational” repression

• Arrested, preventing from leaving the country, faced with the impossible choice to live in a different country with an expired passport or go back to TurkMenistan and renew it

• This may not seem all that repressive, just a rule: you must go back to your country to renew your passport, but it is

2. Denying coordination to citizens

• “Our central theoretical finding is that, contrary to much research and commentary, the purpose of the censorship program is not to suppress criticism of the state or the Communist Party. Indeed, despite widespread censorship of social media, we find that when Chinese people write scathing criticisms of their government and its leaders, the probability that their post will be censored does not increase. Instead, we find that the purpose of the censorship program is to reduce the probability of collective action by clipping social ties whenever any collective movements are in evidence or expected.We demonstrate these points and then discuss their far-reaching implications for many research areas within the study of Chinese politics and comparative politics.”

3. Creative / Concealed Violence

• Prime Minister of Malaysia in the 1990s accused and brought charges on sonatomy which was against the law in Malaysia against his political opponent

• Cocnealing repression and violence especially against regime critics

• Need more info about this topic 

4. Final Pillar: “co-optation”

• Create loyalty by lying strategically relevant actors/groups to the regime

• “Giving people a vested interest in the survival of the system”

• Broad category - provides benefits, positions of power, or incentive over policy

  • Captures all manner of ways that authoritarian regimes have figured out how do you provide the things in the bullet above ^ in return for people’s political support 

  • Repression works, but it is very costly

Focus now on elite loyalty, mass support later

• Maintaining loyalty in a small group of elites is the most important piece

  • “There is no transition whose beginning is not the consequence of important divisions within the authoritarian regime itself” - O'Donnell and Schmitter (1986, but just as true now as it was 40 years ago)

  • Origins of every authoritarian collapse that we observed

What creates elite loyalty?

• Leaders must share the spoils of governing

  • You need them to be on your side rather than coecling around as someone who could act as the alternative or your replacement

• But who will punish them if they don’t honor their promise?

  • There’s little that can be done in punishment, and there is no way to enforce that the promise is going to be credible

  • No dictator rules alone, but dictators can’t commit to not abusing their loyal friends in the future

    • This is called the fundamental theory of dictatorships

Odysseus and the Sirens (and dictatorships)

• Odysseus also had a commitment problem

  • Right now, he wants to avoid the certain death that results from following the siren song

  • But when he hears it, he knows he will want to make a different decision

  • He will change his mind later, and then there is little he can do to maximize this (and less his men can do to punish him when he does so)

  • Problem is that odysseus is the captain of the ship so how can he commit to not changing his mind to the sailors of the ship

How does Odysseus solve his commitment problem?

• Tells his men before he gets to the sirens to tie him to the mass and tells him to stuff their ears with beeswax to not hear the song (because you don’t want to steer the ship that way or they’ll die). 

• “My hands are tied” physically incapable of grabbing the wheel and steering the ship that way

Thesis: preview of the nature of the argument and the claim you are going to argue some point in the introduction

Co-optation: strategic actions to tie someone strategically within the government - tying strategically relevant actors to the status quo, means giving people a stake in the survival of the system. To identify something that could be a threat to a regime or leader’s hold on political power, and give them a reason to keep things running as per usual 

Lecture Monday 2/17

How can dictators “tie their hands” and  commit to not abusing their loyal friends?

Power sharing institutions: tools to share power and deliver needed concessions to regime insiders

• A way of institutionalizing access to resources, influence, opportunities, and provides a venue by which regime insiders can hold the dictator (leader) accountable 

• Parties and legislatures specifically

  • Control over policy, access to resources and power

Elites know that their own benefit depends on the continuity of the system (co-optation)

Easing the challenge of governing, generate elite loyalty, and stabilize the regime

• Dictators are removed from office by a military coup (dissatisfied colonels - pronounced like kernels - who use violence or threat of violence to overthrow an existing regime)

• See an alternative where they may benefit fully from, usually led from lower level officers

• Very effective at co-opting those people, most dictatorships leave office via this coup process. Between dictators who have legislatures vs. no legislatures, and political parties vs. no political parties, major differences here

One exception (i.e. where autocracies can survive without these institutions)

• Off-producing autocracies tend to survive longer

• Evidence this runs through increased military funding 

• A different way of “sharing the spoils”

Our theory says dictators can also be threatened by oppositional elites and regular citizens. How can these groups be co-opted?

