Authoritarianism is a form of government. Juan Linz, whose 1964 description of authoritarianism is influential, characterised authoritarian regimes as political systems by four qualities: (1) "limited, not responsible, political pluralism"; that is, constraints on political institutions and groups (such as legislatures, political parties and interest groups), (2) a basis for legitimacy based on emotion, especially the identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems" such as underdevelopment or insurgency; (3) neither "intensive nor extensive political mobilization" and constraints on the mass public (such as repressive tactics against opponents and a prohibition of anti-regime activity) and (4) "formally ill-defined" executive power, often shifting or vague.
Authoritarian government and states
Linz distinguished new forms of authoritarianism from personalistic dictatorships and totalitarian states, taking Francoist Spain as an example. Unlike personalistic dictatorships, new forms of authoritarianism have institutionalized representation of a variety of actors (in Spain's case, including the military, the Catholic Church, Falange, monarchists, technocrats and others); unlike totalitarian states, the regime relies on passive mass acceptance rather than popular support.
Several subtypes of authoritarian regimes have been identified by Linz and others. Linz identified the two most basic subtypes as traditional authoritarian regimes and bureaucratic-military authoritarian regimes. Traditional authoritarian regimes are those "in which the ruling authority (generally a single person)" is maintained in power "through a combination of appeals to traditional legitimacy, patron-client ties and repression, which is carried out by an apparatus bound to the ruling authority through personal loyalties"; an example is Ethiopia under Haile Selassie I. Bureacratic-military authoritarian regimes are those "governed by a coalition of military officers and technocrats who act pragmatically (rather than ideologically) within the limits of their bureaucratic mentality. Mark J. Gasiorowski suggests that it is best to distinguish "simple military authoritarian regimes" from "bureaucratic authoritarian regimes" in which "a powerful group of technocrats uses the state apparatus to try to rationalize and develop the economy" such as South Korea under Park Chung-hee.
Linz also has identified three other subtypes of authoritarian regime: corporatist or organic-statistic, racial and ethnic "democracy" and post-totalitarian.
- Corporatist authoritarian regimes "are those in which corporatism institutions are used extensively by the state to coopt and demobilize powerful interest groups"; this type has been studied most extensively in Latin America.
- Racial and ethnic "democracies" are those in which "certain racial or ethnic groups enjoy full democratic rights while others are largely or entirely denied those rights," such as in South Africa under apartheid. The far-reaching implications of denying a different group republican privileges can contribute to the typically highly negative international view of these types of governments.
- Post-totalitarian authoritarian regimes are those in which totalitarian institutions (such as the party, secret police and state-controlled mass media) remain, but where "ideological orthodoxy has declined in favor of routinization, repression has declined, the state's top leadership is less personalized and more secure, and the level of mass mobilization has declined substantially." Examples include the Soviet Eastern bloc states in the mid-1980s.
Authoritarian regimes are also sometimes subcategorized by whether they are personalistic or populist. Personalistic authoritarian regimes are characterized by arbitrary rule and authority exercised "mainly through patronage networks and coercion rather than through institutitions and formal rules." Personalistic authoritarian regimes have been seen in post-colonial Africa. By contrast, populist authoritarian regimes "are mobilizational regimes in which a strong, charismatic, manuipulative leader rules through a coalition involving key lower-class groups." One example is Argentina under Perón.
Authoritarianism is characterized by highly concentrated and centralized power maintained by political repression and the exclusion of potential challengers. It uses political parties and mass organizations to mobilize people around the goals of the regime.
Authoritarianism also tends to embrace the informal and unregulated exercise of political power, a leadership that is "self-appointed and even if elected cannot be displaced by citizens' free choice among competitors," the arbitrary deprivation of civil liberties, and little tolerance for meaningful opposition.
A range of social controls also attempt to stifle civil society, while political stability is maintained by control over and support of the armed forces, a bureaucracy staffed by the regime, and creation of allegiance through various means of socialization and indoctrination.
