Алистер Смит - The Dictator's Handbook - Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

Economic liberalization wasn’t a simple matter for the Soviets. It entailed giving Soviet citizens many more personal and political freedoms. On the up side, this allowed the people to communicate, coordinate, and interact, which can be good for economic growth. On the downside, allowing people to communicate, coordinate, and interact facilitates mass political protest. Gorbachev was no fool and presumably he knew liberalization could get him in trouble. Unfortunately for him, he was between a rock and a hard place. Without a stronger economy his Soviet Union could not hope to compete with the United States and maintain its superpower status. And more importantly he could not pay party members the rewards they were used to. To get a stronger economy he had to put his political control at risk, both from the masses who wanted a speedier path to prosperity and from within his coalition by those who feared losing their privileges. Gorbachev rolled the dice and ultimately lost.

First Gorbachev faced a coup from within his own coalition. In 1991, harder line antireform party members, fearful of losing their special privileges (a loss openly advocated by Boris Yeltsin), deposed Gorbachev and took control of the government. But then Boris Yeltsin, standing atop a tank in Red Square, ensured that the Soviet military would not fire on protestors who wanted reform. The mass movement, with Boris Yeltsin at its head, overthrew the coup that wanted to return to the Soviet Union’s more repressive policies of the past. The mass movement returned Gorbachev ever so briefly to power, leaving him with a much diminished rump Soviet Union, and paving the way for the dissolution of the Soviet empire just a few months later.

Yeltsin, having gotten over his privileges fiasco, understood that he could not forge a winning coalition out of the inner circles of the Communist Party, but he could win over the apparatchiks by promoting greater budgetary autonomy for the Russian Republic within the Soviet structure. They could become richer and more powerful in Russia than they had been in the Soviet Union. In this way, Yeltsin picked off essential members of Gorbachev’s coalition and made himself a winner. Yeltsin was, as it turned out, much better at working out how to come to power than he was at governing well, but that is a tale for another time.

Coming to Power in Democracy

Most of the examples we have discussed so far have involved autocracies. Although generally much less violent, leader transitions in democracies operate via the same mechanisms. Just as in an autocracy, a democratic challenger needs to ensure the deposition of the incumbent, seize command of the instruments of state, and sufficiently reward a coalition of supporters so that they back her as the new democratic incumbent. Yet achieving these goals is quite different in democracies.

In some respects, it is an easier task. In a democracy it is less difficult, for instance, to detach supporters from the dominant coalition because democrats need such a large number of supporters. Leaders rely heavily on public goods to reward their backers, but precisely because so many of the rewards are public goods that benefit everyone, those in the coalition are not much better off than those outside the coalition. Furthermore, since personal rewards are relatively modest once the essential bloc is so large, loyalty is further diluted. The risk of exclusion from the next leader’s coalition remains relatively small—after all, the next leader will need a lot of backers too—further weakening the incumbency advantage.

Challengers succeed when they offer better rewards than the government. Given that there are so many who need rewarding, this means coming up with better or at least more popular public policies. Unfortunately, because it is easy to erode the support of the incumbent’s coalition, it remains difficult for the challenger to pay off her own supporters.

When democratic leaders come to power they need to seize control of government, but there is not the frenzied rush that we observe in autocracies. In the United States, for instance, leaders elected in the November election are not sworn in until the following January. This lag gives incoming presidents time to prepare, nominating their cabinet and appointing people to positions that need to be filled. Originally the delay (which lasted until March) was required because leaders needed months to travel to the Capitol from the state that elected them. Contenders to become a new dictator or monarchs never extend the courtesy of waiting for their more distant kin to travel great distances to compete with them. Democrats lack urgency when assuming power because the democratic rules that determine that the incumbent has been defeated simultaneously create a coalition of supporters.

Democratic Inheritance

Democrats, because they rely on a large coalition, cannot lavish great wealth on their supporters personally. They simply do not have enough money to go around. Instead democrats need to find effective public policies that their supporters like and reward their loyalty that way. But this is not to say there are no private goods in democratic politics. There are. And this explains why dynastic rule is common even in democracies. It may be surprising to learn, for instance, that a careful study finds that 31.2 percent of American female legislators (and 8.4 percent of men) had a close relative precede them in their political role.10 Nearly 20 percent of American presidents were close relatives of each other. That’s a lot more than chance and fair competition suggest.

Dynastic rule is commonplace in democracies for exactly the same reasons that it is popular among autocrats and monarchs. Who better to protect the wealth and prestige of the family than family members? Elected officials get to dole out money and enjoy power and money in return. They are as eager to see their progeny enjoy the same benefits—and protect their own legacy—as Emperor Augustus or Carlo Gambino. And so it is that the Tafts of Ohio have held high office generation after generation. Ohio’s governor from 1999–2007, Bob Taft, has an illustrious pedigree. His father and his grandfather were both US senators, his great grandfather was president of the United States, and his great great grandfather was attorney general and secretary of war. The Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Roosevelts, the Bush family, and many other American families also have long and distinguished political histories.

Of course, dynastic rule is more common outside of democracy. Even if you don’t have the good fortune to be born into a political dynasty, you can come to power in a democracy if you have good, or at least popular, ideas. Good ideas that help the people are rarely the path to power in a dictatorship.

Democracy Is an Arms Race for Good Ideas

Competition in democracies is cerebral, not physical. Killing foes works for dictators, but it is a pretty surefire path to political oblivion in a democracy. That’s a good thing, from a moral standpoint, of course. But from a democrat’s point of view, the corollary is that even good public policy does not buy much loyalty.

Everyone consumes policy benefits whether they support the incumbent or not. If a leader cleans up the environment or solves global warming then everyone is a winner, although of course the extent to which individuals value these things will vary. But past deeds don’t buy loyalty. When a rival appears with a cheaper way to fix the environment, or the rival finds policy fixes for other problems that people care about more, then the rival can seize power through the ballot box. Autocratic politics is a battle for private rewards. Democratic politics is a battle for good policy ideas. If you reward your cronies at the expense of the broader public, as you would in a dictatorship, then you will be out on your ear so long as you rely on a massive coalition of essential backers.