• Theory: Authoritarian regimes are threatened by losing the confidence from regime insiders. 

• However, they are also threatened by organized political party regimes in opposition, or regular citizens who engage in organized protest activity, or who voted against them

• Fact: Over 45% of all legislative and executive elections over the last 60 years were conducted in dictatorships!

Why elections in autocracies?

• Post Cold War pressures of mimicry?

• Some small effect on enhancing regime legitimacy domestically and internationally

• Electoral victory has huge benefits for autocrats, and the danger can be diffused

How? → Buying votes

• Government intervening to lower prices of gasoline is an example of buying political support

How? → Can repress or cheat on election day

• On the day of, they can engage in repression (e.g. Tanzania a few years ago, where there was widespread report of violence in opposition strongholds in the African country)

• Sometimes they stuff the ballot box with votes, straight up fraud (e.g. Mexico in the late 1980s where the ruling party had won presidential elections every year for 7 decades at a time, but the presidential election in 1988 wasn’t going to go their way, they rapidly realized they weren’t going to win in a free and fair fashion. In their moment of panic, they unplugged the ballot tabulating machine and put ballots in the banking machine and lit the warehouse on fire. Sorry, you’ll have to trust us that we were going to win.

BUT… typically unnecessary when playing field is tilted (the previous examples are exceptions to the rule)

• Most authoritarian regimes do not need to resort to these egregious violations

• Still may not be free and fair

• Tilt the playing field well in advance from election day to lead to desired outcome

Innovations in “tilting the playing field” (Venezuela in summer 2024)

• All of the other parties being “separate” political parties but they also nominated Nicholas Maduro along with his actual party

• Gives a veneer of democratic competition

• How can it be an autocracy if there’s “40 people you can choose from”

• Competitor only shows up 3 times from 3 different parties

• Leaders are coming up with clever strategies to win without outright cheating, common ways leaders diffuse the dangers that elections present themselves

Why bother to “tilt”? Elections as tools to co-opt the opposition

• Better to have opposition candidates play within the system than outside

• Divide the opposition into participators and rejectors → cannot act in unity in determining if the opposition party should participate in the election

• Overwhelming victory demoralizes participating opponents

• E.g. Nicholas Maduro in 2018 released prisoners to get these people to tear them apart in opposition forces → vote for him in the upcoming election 

• By 2021, opposition relents, participates, and predictably is trounced. Still hasn’t recovered!

• Links dictators will go to get opposition members to participate in the election and diffuse dangers and harness all the benefits

Elections are also a key mechanism to co-opt citizens

• Generate information about supporters and opposition

• Userful for rewarding/punishing particular blocks of voters

  • Provide a regular, institutionalized way to gather information about where your opponents and supporters live and reward/punish accordingly

An example from Venezuela under Chavez

• 2003 petition drive to recall President Hugo Chavez

• Chavez wins his recall vote

• Petition signers names becomes part of “Matsanta” list which is widely circulated as “enemies list”

What happened to those who signed recall petitions?

The Case of Singapore and the People’s Action Party

• City-state, densely populated, one party dictatorship (People’s Action Party)

• Most apartment buildings in Singapore are publicly owned

• Ruling party changes vote collection and aggregation rules to focus on “wards”, which are basically city blocks

• Ruling party now has an extremely detailed view of where their supporters lived, where their opponents lived, down to the city block!

• And because housing was publicly owned, which city block apartment buildings got the needed maintenance? And which were left with lower upkeep?

• To get what you want (apartment you want, textbooks for children at school, etc. ) you have to vote for the ruling party 

  • how we make sense of strange patterns in authoritarian regime, why so many of these rulers / regimes rely on elections, but why so many of them do not rely on violence, fraud, repression in elections

Lecture Wednesday 2/19

*Use information from here to gather evidence for journal 3

How Do Democracies Die?

