James Loxton is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Authoritarianism: A Very Short Introduction.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and James Loxton explore different types of authoritarian regimes, why they fail, and whether the United States passes the fear test.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: We talk a lot about democracy, which are themselves hard to define. Most listeners probably have a sense of what they mean by democracy. When we talk about dictatorship, authoritarianism, those are such broad concepts, incorporating such different regime forms. What is an authoritarian system? What is a dictatorship?
James Loxton: The way that authoritarianism is used today, it is simply a shorthand for all non-democratic regimes. I like to think about the big three—the big three types of authoritarian regime. Those are military regimes, single party regimes, and personalist regimes. Each of those subtypes of authoritarianism is really different.
But that’s also not an exhaustive list. You can have, for example, theocracies and potentially other kinds of authoritarian regimes as well. But this is what, in political science, we call a residual category. So democracy is actually defined quite clearly, and we can talk about the defining criteria of democracy. If any of those criteria are violated, the regime is, by definition, a dictatorship.
Mounk: I feel like you’ve left out—I suppose because they’re not very prevalent today—what traditionally would have been the most important form of authoritarian regime, which is just some form of monarchy in which the king, or sometimes the queen, held tremendous power, right?
Loxton: Some people do like to distinguish between monarchies and what are known as personalist dictatorships. When I say monarchies, I’m not talking about Great Britain, Sweden or Japan—constitutional monarchies. I’m talking about actual ruling monarchies like Saudi Arabia. Some people like to distinguish between monarchies and personalist dictatorships. If you want to do that, that’s fine. I think it really has to do with how seriously you take the idea of royal bloodlines. I don’t take it particularly seriously, but whether that person is called a king or whether it’s just President-for-Life So-and-so who then tries to pass power to a son, it’s pretty much the same thing in my mind.
Mounk: What’s interesting is that democracy emerges, obviously, in ancient Athens. You can argue we had democracies in certain Italian city-states. But really, it’s a very rare regime type until quite recently. So one way of thinking about this is that, throughout history, this residual category of dictatorship or authoritarianism encompassed effectively every regime in the world.
Loxton: Absolutely.
Mounk: Historically, a lot of places were monarchies. Tell us about what those systems were like, what we know about them, and then perhaps talk about how that compares to Venezuela today, which I suppose you would call a personalist dictatorship or something like that. There are some important differences between Louis XIV and 17th–18th century France and then contemporary Venezuela or Saudi Arabia and so on.
Loxton: Absolutely. So I think what I would say—and what you were kind of gesturing towards before—is that authoritarianism is the norm. For all of human history, pretty much, or at least post–hunter-gatherer societies, the vast majority of polities have been under some form of non-democratic rule. Democracy is really the exception. The fact that we now think of this as the natural way of being—personally, I believe that democracy is a better form of government than authoritarianism—that’s actually a really new idea. Even when we talk about what we think of as the quintessential democracy of the ancient world, which is ancient Athens—that would not meet modern standards of democracy; it wouldn’t come even close to it.
Maybe 10 to 20% of the population were citizens and were therefore allowed to participate in politics. There’s absolutely no respect for something like what we would call civil liberties today. Socrates, Athens’ most famous citizen, was famously sentenced to death for basically being an infidel and for corrupting the youth. So even ancient Athens would not meet modern standards of democracy.
Mounk: The other thing that brings that out is that, obviously, the way systems work and the kind of performance they have is going to vary hugely. Under the heading of authoritarianism we have everything from ancient Sparta to small tribal societies in Africa or elsewhere, to contemporary China and Iran—those are so heterogeneous that it’s hard to generalize about them.
How does this typology of three different types of dictatorship start to help us think about this? I’m sure that there are different political scientists who cut up the space in slightly different ways, but why is one common-sense way within the field of cutting up authoritarian systems in those three types? What does that allow us to understand about their nature that is important?
Loxton: The term authoritarianism is actually an old one—it dates back to the 1850s in the English language. It didn’t mean quite what it means now. At the time, it referred to a kind of personality type: people who preferred obedience to authority over personal liberties. Only in the second half of the 20th century did the term begin to be used to describe political regimes.
The person most associated with that shift—using authoritarianism to describe a kind of regime—is the famous Spanish sociologist and political scientist Juan Linz. His formative experiences were the Spanish Civil War and then living under the decades-long Franco regime. Clearly, the Franco regime was not a democracy, and yet, when he compared it to Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, he realized it was quite different.
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, were described as totalitarian regimes, and there was a lot of interest in studying totalitarianism. People like Hannah Arendt, of course, wrote about it. Linz said that was a worthy topic of study, absolutely. But most non-democratic regimes in the world are not actually that similar to Stalinism or Hitlerism. They’re probably more similar to the Franco regime. And so he began to talk about authoritarianism.
Since then, the term has morphed—and arguably has become too broad. I can see in your questions a bit of skepticism. I mean, wait, this term really extends from everything in the ancient world right up to contemporary Venezuela? That’s a bit weird, isn’t it? And the answer may well be yes. But that is, for better or worse, how it is used in political science: a residual category for regimes that are not democracies.
Mounk: Before we delve into some of these different regime types, you brought up the distinction between totalitarian systems and non-totalitarian systems. My understanding is that that’s a separate conceptual distinction from the one we laid out earlier—between military, personalistic, and other kinds of dictatorship.
