Chapter 6. Authoritarianism
Chapter Overview
Authoritarian leaders were on the defensive between 1974 and 2000 as a wave of
democratization swept across the world. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, however,
authoritarian regimes proved surprisingly resilient.
The first section of the chapter discusses the characteristics that define authoritarianism. The
second section addresses the two main political problems that confront all authoritarian leaders:
preventing other members of the leadership group from overthrowing them and preventing
popular uprisings from overthrowing them. The next section describes four main types of
authoritarian regimes: monarchy, military, one-party, and personal rule. It examines how leaders
of each regime type manage the problems of authoritarian power sharing and authoritarian
control.
The following section turns to the question of why some authoritarian regimes have persisted for
decades despite expectations that they would succumb to democratic pressure. It focuses on the
Middle East and North Africa, which have been the regions of the world most resistant to
democracy.
The final section investigates why some authoritarian regimes do more to improve the
capabilities of citizens than others. We propose that those differences are due in part to the
different ways in which authoritarian regimes select leaders and how leaders resolve problems of
power sharing and control.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter students will be able to do the following:
6.1 Explain the characteristics of an authoritarian regime.
6.2 Describe the two main political problems authoritarian rulers must address.
6.3 Explain how the four types of authoritarian regimes manage the problems of authoritarian
power sharing and authoritarian control.
6.4 Evaluate explanations of authoritarian persistence in the Middle East and North Africa.
6.5 Explain the reasoning supporting the hypothesis that regime type affects capabilities and
evaluate the way in which that hypothesis is tested.
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Chapter Outline
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Authoritarianism is a type of political system in which a single individual or small
elite rules without constitutional checks on their use of power.
B. Authoritarianism has been the main form of government through most of recorded
history.
C. What is new is that authoritarian leaders now feel obliged to make a show of
ruling by democratic means.
D. Authoritarian governments were on the defensive between 1974 and 2000.
1. The number of authoritarian governments in the world fell dramatically.
2. Many political scientists believed it was only a matter of time until the
remainder fell.
1. A number of authoritarian regimes have displayed impressive staying power.
2. Some countries that once appeared to be on their way to democracy have
slipped back into authoritarian rule.
3. Some authoritarian countries have had considerable success in improving
people’s lives, with China being the best example.
3. Description of different kinds of authoritarian rule and how they manage
problems of power sharing and control
a. Monarchy
b. Military
c. One-party
4. Personal rule: Evaluating explanations of the persistence of authoritarian rule
5. Comparing capabilities in different types of authoritarian rule
II. AUTHORITARIAN POLITICS
A. Authoritarian politics are ruthless and treacherous.
B. Authoritarian regimes lack independent authorities to enforce agreements among
members of the leadership group and fully enforce rules for changing leaders by
popular elections.
C. The result is that authoritarian leaders face threats from two directions:
1. From other members of the leadership group seeking to overthrow them and
take their place
2. From the population in the form of uprisings to overthrow them
D. Problem of authoritarian power sharing
1. To avoid overthrow by other members of the leadership group, authoritarian
leaders find ways of retaining their support by sharing power with them
2. Can do so in three ways:
a. Creating deliberative councils in which others have seats
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b. Appointing them to influential positions in the state
c. Providing opportunities for them to become wealthy
3 If these do not work, the alternative for the leader is to dismiss, imprison, or
execute members of the ruling group.
E. Problem of authoritarian control
3. How military leaders solve the problem of power sharing:
a. Include the officers who led the coup d’etat in a decision making council
known as a junta
b. Allocate control of key state offices among members of the junta
c. Give junta members, their family members, and their followers
opportunities to become wealthy
4. How military leaders solve the problem of control:
a. Find allies in society
b. Win elections in which a party backed by the military has overwhelming
advantages over other parties
c. Use martial law, arrests, imprisonment and executions
C. One-Party Regimes
1. In one-party regimes, high-ranking members of the ruling political party select
the country’s leader from among its senior personnel.
2. Two main types of one-party regimes:
a. Ones in which the ruling party does not allow other political parties to
compete against it, as is the case in communist party-led regimes in China
and Vietnam
b. Ones in which the ruling party allows other political parties to compete,
but sets the rules of the game in ways which make it nearly impossible for
other parties to win control of the state
3. Methods of managing the problem of power sharing
a. Create committees in which elite party members can have a say in
determining public policies
b. Establish rules about how transitions are made from one set of leaders to
another, thus giving other high ranking members incentives to support the
current leader in hopes of becoming party leader in the future
c. Appointing top party leaders to direct important state agencies and state
agencies with numerous opportunities to become wealthy
4. Methods of managing the problem of authoritarian control
a. Building coalitions of supporters that can include family members of party
members, business people in the private sector, and professionals
b. Communist parties do not allow multi-party elections for officials at the
national level, but other types of one-party regimes allow multi-party
elections in which the rules heavily favor the ruling political party
c. Repression in the form of curtailment of civil liberties, arrests,
imprisonment, torture, and executions
D. Personalist Regimes
1. In personalist regimes, a single leader rules, who has accumulated sufficient
power to impose decisions without significant constraints from other leading
members of the regime.
a. Personalist rulers usually emerge from power struggles in a ruling political
party or military regime after it has seized control of the state.
b. Personalist rulers can emerge in both strong and weak states, but most
cases of personalist rule occur in very poor countries with weak states.