1. Sudden vs. Gradual

2. Process of “autocratization”

3. Populism

4. What does it mean for democracy to be “consolidated”?

Waves and Reverse Waves

• Huntington’s third wave of democracy

• Earlier reverse waves of democracy - moments immediately following WW1 and WW2 in the 1970s, where democracies collapse and are replaced by authoritarian regimes, are overwhelmingly caused by military coup’s (use of violence, or threat of violence, to overthrow an incumbent regime)

• Dominant way that earlier waves of democracy were reversed

• Presence of military coups has declined since then

  • Countries that had recent military coups: South Korea, Myanmar, Niger, Mali, Gambia, Sudan

So, is democracy safe from another reverse wave? (No)

• 2023 was the 18th consecutive year that the number of freedom house scores (composite score of political rights and civil liberties) declined exceeded the number of countries where the score increased

• For 18 consecutive years, the number of countries going down on the scale has exceeded the number of countries going up on the scale

Chart Info:

1. The level of democracy enjoyed by the average person in the world in 2023 is down to 1985-levels, by country-based averages, it is back to 1998

2. Since 2009 - almost 15 years in a row - the share of the world’s population living in autocratizing countries has

How do we make sense of these trends?

Declining

• Classic coups

• Autogolpes (self, or executive coupe) → spanish word

• Election day fraud

*These classic means of democratic fail have faded

*Replaced by emergence of two trends 

Increasing

• Executive aggrandizement → aggrandizement means to empower yourself, make yourself more powerful, accumulate more power for yourself

  • Weakening checks on executive power to hamper power of opposition, often through legalistic means) → taking away power from judicial and legislative branches. Gradually chipping away their power and taking it to their own at the cost of their co-equal branches

  • Strategic election manipulation / “tilting playing field” (like last lecture)

Net effect is similar to reverse waves, even if method differs

Key element: erosion

• Not a brand new phenomena, but increasingly dominant

• Democracy a “collage of institutions” put together piece by piece

• Can also be taken apart the same way (dismantled)

  • The main threat to democracy is not the threat of military, slowly the erosion process can happen, especially with people who are internal to the process

  • Has a real shift to the pace in the actors who are involved

Two models of this erosion process

Backsliding: changes in formal institutions and informal practices that reduce citizen’s capacity to make enforceable claims upon the government (holding leaders accountable for responsiveness and representation to work as intended)

• Example: Poland weakening checks and balances, authority of the media, etc.

• Reduced the quality of Polish democracy, made it difficult for citizens to elect independent leaders, gain information, and so forth and so on

Remember our “hybrid” regimes?

Differ in how they deal with the electoral process

1. Electoral Authoritarian - “I’ll do as I please to win elections”

2. Illiberal Democracy - “After winning elections, I do as I please” → illiberal means absence of liberal traits in democracy such as liberties and freedoms

*Key distinction in this process

The second model

Autocratization: when democratically elected leaders disadvantage and sideline opponents to consolidate power/control themselves

• Backsliding regimes might still be democratic, just a reduced quality

• Autocratization implies shift from democracy to autocracy

Comparative Evidence - notice the change over time (and compare to coups)

How does this erosion process unfold? (these models)

• By definition, happens slowly and incrementally

• Metaphor: “death by a thousand cuts”

Two general patterns:

1. No singular event, the accumulation of multiple events over time

2. Legalistic, internal process

In general:

1. Incumbents undermine institutional constraints on their power/authority

2. Weaken opponents (sidelining, not jailing or anything extreme, just reducing level of competition these incumbents face)

3. Sideline of sprinter civil society

More specifically:

1. Place loyalists in powerful positions, particularly the judiciary

• Example: Venezuela (2004) under Hugo Chavez. Chavez expands Supreme Court from 20 to 32, and Chavista-led Congress staffs new positions (plus 5 vacancies) with supporters

• Having Congress pass a law that we need more judges, capturing what should be the referees of political society is a common part of this model of backsliding

• Example: Polish court says European rights pact clashes with the law

2. Control media to promote a pro-government line

• Threaten or jail journalists, or just revoke access (press can no longer report freely, no longer a tool of representation and accountability)

  • Tilting the playing field

• Example: A national newspaper in Mexico has said its reporter was killed in a western state