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Now, another way I think about this—and tell me whether that’s how you’d describe it as well—is that a totalitarian political system, like many fascist and communist systems, wants total mobilization of society. You have to be political. If you’re ten years old, you have to join the youth organization—the fascist youth organization in a fascist country, the communist youth organization in a communist country. There are big displays of the public mobilization of the populace. Everything becomes political in this society. The system wants you to participate in politics—of course, only in the one sanctioned form of politics—but it does want you to participate.
Whereas in a lot of dictatorships, life is rather different. A lot of dictatorships say, of course, if you come out in the street and protest against this authoritarian regime, well, then you’re in trouble. But otherwise, go home, watch TV, do your job—we’re not going to make your whole life political. There are going to be cases that lie somewhere in between. But is that what we mean when we talk about totalitarian versus non-totalitarian forms of authoritarianism?
Loxton: When Linz talked about totalitarianism versus authoritarianism, he was really talking about three different things. One of those was what you just gestured toward—whether or not the population was supposed to get actively involved in politics. Linz grew up in Spain—he was Spanish—but his father was German, so he also knew Germany pretty well. As you mentioned, the youth organization in Nazi Germany was the Hitler Youth. In the Soviet Union, there was some kind of equivalent organization. The Boy Scouts were banned. You were expected to join organizations like that. You were expected to vote in these ridiculous, meaningless electoral rituals where the ruling party would win 99% of the vote. You were supposed to get actively involved. In authoritarian regimes, according to Linz, it was the opposite. You were really supposed to keep your head down and your mouth shut—and if you did that, then you were doing what you were meant to do in an authoritarian regime.
So I find all of this stuff really interesting from a historical point of view, but I don’t actually think it’s that relevant from a contemporary point of view—largely because totalitarianism, as it was understood in the 20th century, has largely disappeared. The only unambiguously totalitarian regime we still have in the world today is North Korea.
Mounk: That’s a very interesting point, and perhaps we can come back to talk about why that is—and I share that judgment. A place like China, which is often described as totalitarian in some Western media, is clearly an authoritarian system but not, I think, a totalitarian one.
All right, so we’ve been teasing this distinction between three different forms of dictatorship. Tell us about what the specific characteristics are of each of them. What is specific, for example, about a military dictatorship? How does it differ from the others?
Loxton: Okay, actually, let’s turn back the clock a little bit, because I do want to talk about each of the three subtypes of authoritarianism—the big three, as I call them—but first, it’s important to understand what a democracy is. Again, authoritarianism is defined negatively; it’s a residual category.
Political scientists, by and large, use something known as the procedural minimum definition of democracy. To meet that definition, you have to have free and fair elections, universal adult suffrage, and protection for a broad array of civil liberties. If you remove even one of those things, the regime is no longer a democracy. By definition, it is an authoritarian regime. So we actually have a pretty exacting standard when it comes to defining democracy. But when we talk about authoritarian regimes—when we talk about a regime that does not meet all of those criteria—that can mean many different things.
So let’s start with military regimes. I study Latin America primarily. There’s a long history of military regimes. There are none at the moment, but at the end of the 1970s, the majority of countries in the region were actually under military rule. What does that mean? First of all, military regimes are born through a coup—that’s a violent, illegal seizure of power by the armed forces. And second, there’s some kind of collective rule on the part of the armed forces. This is not just General So-and-so who has absolute power. There’s some kind of collective rule by the armed forces. That’s military rule. There are still multiple military regimes in the world today.
Single-party regimes—that’s just what it sounds like. There’s this great quote that I love by the great Polish political scientist Adam Szymborski, where he says that democracy is a system in which parties lose elections. Well, single-party regimes are the opposite. This is a system in which parties do not lose elections. Either they simply don’t hold national elections—so that would be China under the CCP—or they hold national elections but then put their finger on the scale in order to ensure that they always win. That would be something like Mexico from 1929 until 2000. It was ruled by a single party called the PRI.
Finally, you have a personalist regime. That is a regime where, as the name suggests, one person has absolute power. He doesn’t need to defer to party bigwigs like in a single-party regime. He doesn’t need to defer to a military junta like in a military regime. He has absolute power. The military is his goon squad, the treasury is his personal bank account, and often a cult of personality is built around that person.
Mounk: This is, I think, a very interesting distinction that might be unintuitive to many people who will say, well, isn’t the whole point of any authoritarian regime that there’s one person at the center of the system who ultimately makes the decisions? And if you cross that person in some kind of way, you might find yourself at the very least expelled from power—and quite likely in jail or perhaps executed.
When you go to some of the examples of one-party rule in the Soviet Union, somebody like Joseph Stalin disappeared a lot of people to the Gulag. There’s some striking statistic in the speech by Khrushchev—his successor—criticizing Stalin famously at the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Union, the so-called “Secret Speech,” in which he says something like—I’m going to get the numbers wrong: of the two hundred members of some senior executive committee in the party at the 18th Party Congress, about 150 were defenestrated in some way—many of them died, etc.
What does it mean, in a military dictatorship or in a one-party system that hasn’t degenerated into personalistic rule, to actually have constraints on the ruler? When we say this is not a personalistic system, there really is some form of collective rule—within a military organization, within a political party—that puts some amount of constraint on the ultimate decision-maker. What does that look like? How does that sustain itself?