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2. Managing power sharing
a. Personalist rulers do not have to share power with other members of a
ruling group, but do have to worry about ambitious individuals seeking to
overthrow them.
b. The biggest threat is from military officers.
c. Personalist rulers handle these threats by filling officer ranks with cronies
and relatives, creating military forces separate from the regular army, and
using spies to inhibit plotting among dissenting officers.
3. Methods of maintaining authoritarian control of the population
a. Personalist rulers rely on narrow coalitions of supporters consisting of
relatives, friends, members of their ethnic group, and crony entrepreneurs.
b. State revenues are used to enrich the ruler and his narrow coalition of
supporters.
c. Many personalist rulers use rigged elections that give opponents no chance
to win as a strategy for dividing their opponents and claiming to rule with
popular support.
d. They also make extensive use of repression to silence critics.
e. Some have been successful in finding foreign support.
IV. EXPLAIN AUTHORITARIAN PERSISTENCE: INTERNATIONAL VARIABLES
A. Many authoritarian regimes have survived in an age of democratization.
B. Middle East and North Africa have the greatest concentration of authoritarian
regimes.
C. Some of these regimes were toppled during the Arab Spring in 2011, but the
majority of them remained in power.
D. International variables used to explain the persistence of authoritarian regimes.
1. Weak linkages to Western democracies
2. Economic and military aid from Western democracies who supported them for
economic and strategic reasons
V. EXPLAINING AUTHORITARIAN PERSISTENCE: DOMESTIC VARIABLES
A. Level of economic development
1. The higher the level of economic development, the higher the probability that
a country is a democracy.
2. When level of economic development is operationally defined as GDP per
capita, this hypothesis does not hold true for the Middle East.
3. Authoritarian regimes govern countries with very different levels of income.
4. Some countries are very poor, while others have very high per capita incomes.
B. Culture
3. Some scholars argue that Islamic culture is responsible for
authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa.
4. These scholars argue that Islam does not allow for a pluralism of ideas and
that laws should come from God rather than democratically elected
legislatures.
5. Critics of this hypothesis offer three arguments against it:
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a. There is not one version of Islamic culture.
b. Similar arguments were once made about Catholicism.
c. Several surveys have found substantial support for democracy in a number
of Muslim societies and there are democracies in several countries which
6. Islamic beliefs can be an obstacle to democracy, but the reason for this has
less to do with a primordial set of beliefs than with the ways in which rulers
and their allies interpret Islamic texts to justify their rule
C. Oil revenues
1. Oil revenues do not help explain the persistence of authoritarian rule in the
last decades of the twentieth century or first decade of the twenty-first century
because authoritarian regimes had very different levels of oil revenues.
2. Oil revenues do help explain why a number of authoritarian regimes in the
Middle East survived the Arab Spring while a few did not.
a. Income from oil sales allowed rulers to buy support from citizens by
providing large numbers of jobs and generous public services.
b. Oil revenues also funded powerful security and military forces which
could be used to suppress dissent.
3. Oil revenues cannot be the full explanation of authoritarian survival during the
Arab Spring because autocratic governments also endured in Jordan,
Morocco, and Syria, which do not have large oil revenues.
D. Hereditary rule helped authoritarian rulers survive in these three countries.
1. A ruler’s power could be smoothly transferred from one member of the ruling
family to another with the support of military leaders.
2. These military leaders were loyal to the ruling family and were willing to use
whatever force was necessary to suppress popular uprisings.
VI. AUTHORITARIANISM AND THE GOOD SOCIETY
A. Why do some authoritarian regimes do more than others to improve their citizens’
capabilities?
B. These differences can be explained in part by the way in which different types of
authoritarian regimes resolve problems of power sharing and authoritarian
control.
C. Hypothesize that monarchies will have the best record of improving citizens’
capabilities and personalist regimes the worst record.
D. Will focus on monarchies, one-party, and personalist regimes
E. Present data in form of column charts
F. Testing the hypotheses
1. Physical well-being
a. Monarchies have lowest levels of infant mortality and personalist regimes
the highest, as hypothesize suggests.
b. There is considerable variation within regime types in levels of infant
mortality.