• Too many examples to list

3. Manipulate electoral rules to advantage incumbent 

• How votes are counted impacts representation

  • Gerrymandering: creative drawing of electoral districts to advantage one particular outcome, problem in electoral systems because we have a rule that only one person can win 

• Fits with incremental, legalistic process in which this backsliding unfolds

• Ex: change to winner take all electoral system in Bolivia

• Orban’s innovation and “near-abroad” absentee voting

  • Have to go to the Hungarian consulate to vote, more educated liberal Hungarians move to Brussels, London, etc. Created this two-tiered system to make it easier for people abroad who support him to vote, and harder for people abroad who do not support him to vote

4. Neuter rival branches

• Weaken formal powers and oversight (judicial review) powers of legislature, judiciary

  • While enhancing power of executives

• “Executive aggrandizement”

5. Amend constitution to legitimate these power grabs

• Constitutional revision process that codifies these changes has some degree of “legitimacy”

• Example in Zambia: President Chiluba pushes through change to limit Presidency to Zambian born only

  • The problem: his chief opponent had Malavi heritage

• Removal of term limits is common, constitutional overhaul less so, but even more effective

• Example in Turkey: July of 2018 when they changed from parliamentary system to presidential system “a model of presidentialism”. Presidential systems are very prone to this backsliding process as well, they are perfect settings for this executive aggrandizement process

6. Use lawsuits, legislation to sideline civil society

• Restrict the public space to government supporters

• Government opponents are now doing something “illegal”, so easy to justify punishment

• Turkey (2018) - State Supervisory Board has oversight of public and private bodies, including professional associations, employee associations, and nonprofits

• Poland (2019) - “de-concentration of the media” policy involving fines, takeovers by regime loyalists

Experiencing all of these things right now in the US (?)

Lecture Friday 2/21

What explains these trends?

Decline of coups linked to end of Cold War

• Less material support during, and political support after

Coups are risky, and the consequences of failure are greater

• If you try to launch a coups and you are unsuccessful, and at best case scenario you are jailed or exiled, more commonly, you are killed / executed

• Those who seek to overturn incumbent governments realize it is a risky strategy

• Declining frequency of this form of democratic collapse

Rise of autocratizations more complicated

• Gradual pace of autocratization, and retention of democratic features, minimizes international backlash

Many would be autocratic leaders/groups have domestic support, so less of a public outcry

• Moves justified _____ (did not get this point written :( )

Two new developments

1. Compatibility between populism and the model of autocratization

Populism is a worldview that society is separated into two groups in conflict with one another

• The “pure people” and the “corrupt elite”claim to represent “will of the people” in opposition to a status quo dominated by “the elite”

• “Thin ideology”, must be combined with some other economic or political ideology

• Convict between the regular person and the corrupt elite, but also very vague and a moldable, malleable worldview

• Populism gets combined with left-wing economic policy or right-wing nationalist / economic policy or other sort of political ideology

“Thin and ideologically agnostic, though more recently concentrated on the far right”

• Viktor Orbain from Hungary

• Jean someone else in france

• Prior president of philippines rodrigo deterte

Populism as a dimension of “polarization”

• Division (amongst political elites, and amongst politics over public policy and ideology)

• Issue, Geographic, and Social/Affective

  • Replacement of cross-cutting cleavages with reinforcing cleavages

    • Gender, where you live, what shows you watch, what things you do, etc. are highly based on party → “we are all alike” us vs. them mentality

  • Policy differences merge with identities, political adversaries become enemies

    • Ex: issue polarization, in congress parties have become more homogenous amongst each other, viewing certain issues in closer alignment with one another, those who identify as Republican tend to have similar / homogenous views. Becoming homogenous within partisan groups, and that gap has grown

    • Republicans move to less densely populated areas with less grocery stores or walkable areas or museums whereas Democrats do this, and this causes more division (geographic)

    • Growing animosity / hostility to people with another party association (social/affective)

    • Underlying sense of animosity to outgroup members, rooted in the tribal nature of humans as “homo sapiens primates” primed from an evolutionary standpoint 

  • Mechanisms: decline of norms/guardrails, candidate selection, decline in willingness to sanction leader’s anti-democratic actions