Loxton: I think that the main difference between these three major subtypes of authoritarianism that I talked about is who really has the final word. I’ll give you an interesting example. This is the case of Chile, a country that I know well. From 1973 until 1990, Chile was under military rule. But there was also one general who rose to the top—he became kind of the first among equals—and that was General Pinochet.
So was this a personalist regime or was it a military regime? Well, this one person had more power than anybody else, but there was also a military junta. We actually didn’t find out until the very end of that regime who really did have the final word. And it turns out that the junta had the final word. Pinochet carried out a plebiscite in 1988 in which the population was asked, should Pinochet stay in power or not? A majority voted no. He wanted to overturn the results, send the tanks into the street, and clamp down. The other members of the junta said, actually, no, you can’t do that. He was forced to back down. But that’s not quite the question that you were asking.
Mounk: Let me double-click on that for a second, because there’s a lot of interesting material in there. One thing that might be suggested is that it’s kind of Schrödinger’s dictatorship, right? Not just we as observers, but perhaps the participants in the system didn’t really know who ultimately held the power.
It’s not necessarily the case that in 1982 Pinochet knew he didn’t fully hold the power, or that the other members of the military regime knew they ultimately did. It may have come down to that decisive moment in 1988 when the chips were revealed and some of the participants were surprised by it. Presumably, if Pinochet ordered the military to go out into the street and make sure he would stay in power, he did that in part because he thought there was at least a chance the military would obey him. It turned out, to his surprise, that it didn’t.
Loxton: Yeah, that’s a nice way of putting it. One reason why that’s true is that in many—in fact, I would say most, perhaps all—dictatorships, the really important rules of the game are not written down anywhere. We just take for granted in democracies that the constitution matters, that the law matters, and that hopefully you have some kind of functional judicial system that’s actually able to be the referee when there are disagreements.
In authoritarian regimes, though, it’s very different. These regimes are dominated by what political scientists call informal institutions. These are rules that are not written down but that, by and large, people know and respect. Sometimes that can even include something as important as who’s actually in charge.
Many personalist dictators prefer to rule behind puppets. I’ll give you an extreme example. The Dominican Republic, for about 30 years in the 20th century, was under the rule of a man named Rafael Trujillo. He changed the name of the capital city from Santo Domingo to Trujillo City. That gives you a sense of what kind of dictator he was. But for much of his time in power, technically, he wasn’t the president. There was some kind of puppet president. Still, everybody really knew who was actually in power. The same thing happened with Putin. He stepped down for one term, ostensibly, in favor of Medvedev. But everybody knew that wasn’t really true.
So sometimes with informal institutions, even though they’re not written down, everyone kind of does know what the real rules of the game are. But I think you raise a really interesting point: when the rules are not actually written down and there’s no formal umpire to weigh in when there are disagreements, there is a bit of wiggle room. There’s room for disagreement and misinterpretation.
Mounk: What are the mechanisms that help to sustain that form of collective rule within a dictatorship? In a liberal democracy, you have constitutional rules that aren’t always fully obeyed, but are hopefully followed relatively closely most of the time. Those rules establish checks and balances, impose limits on the power of the president or the prime minister, and define decision-making procedures—say, in foreign policy—that might be relatively autonomous. Political leaders can direct policy in many ways, but for a law to come into effect, they also need a majority in parliament. There’s usually some kind of court that can overrule what they do.
In dictatorships, those formal checks and balances are normally absent. On paper, they may have similar institutions, but in practice, the Supreme Court is not going to overrule the will of the dictator, because all the judges have been hand-selected by the system. They understand what would happen if they went against the regime—it would end very badly for them.
Yet, it sounds like some places aren’t just party states on paper. The senior members of a political party really do have power that constrains the head of the party in reality. There also seem to be military juntas—military regimes—in which there may be a primus inter pares, someone who has a little more power than the others, but where power is nonetheless meaningfully constrained. What are the mechanisms that are able to sustain that over time, in the absence of the kinds of checks and balances you have in a democracy?
Loxton: Terror, purges, violence. One of the strangest things about authoritarian regimes is that the scariest place to be is often right around the people at the top. Interestingly, this is explored more deeply in political fiction than in political science texts.
Everybody’s read 1984—an amazing book. Winston Smith, this completely ordinary man in an absolutely terrible dictatorship, the worst regime ever conceived, is eventually imprisoned, tortured, and killed. But Winston Smith is actually not an ordinary person. He is a member of the Party, which Orwell tells us makes up only 15% of the country. The proles, as he calls them—85% of the population—more or less do what they want. If they really get out of line, they’ll disappear, but the people who are constantly being surveilled and disappeared are Party members.
There’s actually a whole genre of fiction from Latin America called the dictator novel that often explores this dynamic. I mentioned Trujillo earlier. Mario Vargas Llosa, the amazing Peruvian political scientist who died recently, wrote a book about Trujillo called The Feast of the Goat that’s really all about this—how Trujillo would subject his highest-level officials to unthinkable humiliations as a way of exerting his power, so they never seriously considered challenging him.
