Evaluate various institutional strategies by which non-democratic regimes remain in power.
Analyze cultural and ideological explanations for the persistence of non-democratic regimes.
Introduction
Those in charge within all political regimes possess a variety of means for staying in power. One common heuristic for thinking about these tools is through a simple "carrots" versus "sticks" breakdown of regime strategies. Carrots take the form of inducements or benefits that a government doles out to gain the loyalty of constituents. Sticks focus on meting out punishments as negative reinforcement of the rules.
One additional tool to add to the mix of carrots and sticks is propaganda. Propaganda is biased information meant to convince an audience of a particular perspective or narrative. Governments may expend resources to shore up their legitimacy in the minds of citizens by utilizing sophisticated propaganda bureaucracies to control information flows to the people. Deploying propaganda is neither a carrot nor a stick, but rather a powerful means to control citizens' perceptions and thoughts. Propaganda, as an ideational strategy, is in a category of its own, and it is especially powerful when it draws on existing cultural foundations in a society.
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The leadership of a non-democratic regime may control media, such as television, radio, and the internet, to transmit pro-regime messaging. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; banlon1964 viaflickr creative commons)
Leaders in all types of regimes utilize a mix of carrots, sticks, and ideas to stay in power. These strategies, though the exact manifestations differ, appear in both democracies and non-democracies. For example, internal investigative bureaucracies, such as the Ministry of State Security in China, have counterparts in democracies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States. Similarly, virtually all countries in the world, regardless of regime type, have police for maintaining domestic order. It is not the case that non-democracies are repressive while democracies are not. But compared to democracies, non-democracies are relatively unconstrained in their ability to use force or to manipulate information in order to ensure compliance with their rule. The lack of robust accountability mechanisms in non-democracies is a crucial difference in how public institutions are managed.
Institutional Channels
Political regimes are most likely to endure when their leaders build and maintain institutions. Institutions are shared rules, practices, norms, and organizations within a political system. One way to think about institutions is that they make up the "rules of the game," formal and informal, for all political and social life. Institutions structure the way those within a state complete tasks politically, and institutions constrain and organize citizens' interactions with the government and with other citizens. They are the source of a great deal of social and political power.
Because of the power of institutions, leaders in all political regimes have an interest in institutionalizing their rule. Non-democratic regimes may use institutional carrots by co-opting opposition, developing patronage networks, and promoting clientelism. Each of these institutions provides positive inducements for supporting the political regime. Non-democratic regimes may also use institutional sticks, such as the creation of domestic security bureaucracies and paramilitary groups. These sticks are strategies of repression that aim to extract obedience from the population. We will discuss each of these institutional channels in turn.
Institutions for Co-opting Opposition
All non-democracies face the problem of an opposition that might oust them from power. To blunt the force of an opposition, or even vocal critics with a following, a regime might invest in institutions that have the appearance of democratic representation. These include rigged elections, legislatures, courts, and the like. These institutions are actually "window dressing," or façades, for a tightly controlled political system. Judiciaries in these systems are not independent, nor do they provide a meaningful check on the authority of rulers. Many nondemocratic regimes have in place legislatures, but these legislatures lack authority to veto measures passed by those in power. Examples abound in the highly authoritarian Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea. North Korea has been ruled since the 1950s by a single Supreme Leader, yet formally it has a unicameral legislature. This Supreme People’s Assembly includes nearly 700 deputies and, in theory, confers authority on the Supreme Leader. However, DPRK’s Supreme Leader makes all governance decisions for the country and does not face any threat of veto by the legislature.
Opposition parties or critics of the regime might agree to sit on such bodies as a means to have access to political leaders. They may also benefit materially from legislative or judicial seats. For example, they may draw a salary or receive other perks, such as a chauffeured car or a swanky office. Co-opting the opposition through such institutions can serve the ruling regime in multiple ways. Co-optation can boost the legitimacy of the rulers in the eyes of the public while simultaneously allowing rulers to closely monitor the positions and ideas of the opposition. This provides the ruling group with information that they can then choose to either counter or incorporate into their political agenda.