  • Huge amounts of evidence that voters (fascinating studies from US included) when they are confronted with a leader who takes some sort of anti-democratic action - tries to change Constitution, derail freedom of the press, the people who are stronger partisans are much less willing to sanction or punish the leader for those actions

    • Anti-democratic action benefitting some people’s side

Populism’s Core (and compatibility with autocratization)

• Harmful because it has built in us vs. them corrupt elite vs. pure people angle

• Perfect distillation of all the problems of polarization

Core features of populist movements:

1. Only the leader can save the country (so give me more power!)

   1. Juan and Evita Peron (Argentina, 1942)

2. The traditional elite is dangerous and corrupt, and existing institutions are not doing their job / can’t handle things

   1. Peru’s Alberto Fujimori - “A President Like You”, and his “Fujinorbile”

   2. Father was Japanese and Mother was Peruvian, leader in South America of Peru

   3. Drives campaigns in a modified tractor from town to town largely in the rural, saying one is for the people

   4. By 1993 he has suspended the constitution, dismissed the parliament, and seized authoritarian power in Peru

Corruption is “an all-devouring octopus, which has ensnared all government organs with its tenaacles”

• Belarus’ Lukashenko in 1994 (still the president today!)

3. The media and experts cannot be trusted

   1. If they are not trustworthy, then you cannot believe evidence they put forth that is contrary to the government line

In short: populism is particularly useful as a tool to slowly chip away at the institutions of democracy

• Rise of populism, rooted in rise of polarization, contributes to democratic backsliding

The second new development

2. Globalization of this phenomena

• European instances: Hungary, Poland, Italy, Greece (some autocratizations, some just backsliding “for now”)

• Can’t ignore economic troubles, integration problems

• Spreading to the liberal democratic regimes we once viewed as “consolidated” (permanent, institutionalized, continuing)

Adam Przeworski on democratic consolidation

• “Democracy is consolidated when no one can imagine acting outside the democratic institutions, when all the losers want to do is try again within the same conditions under which they lost”

• In some ways, democracy becomes self-enforcing, like a perpetual motion machine → it will continue so long as these criteria are met

This view suggests a theory of fragility too

• Everything hinges on the losers acceptance of defeat

• What happens when the losers (or their powerful friends) decide not to comply?

• Could even become “self-unraveling” or a downward spiral

Making this more specific: Consolidation implies that …

1. Popular support for democracy as a system of government is high

2. Anti-system parties and movements are weak or nonexistent

3. Democratic rules are accepted

• Young voters are much more skeptical about this phenomenon, report that it is essential to live in a democratic system

Lecture 3/3

Key point - China governed as a “party” autocracy

• Single party controls access to political posts and shapes policy

• Prevents consolidation of power in the hands of single leader

• Frequently rely on “powersharing” institutions (and elections for mass support)

Why do leaders devolve and share some of their authority with insiders?

Institutions “ease the task of governing”

• Leaders and regime leaders have linked fates

  • Strong incentives to cooperate and maintain status quo

• Real checks against transformation into personalism

• Avoidance of succession fights

  • Smooth over potential for dissatisfaction which is why they tend to last a lot longer

  • Party-based regimes hold onto political power longer than military regimes and personalist regimes 

Party autocracy can sometimes blur the line with “electoral autocracies”

China and the Communist Party Dictatorship (Definitely not “camouflaged”)

• “Inner-Party Democracy” with accepted rules and norms

  • Most internal variation, some are like China with a single party dictatorship with no attempt to camouflage the institutions and functions of a more democratic system, then you have Mexico. China is sometimes known as an inner party democracy

• Top-down, limited competition forum for influencing top posts and policy

• The “party-state” - integration (and even duplication) of party and state institutions

  • Understand how the Chinese communist party is structured, and its internal organizations, and how it overlaps with state institutions (presidency, premiership, national, people’s congress, etc)

Key points:

1. Different names for the same institutions, and the same people

2. Power/influence flows down, not up

Like Mexico under the PRI, post-Mao China is high-performing autocracy

• Political stability, economic growth, public services, policy innovations

Unlike the PRI, accomplished this with different form of “institutionalization”