Mounk: I believe Saddam Hussein was shooting people live on television who were members of his own regime. Going back to the Soviet Union, it was a terrible regime for everyone in the country. But actually, an average citizen or an average peasant had a much smaller likelihood of being killed than a very senior member of the Politburo during many stretches of Soviet history. That really is striking. Why does that happen? I’m not entirely sure about the logic here. Surely, in many of these examples, that kind of internal repression is precisely what leads to the collapse of one-party systems or military regimes. If you’re saying purges, terror, etc., are the mechanisms used to maintain control, shouldn’t that be exactly how a one-party state or a military junta ends up dissolving into a personalistic regime? Where perhaps, on paper, it’s still the party that rules, but in practice, there’s only one person.
One way of thinking about this, perhaps, is to look at the Soviet Union. Would you say that, at different stages of the Soviet Union’s history, it was either a one-party state or a personalistic regime? That at the height of the terror and purges—at the height of Stalin’s power—it was effectively a personalistic regime, but at other moments there was some genuine form of collective rule, such that it could be described as a one-party state?
Similarly, with military regimes—it might start with six generals gaining power and holding each other in check to some degree, with some kind of collective decision-making. But then, using the very tools we’ve been talking about—like terror and purges—one general becomes so much more powerful than the others that there are effectively no constraints on his power, and he becomes a personalistic dictator.
Loxton: Political scientists who have looked at different kinds of authoritarian regimes find that some tend to last longer than others. So let’s talk about the big three again: military regimes, single-party regimes, and personalist regimes. Barbara Geddes and her collaborators have crunched the numbers and found that military regimes, on average, are the shortest-lived of the big three. Then you have personalist regimes. Finally, you have single-party regimes. That’s probably not just a coincidence. There are enough examples of all of these different types of regimes that there’s likely something going on here. So why do military regimes tend to break down more quickly than other kinds of authoritarian regimes? A big part of it, I think, is that the military can imagine a life after dictatorship. The military existed before the regime, and it will exist after the regime. So, after a certain point, much of the armed forces might just decide, you know what? We’ll just return to the barracks and do what we did before.
Mounk: Also presumably, a lot of the rank and file of the military are still going to be employed, because the country presumably needs to preserve the military. They might also hold some power in reserve in ways that are much harder for other systems to replicate. They’re still going to have the guns, so even once they have returned formal political authority to civilians, they retain ways of expressing threats and making demands. It’s very difficult for civilian authorities not to listen to those, even after a transition to democracy.
Loxton: The term for that is tutelary powers, and it is true that after military rule ends, militaries will often try to maintain some kind of tutelage over elected governments. What about personalist regimes? Personalist regimes are very different from military regimes because, for the person at the top, it’s hard to imagine a life after dictatorship. For all of the flunkies around that person—including those in the military who only got their positions because they were sycophants—they also know they’re probably going to face a pretty tough life if the regime ever comes to an end. They do absolutely everything possible to hold on. At the same time, they alienate much of the population because the regime is so patently illegitimate. That leaves you with a regime that will probably last a bit longer than a military regime on average, but that will eventually come crumbling down.
Finally, you have single-party regimes, which by and large last longer than either military regimes or personalist regimes. The reason single-party regimes probably do this is that they try to depersonalize the leadership. The Soviet Union under Stalin became a pretty personalist regime, and after Stalin it became more of a single-party regime. Or take China under Mao—that was a personalist regime that later depersonalized, and has now personalized again under Xi. The lines between these different categories can get pretty blurry. But the more a regime depends on a single person—who may or may not be making wise decisions—the riskier it is for that regime’s long-term survival. That, I think, is why single-party regimes so often last much longer.
Mounk: Tell us a little bit about the performance of these regimes—bearing in mind, of course, that the authoritarian system in Zimbabwe is totally different from the one in China, which is totally different from the one in North Korea, which is totally different from the one in Turkey. It’s obviously hard to overgeneralize. But what do we know about whether, for example, dictatorships or democracies perform better on things like economic growth or providing for their citizens? How does that performance vary across different types of regime? Is there strong evidence that personalistic forms of regime do significantly worse on some of these metrics than those that are more institutionalized—regimes that have constraints from a party system or a broader military group?
Loxton: So I think there’s a kind of popular myth that authoritarian regimes are better at providing economic development than democracies. Political scientists who have looked into this—and many studies have examined it—have found that it’s probably a wash. Some authoritarian regimes do well when it comes to the economy, but most do not. Some democracies also do well economically, but many—perhaps most—do not.
A really important point to make here is that when we’re talking about regime type—democracy versus dictatorship—that’s completely unrelated to whether a country is well or poorly governed. These two things are entirely orthogonal to each other. There’s no guarantee that democracy will provide good government, just as there’s no guarantee that authoritarian regimes will provide good government.
Mounk: This is going to be a little bit shocking to some of my listeners, because they might think, well, isn’t that part of the point of having democracy? That you assure yourself certain forms of good governance? Isn’t part of the point of democracy to have checks and balances and rules that constrain the powerful? Isn’t the goal to make sure that those who hold power aren’t able to use it to benefit themselves, to be corrupt, to enrich their allies, or to favor certain parts of the country over others? If democracy, empirically speaking, doesn’t consistently deliver on all of that—then what’s the point? Why do we care so much?
Loxton: I think that many people living under authoritarianism hope, or even expect, that when the regime comes to an end, the economy will start growing, the welfare state will suddenly become generous, and everything will be better. That is almost never true. In fact, sometimes things get worse initially, because authoritarian regimes often collapse in the context of an economic crisis or a loss in war—something that makes it very hard for the new government to govern effectively. That creates a recipe for disappointment. You get regime change, and then five or ten years go by, and things have barely shifted. So what is the point?