Authoritarian political systems may be weakened through "inadequate performance to demands of the people." Vestal writes that the tendency to respond to challenges to authoritarianism through tighter control instead of adaptation is a significant weakness, and that this overly rigid approach fails to "adapt to changes or to accommodate growing demands on the part of the populace or even groups within the system." Because the legitimacy of the state is dependent on performance, authoritarian states that fail to adapt may collapse.
Authoritarianism is marked by "indefinite political tenure" of the ruler or ruling party (often in a single-party state) or other authority. The transition from an authoritarian system to a more democratic form of government is referred to as democratization.
John Duckitt suggests a link between authoritarianism and collectivism, asserting that both stand in opposition to individualism. Duckitt writes that both authoritarianism and collectivism submerge individual rights and goals to group goals, expectations and conformities.
Authoritarianism and totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is an extreme version of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism primarily differs from totalitarianism in that social and economic institutions exist that are not under governmental control. Building on the work of Yale political scientist Juan Linz, Paul C. Sondrol of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has examined the characteristics of authoritarian and totalitarian dictators and organized them in a chart:
Sondrol argues that while both authoritarianism and totalitarianism are forms of autocracy, they differ in "key dichotomies":
(1) Unlike their bland and generally unpopular authoritarian brethren, totalitarian dictators develop a charismatic 'mystique' and a mass-based, pseudo-democratic interdependence with their followers via the conscious manipulation of a prophetic image.
(2) Concomitant role conceptions differentiate totalitarians from authoritarians. Authoritarians view themselves as individual beings largely content to control, and often maintain, the status quo. Totalitarian self-conceptions are largely teleological. The tyrant is less a person than an indispensable 'function' to guide and reshape the universe.
(3) Consequently, the utilisation of power for personal aggrandizement is more evident among authoritarians than totalitarians. Lacking the binding appeal of ideology, authoritarians support their rule by a mixture of instilling fear and granting rewards to loyal collaborators, engendering a kleptocracy.
Thus, compared to totalitarian systems, authoritarian systems may also leave a larger sphere for private life, lack a guiding ideology, tolerate some pluralism in social organization, lack the power to mobilize the whole population in pursuit of national goals, and exercise their power within relatively predictable limits.
Authoritarianism and democracy
Authoritarianism and democracy are not fundamentally opposed to one another; it is thus definitely possible for democracies to possess strong authoritarian elements, for both feature a form of submission to authority. An illiberal democracy (or procedural democracy) is distinguished from liberal democracy (or substantive democracy) in that illiberal democracies lack the more democratic features of liberal democracies, such as the rule of law, an independent judiciary, along with a further distinction that liberal democracies have rarely made war with one another. More recent research has extended the theory and finds that more democratic countries tend to have few Militarized Interstate Disputes causing less battle deaths with one another, and that democracies have much fewer civil wars.
- "Poor democracies" tend to have better education, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, access to drinking water, and better health care than "poor dictatorships". This is not due to higher levels of foreign assistance or spending a larger percentage of GDP on health and education. Instead, the available resources are more likely to be managed better.
- Studies suggest that several health indicators (life expectancy and infant and maternal mortality) have a stronger and more significant association with democracy than they have with GDP per capita, size of the public sector, or income inequality.
- A prominent economist, Amartya Sen, has theorized that no functioning country labeled as having a liberal democracy has ever suffered a large-scale famine. This includes democracies that have not been very prosperous historically, like India, which had its last great famine in 1943 and many other large-scale famines before that in the late nineteenth century, all under British rule. (However, some others ascribe the Bengal famine of 1943 to the effects of World War II. The government of India had been becoming progressively more democratic for years. Provincial government had been entirely so since the Government of India Act of 1935.)
- Refugee crises occur more often in the less democratic countries. Looking at the volume of refugee flows for the last twenty years, the first eighty-seven cases occurred in the most authoritarian countries.
- Research shows that the democratic nations have much less democide or murder by government. However, it should be noted that those were also moderately developed nations before applying liberal democratic policies.
- Research by the World Bank suggests that political institutions are extremely important in determining the prevalence of corruption: parliamentary systems, political stability and freedom of the press are all associated with lower corruption. Freedom of information legislation is important for accountability and transparency. The Indian Right to Information Act "has already engendered mass movements in the country that is bringing the lethargic, often corrupt bureaucracy to its knees and changing power equations completely."