1. Norm-bound succession, each leader serves 2 consecutive terms

2. Meritocracy: promote bureaucrats on basis of performance, thus limiting factionalism and patronage

3. Separate party from direct management of business enterprises

4. Balance selective repression of dissent with “input institutions”

   1. Permitting newspapers to expose corruption, administrative and judicial decisions overturned through citizens petitioning courts

      1. Citizens could play an increasingly large (still relatively small in the grand scheme of things) in shaping policy to prevent a reemergence of personalism

      2. Principle goal of avoidance for post madei zhong (I think china?)  era of leaders

      3. These power-sharing institutions, which sometimes can be formal like legislatures or informal by speaking with one particular voice 

      4. Promise of future reward induces a lot of obedience and compliance and willingness to go with the status quo. Important that dictatorships solve this succession dilemma, that is what keeps everyone on board

      5. Want the party to remain in power, want the legacy to continue, mutually benefit adherence to norm balance succession

Two remaining questions:

1. How do party autocracies end, and is China vulnerable to this same pattern?

2. How has Xi reshaped China’s autocracy?

Party regimes are not immortal (even though they are highly successful)

• Most vulnerable to international/external pressure to democratize

• “Irreconcilable differences” amongst elites

  • Even though these institutions help ease the task of governing, they tie individuals' fate together, they are not immortal. Differences cause elites to not be able to work together. In Mexico, this elite split is over free trade and economic integration (NAFTA trade agreement in the 1930s). Splits the ruling party into pro free trade and anti free trade. Cannot get over this split, no power sharing institution can be sufficient to keep this system glued together

Failure of Cooptation - especially given rising incomes in Mexico

Cooptation: giving citizen a stake in the survival of the regime, why they would want it to survive e.g. ensuring valuables like apartment, infrastructure, medical assistance, are there 

• Remarkably expensive

• As incomes increase, citizens are less reliant on these things, and less likely to go vote for that candidate

• Migrant remittance: when an immigrant works in a foreign country and sending a vast majority of those wages to the country of origin 

• As the citizens reliance on the state weakens, cooptation is a less effective strategy

Party autocracies may have the “authoritarian advantage” but putting all your eggs in the “performance legitimacy” basket can be risky

Authoritarian Advantage: sometimes certain models of authoritarianism can be effective at promoting high levels of economic growth

• When the institutional revolutionary party was able to manage that level of economic growth, they also got a lot of high levels of vote share for their party

• In the 1980s and 1990s, the Mexican miracle came to a halt. Rates of poverty shot sky high and at the same time, levels of voting for the institutional revolutionary party start to plummet

• Why should we have all the political power? Because of how much wealthier we are! This works as long as you can guarantee that citizens will become wealthy at the same time. It is hard to generate very high levels of economic growth consistently for a long time

What does this imply about China’s future?

• No elections held, so no elections to lose

• More seriously, clever mix of co-optation and repression and highly adaptable institutions

Repression

• Coercive repression has been successful (when needed) → resorting to violence, but not commonly

• But more generally epitomizes shift to “smart,” “low intensity,” or “environmental rights” repression

Traditional repression still a survival strategy, especially against ethnic minorities and regime critics

Co-optation

• Public sector jobs are created disproportionately in ethnic-minority dominated provinces

• Extend party membership to middle class and private entrepreneurship

  • The Chinese communist party itself has changed its membership structure in a way that has welcomed the joining of middle class Chinese individuals and even private entrepreneurs (capitalists). This was unthinkable 10-15 years ago, but captures the emorphis adaptable logic of the co-optation system

  •  Clever way to ensure its dominance over local government, structure the economy, etc. to minimize the incentive that elites have to defect. 

  • Overarching theme is the idea to create a sense of inevitability that there is no other source of rivalry political power

• Dominance of the party means there is a little incentive for elites to defect

What about Mexico’s experience economic performance and trends?