The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen—who won the Nobel Prize—wrote a terrific essay in 1999 called The Universal Value of Democracy. He makes a distinction between what he calls the instrumental value of democracy and the intrinsic value of democracy. Instrumental value means: do I get something good out of democracy? Let’s say, good government. And often the answer is—not really, not especially.
But then there’s this idea of an intrinsic value to democracy. That might be something relatively small—some people might see it that way—like knowing you have the right to go to a protest if you want, or to say something critical about the leader on social media, or to write a grumpy op-ed. Most people will never do any of those things. But knowing that you can, Sen would say, is valuable in and of itself.
Then there are more extreme things: knowing, for example, that you will never be abducted, drugged, and dropped to your death in the sea—as occurred in Argentina from 1976 to 1983, when it was under military rule. That kind of extreme repression, which some authoritarian regimes engage in, is something we can by and large feel secure won’t happen to us under a democracy. So in my view, the strongest argument in favor of democracy is this idea of its intrinsic value. The jury is still out, I guess, on the instrumental.
Mounk: That’s interesting. Part of the intrinsic value of democracy, you would think, is the sense that we are choosing our own fate—that, in some way, collectively, we are writing the rules of our own society. So even though there are certain rules on the books in democracies and certain rules on the books in dictatorships, at least we are the co-authors of the rules that bind us.
Now, of course, the problem with that argument is—and perhaps here we’re veering back into talking about democracy rather than authoritarianism—a lot of people don’t feel meaningfully represented in democracies. They might say that this core promise of democracy, which literally means “rule of the people,” isn’t being upheld. In fact, popular views often aren’t translated into public policies. That may be one of the background reasons why the intrinsic value of democracy feels less meaningful to many citizens, even in longstanding democracies, than we might hope.
Loxton: Yes, I read a very interesting book by a guy named Yascha Mounk called The People versus Democracy about precisely this topic. That is true, of course. What I would say is that even though democracy does not guarantee good government—it does not guarantee “peace, order, and good government,” to quote from the Canadian Constitution—it at least gives us the chance to secure those things. There’s absolutely no guarantee that they will magically materialize once we have a democracy. But because we are allowed to elect our leaders, and because we are allowed to challenge them—through protests, through critical media, by forming new organizations, by forming new parties—we at least have the opportunity to get the things we value.
Whereas in authoritarian regimes, there’s just no chance of doing that. You hope that the rulers of the country will decide, for whatever reason, that they would prefer the economy to develop rather than completely pillage the state. But do you really want to leave that up to the whims of General So-and-so? I don’t.
Mounk: You said earlier that there’s a popular myth that dictatorships tend to be better for economic development than democracies. I would bet that a very large reason for that perception is the contrast between China and India. These are both countries that have done pretty well economically over the last 20 or 30 years. They’re both much more affluent than they were a few decades ago. But if you go back—perhaps 40 years or so—India and China were similarly poor.
Today, I believe the United States is about six times richer than China, and China is about six times richer than India. So the difference between China and India is very significant. For people tempted to say, these are two of the most important and most populous countries in the world—and look at how much better China is doing, it seems natural to attribute that to China’s system. Surely, they might argue, this is in part because of the large-scale, rational development enabled by centralized control—because a single decision-maker can override local resistance to major projects, like the Three Gorges Dam. This centralization, some would say, is what allowed China to go from having no high-speed rail 15 or 20 years ago to having 50% of the world’s high-speed rail mileage today. Doesn’t that show that dictatorships can be much more effective than democracies? What’s your response to that? Why shouldn’t we generalize from that case? And what other factors may explain the development gap between these two countries?
Loxton: So India and China—the world’s two most populous countries—are, to my mind, the two most important countries in the world. It would be an exaggeration to call it a natural experiment, but it’s kind of interesting that India became independent in 1947 and China had its revolution in 1949. So let’s follow their trajectories and see what happens. If you look at GDP per capita—and I encourage your listeners to actually just go and Google this; it’s very easy to do—the World Bank has great data. If you track GDP per capita in both countries, it was virtually identical until the 1990s. Then they start to diverge, and after that, they really, really diverge. As you pointed out, China is now many times richer than India.
But for the first 40 years or so of the Chinese communist regime, it was doing as badly as—or in many ways, worse than—India. In fact, in some respects, it was a lot worse. I mentioned Amartya Sen earlier, the Nobel Prize–winning economist. He won his Nobel Prize in part for demonstrating that under democracy, there are no mass famines. Democracy may not ensure that people enjoy a high standard of living, and it may not ensure good government, but it does ensure that millions of people do not die of hunger. That used to happen in India under British colonial rule. It certainly happened in China under Mao’s rule. The Great Leap Forward—probably the least accurately named event in world history—resulted in something like 50 million people dying, completely unnecessarily, due to utterly misguided economic policies dreamed up by one man who knew nothing about economics. That kind of catastrophe can happen in an authoritarian regime. It did happen in China. But the opposite can also happen, as it has since Deng Xiaoping took over—and especially over the past few decades.