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c. All three regime types have lowered infant mortality rates, with
monarchies having the greatest success in percentage terms, and
personalist regimes the least success.
2. Informed decision making
a. The same pattern between regime type and infant mortality holds for
literacy rates with monarchies performing best and personalist regimes the
worst.
b. As with infant mortality, there is considerable variation within regime
types.
3. Safety
a. The same pattern holds for homicide rates, with monarchies having the
lowest rates and personalist regimes the highest.
b. Several monarchies have lower homicide rates than the United States and
some Western European democracies.
c. One-party regimes such as Singapore have extremely low homicide rates,
while others such as Ethiopia have homicide rates that are among the
highest in the world.
d. Personalist regimes have a pattern similar to one-party regimes, with
examples of both very low and very high homicide rates.
4. Democracy
a. While monarchies lead other regime types in the previous categories, they
come in last in democracy rankings.
b. Communist one-party regimes have lower democracy rankings than other
types of one-party regimes.
c. Personalist regimes have an average democracy score lower than one-
party regimes and only slightly higher than monarchies.
G. Summary of findings
1. As hypothesized, monarchies have the highest capabilities and personalist
regimes the lowest.
2. There is considerable diversity in capabilities within regime types.
3. Within regime types, wealthier countries tend to have higher capabilities.
4. Even poor countries with personalist regimes have made progress in lowering
infant mortality.
H. Findings are tentative
VII. CONCLUSION
A. Persistence of authoritarian regimes has forced political scientists to reassess
earlier assumptions that authoritarian regimes would be replaced by democracies.
B. Reassessment has led to five conclusions:
1. The types of feasible authoritarian regimes have been narrowed.
2. Democracy is now the only widely accepted way of claiming legitimacy.
3. There are no ideologies similar to Marxism with large-scale appeal in many
countries around the world.
4. High revenues from oil and loyal militaries helped regimes survive.
5. Many authoritarian regimes may be more vulnerable than they appear.
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REVEL Assets
6.1 Explain the characteristics of an authoritarian regime.
Reading: The New Africa—Rwanda: Working with the neighbors pays off
6.3 Explain how the four types of authoritarian regimes manage the problems of
authoritarian power sharing and authoritarian control.
Video: Robert Mugabe, 89, sworn in for five more years as Zimbabwe’s president
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Multiple Choice Questions
1. Authoritarianism is:
a. a type of political system where the leader and a small group shares authority and
values constitutional checks.
b. a type of political system where the leader and a small group rules without
constitutional limits.
c. a type of political system where authority does not exist within the party leadership.
d. a type of political system that features an authoritarian party and a democratic party.
Topic: Introduction
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts
2. The main difference between current authoritarianism and that of earlier centuries is that:
a. earlier authoritarianism featured a single ruler.
b. in earlier authoritarianism, legislatures had little or no influence.
c. in current authoritarianism, citizens can hold rulers accountable.
d. in current authoritarianism, leaders feel obliged to make a show of ruling by
democratic means.
Answer: d
Learning Objective: LO 6.1: Explain the characteristics of an authoritarian regime.
Topic: Introduction
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts
3. What major event occurred in Rwanda during 1994?
a. Members of the ethnic Hutu tribe slaughtered approximately ethnic Tutsis.
b. Paul Kagame became president.
c. Members of the ethnic Tutsi tribe slaughtered approximately ethnic Hutus.
d. The United States intervened with military force.
Answer: a
Learning Objective: LO 6.1: Explain the characteristics of an authoritarian regime.
Topic: Introduction
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts
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4. Why does the success of Rwandan President Kagame’s presidency make supporters of
democracy nervous?
a. Kagame was a monotheist who combined church and state rule.
b. Kagame introduced democracy to tribal Africa.
c. Kagame had an authoritarian government.
d. Kagame had a socialist-democratic cabinet.
Answer: c
Learning Objective: LO 6.1: Explain the characteristics of an authoritarian regime.
Topic: Introduction
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts
5. The best example of authoritarian success in promoting economic growth and raising
citizens out of poverty is __________.
a. Russia
b. China
c. Cuba
d. Saudi Arabia
Answer: b
Learning Objective: LO 6.1: Explain the characteristics of an authoritarian regime.
Topic: Introduction
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts
6. Political scientists’ optimism about an end to authoritarian rule has been dampened
because:
a. the number of democracies has dropped significantly in recent decades.
b. the number of authoritarian regimes has increased significantly in recent decades.
c. a number of authoritarian regimes have displayed impressive staying power.
d. a number of authoritarian regimes have improved citizens’ capabilities.
Answer: c
Learning Objective: LO 6.1: Explain the characteristics of an authoritarian regime.
Topic: Introduction
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts
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