- Of the eighty worst financial catastrophes during the last four decades, only five were in countries labeled as democracies. Similarly, those labeled as "poor democracies" are half as likely as countries labeled as "authoritarian regimes" to experience a 10 percent decline in GDP per capita over the course of a single year.
- One study has concluded that terrorism is most common in nations with intermediate political freedom. The nations with the least amount of terrorism are the most and least democratic nations.
There is no precise definition of authoritarianism, but several annual measurements are attempted, including the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index (which classifies 51 states as "authoritarian regimes") and Freedom House's annual Freedom in the World report.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of examples of states which are currently (or frequently) characterized as authoritarian:
- Azerbaijan under Ilham Aliyev
- Bahrain under the House of Khalifa
- Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko on account of Lukashenko's self-described authoritarian style of government.
- Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and Hun Sen
- People's Republic of China under the Chinese Communist Party. "Some scholars have deemed the Chinese system a 'fragmented authoritarianism' (Lieberthal), a 'negotiated state' or a 'consultative authoritarian regime.'"
- Cuba under Fidel and Raúl Castro
- Egypt under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
- Hungary under Viktor Orban
- Iran under Ali Khamenei
- Laos under the Lao People's Revolutionary Party
- North Korea under the rule of the Kim dynasty and Korean Workers' Party
- Russia under Vladimir Putin (See Putinism) - described as "really a mixture of authoritarianism and managed democracy."
- Saudi Arabia under the House of Saud
- Turkey under Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan
- Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro
- Vietnam under the Vietnamese Communist Party
Examples of states which were historically authoritarian:
- Argentina under the Argentine Revolution period of military rule (1966â€"1973) and later during the justicialista rule of Juan Perón (populist authoritarianism).
- Brazil during both the Estado Novo period under Getúlio Vargas (1937â€"1945) and under military government from a 1964 coup until a transition to democracy in the early and mid-1980s.
- Burma from a 1962 coup until a transition to democracy beginning in 2011.
- Chile under Augusto Pinochet until a transition to democracy in 1990.
- Egypt under Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak.
- Libya under Muammar Gaddafi until his deposition and death in 2011 at the end of the Libyan Civil War.
- Spain under Francisco Franco from 1936 to 1975, when the Spanish transition to democracy began after Franco's death.
- South Africa under the National Party from 1948 until the end of Apartheid in 1994.
- South Korea from the early 1970s until a transition to democracy in 1987.
- Taiwan from the 228 Incident of 1947 until a transition to democracy in the late 1980s.
- Turkey under Republican People's Party from 1923-1946
After World War II there was a strong sense of anti-authoritarianism based on anti-fascism in Europe. This was attributed to the active resistance from occupation and to fears arising from the development of superpowers. Anti-authoritarianism also became associated with countercultural and bohemian movements such as the Beat Generation in the 1950s, the hippies in the 1960s and punks in the 1970s.
According to an article titled "Gender Inequality and Gender Differences in Authoritarianism" there is a direct correlation between the rates of gender inequality and the levels of authoritarian ideas in the male and female populations. It was found that in countries with less gender equality where individualism was encouraged and men occupied the dominant societal roles, women were more likely to support traits such as obedience which would allow them to survive in an authoritarian environment, and less likely to encourage ideas such as independence and imagination. In countries with higher levels of gender equality, men held more authoritarian views. It is theorized that this occurs due to the stigma attached to individuals who question the cultural norms set by the dominant individuals and establishments in an authoritarian society as a way to prevent the psychological stress caused by the active ostracizing of the stigmatized individuals.
See also
- Managed democracy
- Fascist (insult)
Notes
Works cited
- Juan J. Linz, An Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Spain, in Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems (eds. Eric Allard & Yrjo Littunen) (Helsinki: Academic, 1964)
External links
- Not The End Of History? Democracy vs Authoritarianism Debated
- Growth of Authoritarianism in America
- Are we entering the age of the autocrat? Francis Fukuyama, Washington Post, August 24, 2008