Did not get the chance to write this slide 🙁

Average income per capita was doubling every 7 years, and the economy was growing at a rate of 10-12% per year. There has never been an instance of that level of economic progress in the modern world, so fast and so dramatic. Brings almost a billion people out of poverty

• That said, we know from Mexico that it is not just the income per capita, it is also the rate of economic growth and expansion

• China has reached limits of industrial led growth and development

• Headline: China Suspends Report on Youth Unemployment, Which Was at a Record High 

  • Massaging the underlying metrics or stop reporting / publicizing when things are bad, rates were continuing to skyrocket as they had been the past 2 decades

• Growing sense that China’s economy may be on shakier footing than the regime acknowledges

Other factors

• Dissatisfaction increases with rising inequality, prevalence of corruption

• Nepotism / corruption has given rise to income inequality 

• New York Times was banned for a long time in China 

Lecture Wednesday 3/5

How long will this last?

Nature of dictatorial institutions

• Mexico’s democratic features were a hindrance to democracy until they become helpful

• Institutions keep dictatorships stable, but if they do collapse, such institutions increase likelihood of successful democratization

China’s institutions may “ease the task of governing” but they do not offer the favorable grounds for successful democratization

How has Xi Changed the party autocracy in China?

Short version: upended each of these “institutions”

• From norm-bound succession to no term limits

  • Norms are regularly upended and violated. Xi Jinping served a third term

• This year, passing China’s biggest exam involves waxing eloquent about XI Jinping’s philosophy

• From meritocracy to loyalists (& disloyalty met with purges)

Tightening political control

• Pre-Xi, small expansion of transparency public participation 

  • Ex: localities experimenting with publicizing local officials’ assets and incomes, public budget “consultations”

    • Create a sense of trust and push back against accusations of corruption

• Post-Xi, these small but important steps toward liberalization were reversed

  • Increasing detention, combined with high-level surveillance

Where does this leave China under Xi?

• Move to a more personalist autocracy, with all the attendant risks

  • Resistance from insiders who have lost chance of promotion

    • Is a “dictator for life” actually the least bad outcome? - many personalities see competing coups and power struggles

  • Global risks

    • Information deficit / misinformation 

      • Nobody tells a personalist leader information they do not want to hear

    • Unchecked ambition / foreign policy aggression

      • China has behaved more aggressively in the South China Sea after Xi Jinping. Increasing hostile rhetoric about owning chains of islands, maybe we should take Taiwan back, these are concentrated in personalist regimes. Many global risks

Executives in Democracies: Presidents vs. Prime Ministers

Outline for next 2 lectures

1. Defining executives and executive powers

2. Presidential vs. parliamentary models of executive institutions

3. Is presidentialism dangerous?

Political Institutions: A Basic Definition

(Only talking about executives before the exam)

• Executives

  • The branch, and individual(s) of the top of their branch, that executes or administers policies and laws in a country

• Electoral systems 

  • Legislatures, and “turning votes into seats” - how do you take citizens' preferences cast at the ballot and turn them into actual seats in the legislature in the House of Representatives, Parliament, etc. Electoral systems help us understand this process

  • How legislatures are composed

Two types of Executives

• Head of state

  • A country’s symbolic representative

• Head of government

  • The official responsible for forming governments and formulating and implementing policies

• President

  • An executive leader that typically combines the functions of head of state and head of government, and is not directly responsible to a legislature

• Prime minister

  • A chief executive in a parliamentary system of government 

    • (Individuals who have the role of head of government)

    • Examples: Britain (UK) Chancellor, and Germany

      • Former heads of government that won current heads of government

• Monarch

  • In democracies, monarchs are head of state, who usually inherit a position for life

  • In democracies, they tend to have limited, often ceremonial, powers

Formal Powers

• Powers possessed as a function of their constitutional or legal position

  • Veto

  • Dissolution of legislature (calling new elections)

  • Decrees and executive orders

  • State of emergency declarations

Partisan Powers

• Powers held by virtue of the executive’s leverage or power over members of a political party

• Executives sometimes can control legislatures through control of career paths, position on ballot

  • Influence the structure of a legislative bill through their position

• Party platforms (“manifestos” that say a document of what they are going to do if you vote for them to get political support)

  • Executives play a huge role in what they stand for and help shape this, enormously powerful politically but does not come from a provision in the constitution

Informal Powers

• Powers not “official” but based on custom, convention, or other sources of influence

• Includes chance to set agenda (Teddy Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit”) - bullying people into viewing things in a certain way

• Patronage can be an informal power

  • Use of government favors, typically in the form of employment, to garner political support

  • Ex: Biden’s Presidential Medals of Freedom: setting the “agenda of emulation”

Presidentialism

• Form of executive power defined by separate elections, and separate survival of executive and legislative branches

  • Our notion of “checks and balances”

  • Separate elections

    • If you voted in November, you voted for a President, a member of Congress, that your choices did not affect the other, for example, a Democratic President and a Republican member of House of Representatives

    • Simply a matter of convenience, doing all at the same time. 