Mounk: Yeah, and I guess I would add to that that there are also some differences between China and India that may help explain the greater difficulty of achieving rapid economic development in India. China is actually quite a diverse place. There are many different ethnic groups and a vast variety of languages—not just Mandarin and Cantonese, but all kinds of local languages and dialects that are mutually incomprehensible. I’ve spent some time in Shanghai, for example, and Shanghainese comes from the Wu language family, which is distinct from both Mandarin and Cantonese and is not mutually intelligible by and large.
That said, China is, I believe, over 90 percent Han Chinese. It has a very long history of extraordinary state capacity—a strong sense of itself as a unified nation and culture that goes back a very long time. In India, by contrast, you have a huge variety of regional ethnicities and regional languages. Hindi has been far less historically dominant than Mandarin dialects were in China. India also has much more significant religious diversity—most notably, a majority Hindu population alongside a very significant Muslim minority. All of those factors, you might think, in various ways make it harder to develop an economy at the speed that China did.
Loxton: Maybe. All of those supposed advantages that China had didn’t seem to have helped very much until Deng Xiaoping opened up the economy. When Mao was in charge, it was just a complete and utter fiasco.
Mounk: I guess that’s the other argument you can make—that India was under the Raj, under colonial rule, and then when it opened up, people joked that it came under the license Raj. It was an incredibly protectionist economy, and India too has had some market reforms over the last decades. They were much less radical than what Deng Xiaoping did in China. So I guess another way of explaining this is simply by different economic policy. Now you might think, of course, that that goes back to the contrast between democracy and dictatorship. That one of the reasons why China could pursue much more radical free market policies and prove that they work is that there was a lot of power concentrated in Deng Xiaoping when he became convinced of the wisdom of his policies. And when they worked, then they sort of became hard to roll back, whereas in India, there were certainly some more free market-oriented politicians at various points, but their power was so constrained that they were not able to go nearly as far with those reforms. Therefore they were less successful, therefore they gained less of a political constituency, it was harder to sustain them. Though India certainly has liberalized significantly from the days of a license Raj, its economy has many, many more restrictions, rules, protections, bureaucratic obstacles than China does in various ways. And so that might be a way of sort of arguing back to: look, dictatorship isn’t always good, but perhaps for a certain form of development, it takes that kind of single decision-making power. How would you respond to that argument?
Loxton: I am going to respond to this in a way that might seem a little bit strange, but just bear with me. So you know that there are people—those who admit that they don’t have magical powers describe themselves as mentalists, and then those who pretend they do have magical powers—they describe themselves as psychics. They do something pretty amazing. They’ll apparently read people’s minds sometimes. The way they’ll do this is they’ll say, for example, okay, I’ve got an A name coming to my mind. Does that mean anything to you? No? Okay, no—actually, I think it’s a P name? No? Okay, actually a T name… Then you’ll say T... My wife’s name is Teresa—that’s amazing. How did you know that? People remember the hits, but they forget the misses. A skilled mentalist can do this in such a way that they kind of just take you for a ride.
I think the same thing happens—and this comes back to this myth of authoritarian regimes being better at economic development. We remember the hits, but we forget the misses. I’ll give you a few of the hits. China since 1978. Taiwan during the entire period of one-party KMT rule—so 1949 until 2000. South Korea under military dictator Park Chung-hee. Chile under military dictator Augusto Pinochet. Wow, that’s amazing. Authoritarian regimes are really good at economic development.
If you look at some of the misses, though—what about the Democratic Republic of Congo under Joseph Mobutu? Or Nigeria under military rule? Or China under Mao? Or really the vast majority of authoritarian regimes, which have very little to show for themselves?
Mounk: North Korea, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Venezuela after Chavez, etc.
Loxton: Exactly. So I’m not saying that we shouldn’t—I think it’s incredible what has happened in China in recent decades. It was incredible what the KMT did in Taiwan. It was incredible what Park Chung-hee did. I’m not saying that that excuses any of their repression, but it’s very interesting. All of those cases are very interesting. The reason they’re so interesting is because they’re so unusual. They are atypical, not typical.
Mounk: Is one way of thinking about this that the variance is going to be bigger in dictatorships than in democracies? Which is to say that in democracies, a much more sensible argument is that economic development might not be great, might involve a lot of poverty, but there aren’t going to be any famines, right? The worst-case scenario is likely to be averted.
Now, conversely, you might say if somebody has a really sensible set of economic policies that can help lead a country like China rapidly out of poverty and into more or less middle-income status, they’re going to be able to do that in a dictatorship as well, just because there’s so much more concentrated power. It’s harder to do in a democracy like India—the free market people just aren’t able to go as far as they are in China.
So there’s a kind of institutional reason to think that what it means to have institutional constraints on what you can do is that if you’re doing something really bad, somebody is going to be able to stop some of the really bad things you’re doing. If you’re doing something really good, somebody’s going to be able to stop some of the really good things you’re doing. And so perhaps you get lower variance—a lower variety in the outcomes—clustered a little bit closer together than in a dictatorship, where you might get some really positive cases and some really negative cases.
Loxton: Yeah, maybe. I’m not actually sure. But again, my understanding is that the large end studies show that there’s really no relationship between regime type and development outcomes. So I do think that this is largely a myth.