Patronage Networks
All politics hinge on relationships and the flow of resources. Patronage networks are relationships within political systems in which a leader, or a group of leaders, with access to resources distributes those resources to those within their network in exchange for loyalty. Within a patronage network are reciprocal bonds that unite members of the network. A leader might take a portion of oil revenues and distribute those monies to their deputies scattered throughout the provinces; in return, those deputies might make sure that the leader’s posters are prominently displayed in every local government office.
Patronage networks may be organized via many different kinds of organizations or social groups. Political parties are one way to distribute public resources in exchange for political obedience. Other major state organizations, such as the military or state-owned businesses, are also sites for building patronage networks. Non-state organizations may be part of patronage networks, such as private businesses or business associations. Identity groups, including those bound by ethnicity or tribe, may be the basis of patronage networks. The latter was evident in Syria under the al-Assad family, which ruled the state from 1971 to 2024. Major institutions of the state were controlled by the Alawite minority, a Shia Muslim group that makes up less than one-fifth of Sunni Muslim-dominated Syria. In return for political power, Alawite networks supported the ruling al-Assad family.
Broad-Based Clientelism
Related to, but separate from, patronage networks are institutions that promote clientelism on a broad scale. Clients are those who rely on a patron for resources; clientelism is a strategy whereby rulers seek to buy off the loyalties of broad swaths of the population. To do so, rulers may invest in social programs in which they mark clearly their sponsorship of these programs to the masses. Such broad-based distribution of resources has the effect of turning significant parts of a state's population into clients, or dependents, of the ruling regime.
One example of broad-based clientelism was in Mexico under the rule of the PRI from 1929 to 2000. Under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994), social programs were consolidated under a new government initiative called the National Solidarity Program (Programa Nacional de Solidaridad, commonly referred to as "Pronasol"). Pronasol distributed government funds to poor communities to build public works, such as schools, health clinics, water treatment facilities, and electric grids. This initiative reflected the national ambitions and reach of the PRI: At its height, there were nearly 250,000 Pronasol committees at the grassroots level to carry out community projects in collaboration with community leaders. The results were impressive. They included the renovations of 130,000 schools, the creation of 1,000 rural medical units, and plumbing access for 16 million Mexican residents (Merrill and Miró, eds., 1996). Looking back on this ambitious program, it represented a broad-based means to build support for PRI rule throughout the state, especially in the countryside.
Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): A rural school in Mexico. Schools such as this were sponsored by the ruling PRI in Mexico as a means to build loyalty among rural citizens. (Source:Rural School in Mexico by Heather Paul viaflickr creative commons is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0)
Domestic Security Apparatuses
Moving away from institutions that provide positive inducements for supporting the political regime, non-democratic regimes also employ strategies of repression to extract obedience from the population and to ensure the ruling elite remains in power. Non-democracies are the creators of the modern secret police, beginning with the creation of the Cheka in 1917 during the Russian Revolution under Lenin, which aimed to combat counter-revolution and used strategies of violence and terror. The Cheka became the NKVD--the internal secret police, another highly repressive group--under Stalin from 1934-1946 in the Soviet Union. Later, in 1954, the secret police organization became the KGB, which lasted until the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991. Though often exceedingly violent, from the ruling elite's perspective, these institutions can serve critical purposes by collecting intelligence on potential dissent within a state and ensuring compliance by instilling fear among citizens through campaigns of terror.
One non-democracy that has developed sophisticated means for surveilling its population is China. Since 2010, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has spent more on domestic security than external defense. A vast network of surveillance programs exists throughout the country, including "Sharp Eyes" (xueliang), a project announced in 2015 that mandated video surveillance of all public spaces by 2020. Sharp Eyes included nonstop video feed of public squares, intersections of major roads, public areas in residential neighborhoods, and transit stations (among other areas). It also included the monitoring of select buildings, such as the entry points of radio, television, and newspaper offices, and combined video surveillance with facial recognition technology.
Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\): Pedestrians in a public square in Beijing are surveilled as part of a national system to record all public spaces. (Source:Tiananmen Gate with surveillance cameras by hmchang viawikimedia is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)
Paramilitaries
Another powerful instrument of repression is the creation of paramilitaries. Paramilitaries are groups with access to military-grade weapons and training, yet not part of the national military, that carry out violence on behalf of the state. They are "irregular armed organizations that carry out acts of violence against civilians on behalf of a state" (Üngör, 2020). Paramilitaries have been deployed by governments around the world, and they are an additional institutional layer of terror over citizens. Death squads are one kind of paramilitary organization employed by governments to carry out extrajudicial murders, usually of political enemies of the state. One tragic example of mass killing carried out by death squads occurred in Indonesia. During the height of the Cold War in the mid-1960s, Indonesian death squads were responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians believed to have leftist sympathies.
Taken together, non-democratic leaders possess a variety of means, both persuasive and coercive, to enforce their rule. These include positive inducements that can be narrow or broad in scope. Coercive institutions, such as secret police and paramilitaries, additionally offer an institutionalized means for non-democratic leaders to maintain their monopoly on the use of violence.
Cultural and Ideological Controls
Another powerful way to maintain authority is to convince people to believe in the legitimacy of non-democratic rule. This is in some ways the most efficient way to stay in power because it preempts resistance. Non-democratic leaders thus invest in creating strong ideational foundations for their rule. These ideas may derive selectively from deeper cultural traditions in a society, including those linked to faith traditions, or they may stem from the dissemination of non-democratic ideologies to the masses.
Undemocratic concepts such as hierarchy and unaccountable authority are embedded in many cultural traditions. Monarchies of Europe and empires of the Americas were supported by ideas focused on the divine right of rulers. Virtually all major religions of the world promote authoritarian and undemocratic systems of governance and social order, from the rigid patriarchy of the Roman Catholic Church to the castes of Hinduism. Several East Asian societies--China, South Korea, and Japan, to name a few--have strong Confucian influences. Confucius, a scholar of antiquity, argued that the hierarchical relationship between ruler and ruled was one of several hierarchical relationships that constitutes an orderly society. This supplemented the idea that Chinese emperors possessed the mandate to rule "all under heaven" (tian xia). To this day, Chinese leaders draw from Confucius’ writings to argue for a "harmonious society" and legitimate a culture that frowns upon dissent.
Figure \(\PageIndex{5}\): Confucius (551-479 BCE) argued that several hierarchical relationships, such as between ruler and ruled, formed the foundation for an orderly society. Some have suggested that the influence of Confucius’ undemocratic ideas supported persistent authoritarianism in East Asia. (Source:The teaching Confucius. Portrait by Wu Daoz viaWikipedia is licensed underCC01 - Universal Public Domain)
One ongoing debate is whether "persistent authoritarianism" is an inevitable consequence of certain cultural traditions. The evidence on this count is that undemocratic cultural elements are not necessarily barriers to eventual democratization. While arguments have been proffered for the incompatibility of democracy and Islam and democracy and Confucianism, there are many examples of modern democracies that have emerged out of these anti-democratic cultural traditions. Indonesia is an example of a Muslim-majority democracy, while South Korea demonstrates that a society with Confucian influences can become a robust democracy.
Beyond cultural traditions, certain powerful political ideologies support non-democratic rule. Two of these are communism and fascism. Countries organized according to these ideologies have been uniformly non-democratic. They lack mechanisms of accountability between ruler and ruled, and they lack basic freedoms for citizens. Fascist states, for instance, are characterized by extreme social hierarchies, with the ruling party controlling all aspects of society.
A narrower tool employed by non-democratic leaders to remain in power is the creation of a cult of personality. As described in Chapter 3, a cult of personality occurs when a state leverages all aspects of a leader’s real and exaggerated traits to solidify the leader’s power. Drawing on institutions like propaganda bureaus and state-controlled media, a cult of personality creates the illusion of mass support for, and even adulation of, the ruler. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was famous for creating such a cult around his personal rule, and this was taken to new heights by other 20th century rulers, such as China’s Mao Zedong and Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu. Fanning a cult of personality is a powerful way to create emotional links between citizens and ruler. A cult of personality also creates the appearance of invincibility on the part of the ruler, which can serve to stave off challenges to their rule.