    • The selection of individuals is independent of one another

  • Separate survival

    • Losing control of one of the houses of rep’s doesn’t remove Trump from power, term does not go from 4 years to 2 years, these things are fixed terms, and their survival is independent of one another

    • This is not present in the vast majority of parliamentary democracies around the world

Task: Find a YT clip of this guy getting booted democratic sergeant from texas, watch a few YT clips on the moodle page that describe prime ministers question time. Example of different forms of legislative and executive relationships in parliamentary and presidential systems. Would Al Greens outburst have registered in a session of parliamentary governance. Fails thinks answer is no

Lecture Friday 3/7

Presidentialism (continued)

1. Difficult for single person to dominate

2. Stabilize policies and preferences

3. Slow moving nature is a feature, not a bug!

   1. Baked into political systems in which electoral authority is fragmented, elected separately, survives separately. This is a natural consequence of presidentialism. The found

Parliamentary Systems

• The “European Model”

  • Most frequent form of democracy

• What is “the government” in a parliamentary system?

The Canadian “Government”

Parliamentary Systems, Key Features:

• Citizens vote once, but selection of executive follows a two-step & indirect process

1. Citizens vote for “MPs” (Members of Parliament)

2. MP’s vote for a Prime Minister

3. Head of government

• Most citizens do not vote directly for the executive (whomever it ends up being)

An example from Canada: 336 “ridings”, or districts

• Riding 55: District of Poppeno (Quebec). One of the smallest electoral districts that is ridings in Canada

• 9 square miles, second smallest Federal Riding in all of Canada

• Total population of around 110,000

• Total registered voters of around 75,000

• Winner was elected by only 22,848 voters

• As a share of all voters in Canada’s 2021 election (more than 17 million), this is 0.12% of all votes cast

• Justin Trudeau’s home district

Parliamentary Systems (continued)

2. The Executive is fully accountable to the Legislature

• Executive/Government serves as discretion of Legislature

  • Legislatures and parliamentary can remove the executive

• Fusion of executive and legislative power / no institutional checks and balances

• This institutional connector leads to some (stark?) institutional differences

• “Prime Minister’s Question Time”

  • The Legislature can vote the executive out of office

  • Vote of confidence: referendum or government’s majority support

• Specific legislative maneuver where members of parliament can hold an executive accountable or fire them if they deem them unsatisfactory in their job 

Parliamentary Systems (continued)

4. No fixed electoral terms

• “Snap” elections - any election that occurs before the regular expiration

  • Unique feature of parliamentary systems. Executives can be removed from office, so if a parliament executes their vote of confidence, if a prime minister cannot survive a vote of confidence and no one can take their place, then we need to have a new election

  • Rooted in institutional rules, and possibility of strategic decision making

  • “Shadow Cabinets”

How do “governments” form in Parliamentary systems?

The central requirement is that an absolute majority of MP’s must agree (50% + 1)

• Depends on how the legislative election unfolded

Option 1: Create a Single Party Majority

1. Single Party Majority (vs. “hung” parliament)

• Central Requirement is “party discipline”

• Example: bad members of parliament, outsiders in their party

• Joe Manchin conservative democratic west virginia

• May be admirable from an American politics standpoint, but it means that you would be a terrible member of parliament. These people display the opposite of “party discipline” which means going along with what your party wants. There is no room for “independent minded” thoughts

Option 2: Form a Coalition

Coalitions are (temporary) but formal agreements between parties to pool votes together, in order to form a government

• German parliamentary election from 2 weeks ago

  • As of yesterday, there is still not a formal agreement of a coalition in Germany. Ban together and come together to try and form a coalition, but let’s see if they figure it out and try to form it