Mounk: All right, well, perhaps there’s a research hypothesis to follow up with. I know they’ve looked at variance specifically—probably they did. What about one argument I’ve heard, which is this distinction within dictatorship? You’ve distinguished between totalitarian and non-totalitarian regimes, and you’ve distinguished between personalistic regimes and those other kinds of regimes. Is it true, in general, that the results—the outcomes—of relatively more institutionalized dictatorships, the ones where there’s some significant power to constrain the ultimate decision-maker, tend to be better than those of personalistic dictatorships? Better than those where one person really does call the shots in such a way that it’s very hard even for the inner circles—even for the dictator’s historical allies—to say, this seems a little bit nuts. I hear reports that in this part of the country, people don’t have anything to eat. We’re about to engage in a big military adventure against our neighboring country. That might end pretty badly. Let’s not do that. Is there some systematic evidence of that, or do you regard that as more of an unproven hypothesis?
Loxton: This reminds me of what has been called the dictator trap. I am going to answer your question, but it’ll take a moment to get there.
Dictators do not like to be contradicted. They don’t like to hear the word no—even less do they like to be told that their ideas are infeasible, or immoral, or insane. The more powerful a particular leader becomes, the more likely they are to be surrounded by sycophants who tell them whatever they want to hear and simply avoid giving them bad information.
One thing I’ve heard is that in China under Mao, during the Great Leap Forward, the reports of starvation were not always actually making their way up to the top leadership, because nobody wanted to bear that bad news. They knew the consequences would be severe. Or take Russia under Putin—who was going to tell Putin, actually, Ukraine is a real country. They do have a sense of identity. They probably will fight back. This isn’t going to be over in two days. I would not have wanted to be the official who told that to Putin, because things would not turn out very well for that person.
So I think it is probably true that the more power is invested in a single person, the more likely they are to fall into this dictator trap—where they’re simply surrounded by sycophants who tell them whatever they want to hear, until one day they make some insane decision, like invading Ukraine or trying to carry out the Great Leap Forward.
Mounk: Yeah, and that I think is an important point, because it both shows when some of these authoritarian regimes might be comparatively more effective—when there are actually still effective mechanisms for transmitting information so that the person at the top knows if a part of the population is starving, in the extreme case, or knows if there’s extreme corruption in some part of the state.
Loxton: Can I give you a very interesting example of that? There’s a wonderful political scientist named Martin Dimitrov—I believe he’s Bulgarian, but much of his work is about Bulgaria, and he has also studied other communist regimes. One of the things he has looked at is the fact that in the Eastern Bloc—especially in Bulgaria, but I believe this is true in multiple communist countries—there was an active effort by the ruling party to get citizens to complain. To file formal complaints about things like the elevator in my building isn’t working, or the lines in the supermarket are too long. These bread-and-butter issues, if left unaddressed, could build up and threaten the regime by fueling widespread public anger. The regime wanted to know what people really thought—at least on those day-to-day matters—so that it could get ahead of the discontent and actually solve those problems.
People did this. According to Dimitrov, in one year in the 1980s, something like 10% of the entire population made some kind of formal complaint to the authorities about X, Y, or Z. What they didn’t do was tell the authorities, actually, this whole communist thing—we don’t really like it. We’d like to have a complete regime change. People understood what information they were allowed to give, and what information they were not.
Mounk: That’s very interesting. My understanding from some researchers is that China uses similar mechanisms very effectively. If complaints about some local official swell sufficiently—sometimes in public fora like social media—those officials will often be removed and punished. That becomes a way to ensure continued information flow. If there’s a real coefficient somewhere that is particularly bad, that figure gets removed. This helps maintain some form of regime legitimacy.
The problem with personalistic systems is that those information flows might be cut off. The dictator might become sufficiently enamored with himself—sufficiently intolerant of any form of dissent—that he no longer has any realistic understanding of what’s actually going on in the country. That’s where you tend to get the really, really bad results. That’s why this question about whether you can stop the authoritarian system from degenerating into a personalistic form of rule is very important.
I want to touch on another paradox, which is that, by definition, authoritarian systems allow no—or very limited—rival centers of power. By definition, they don’t have ways to change the political regime or the team in power through public consultation. One very minimalist definition of democracy is that there are multiple teams competing for power, and it’s unclear which of them will be in power in five or ten or twenty years. That is absent in dictatorships. All of that would lead you to believe that authoritarianism is an extremely stable form of government. Since power is concentrated at the top and there are no formal mechanisms for regime change, it should persist for a very long time.
Yet, every democracy in the world is born out of some form of authoritarianism. We have plenty of examples—some of which you’ve already touched on—of authoritarian regimes collapsing and falling apart. When do these regimes fall apart, and why do they do that? Why do they seem so susceptible to being replaced, when the whole goal is to not be replaced?
Loxton: So one thing that I would challenge you on is this idea that, by definition, there are no rival centers of power. I don’t think that’s true. Many authoritarian regimes do allow some kind of opposition to exist, and/or other organizations that are not explicitly political but that nevertheless could potentially become some rival power center. The Catholic Church is a great example. Military regimes in countries like Brazil or Chile, or even Poland’s communist regime, allowed quite a lot of autonomy for the Catholic Church. Uncoincidentally, the Catholic Church ended up really spearheading the struggle for democracy in all three of those countries—in Chile and Brazil, and in Poland once Karol Wojtyła became John Paul II and then visited his native country, I think in 1979. One year later, Solidarity emerges. That is not a coincidence. Some authoritarian regimes do actually allow organizations like the Catholic Church to maintain a significant degree of autonomy. But to your question—why do authoritarian regimes eventually fall? Because most of them eventually do. There’s no one answer to that question. But I would say that all authoritarian regimes face a handful of similar problems—problems that simply do not exist in democracies to the same degree.
Earlier on, we were talking about—and you were a little bit skeptical, I think—how big a tent the topic of authoritarianism is, how broadly political scientists seem to use this category. But it turns out that, whether you’re a military regime, or a single-party regime, or a personalist regime, there are a number of dilemmas that you often face.
One is what we were just talking about earlier: the problem of information. The fact that dictators simply do not—often do not—get accurate information. That is a much bigger problem in authoritarian regimes than in democracies.
Another is the problem of legitimacy. We hear the term “legitimacy” all the time, but what does that actually mean? It’s a moral concept. It’s the answer to the question: what right do you have to rule? In democracies, the answer is simple—well, the people elected us in the most recent election. Authoritarian regimes don’t have that answer because, by definition, they did not come to power in free and fair elections with universal suffrage and full civil liberties. That means they need to find their legitimacy somewhere else. Sometimes they hitch that on their performance. That has been China for several decades now, and its performance has been absolutely extraordinary. But what happens when the economy eventually stops growing? Which it will. If you have based your legitimacy on the idea that “the economy will grow forever under us,” and then it stops growing, then you’re in trouble. Or what if, for example, your performance does not have to do with the economy, but it has to do with national glory—under us, we made X country great again. We restored the Soviet Union. We took back Ukraine. What if Russia eventually loses the war in Ukraine? It doesn’t seem likely to happen at the moment, but God knows what’s going to happen. Who expected this war to still be going on several years later? If Russia were to lose that war, that would be a pretty serious blow for Putin.
So economic crises are one major reason that authoritarian regimes often fall. Loss in a war is another really bad thing to have happen to you if you are at the top of an authoritarian regime.
Mounk: What are the internal mechanisms by which these regimes then fall? Obviously, that differs very strongly across these different types. But is the decisive factor in whether a military regime falls or a one-party state falls popular protest? Is it, as I think political science sometimes suggests, splits in the regime—where the regime is no longer able to keep the loyalty of some of the insiders who start to switch sides and basically do the bidding of the populace that is deeply unhappy?
What is most dangerous to an authoritarian regime in terms of who might betray it, and how does that process tend to work?
Loxton: Popular protests can play a major role. Look at Tunisia or Egypt during the Arab Spring, where dictators were overthrown and both of those countries briefly became democracies—Tunisia for a bit longer. Or a place like the Philippines during the People Power Revolution of the 1980s. Or throughout Eastern Europe, when people took to the streets in their millions in order to call for an end to communism. I think mass protests really did matter in all of these countries.
However, we can also think of examples where there were mass protests and the people in power just decided to kill the protesters. That was China in 1989. Most people in the world have heard of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The fact that that happened in 1989 was not a coincidence.
Communist regimes were falling throughout Eastern Europe in 1989, and it seemed like China was going to be the next domino to fall. People in China did what they did in countries like Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia and East Germany. They took to the streets, they demanded change, and in China, they just decided to kill hundreds or possibly thousands of people. We’ve seen that recently in places like Nicaragua or Venezuela. It does seem that if the authorities have no qualms about massacring people, locking people up, torturing them in large numbers—and crucially, if they hang together—they can pretty much beat back any kind of protest, no matter how big it is. That is why political scientists, as you mentioned earlier, often really focus instead on what’s happening at the elite level and whether there’s a split in the ruling coalition. In particular, people like Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter talk about the split between what are called hardliners and softliners. Once you have some kind of a split, plus mass protests, that’s when things get pretty iffy for the authoritarian regime.
Mounk: Is there any clear pattern on the ideological orientation of authoritarian regimes, particularly in the modern age? Are they equally represented on the left, the right and in parts of the ideological spectrum that we can’t clearly attribute to the left or the right? Are they so idiosyncratic that those labels aren’t really helpful? How should we think about political ideology and authoritarian regimes?
Loxton: I’m glad you asked that question. I don’t have a count off the top of my head, but I would guess that you have just as many right-wing dictatorships as left-wing dictatorships and vice versa. The reason that I’m glad you asked that question is that I think a lot of ideologues have a real blindness when it comes to dictatorships on their side of the aisle. To this day, there are a lot of people in the world who have this romantic idea of communist Cuba. If you actually study communist Cuba, it is completely indefensible—just completely and utterly indefensible. It is one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world, but it’s left wing, and if you’re on the left, you’re supposed to like it.
The same is true, during the Cold War, for regimes on the right—apartheid South Africa, Taiwan under the KMT, Chile under Pinochet. All of these were just absolutely awful dictatorships, but people like Jean Kirkpatrick were willing to give regimes on their side of the aisle a pass. We talked about how democracy and dictatorship form one axis, and good government and bad government form another axis—and they are completely orthogonal. The same is true when it comes to ideology. We have democracy and dictatorship on one axis, and we have left and right on another axis, and they are completely orthogonal. It is so important for those of us who care about democracy, who want to preserve our democracies, or for those of us who live in dictatorships but would like to see an eventual transition to democracy, to accept this basic idea and to be willing to challenge authoritarians on our side of the aisle, because if you’re unwilling to do that, that is more likely than not a recipe for democratic breakdown.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and James discuss the state of democracy in the United States. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
