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Reflection
Formal Models of Authoritarian Regimes:
A Critique
Adam Przeworski
The very idea that authoritarian regimes (“autocracies”) may enjoy popular support is hard to fathom for democrats. Models of
authoritarian regimes often entail tacit ideological assumptions, and many are driven by methodological fashions. They ignore the
efforts of rulers to provide what people value. The psychology they assume is inadequate to predict actions. They are often too
abstract to generate testable predictions. “Support”for any regime is difficult to assess.
We now have a canonical view of authoritarian
regimes. A dictator (autocrat), individual or col-
lective, maximizes the probability of survival in
office or the expected rents, using instruments that include
co-optation, repression, censorship, propaganda, and the
like. These instruments differ in their effectiveness and
costs. In the (Stackelberg) equilibrium, the dictator
chooses their optimal mix subject to some constraints.
Comparative statics depend on the exogenously given cost
and effectiveness parameters (for the best summary of this
view, see Guriev and Treisman 2015).
This view is based on assumptions that are laden with
ideological biases and are often driven by methodological
fashions. The ideology is flagrant even at a purely seman-
tic level. Game-theoretic articles on “persuasion”
(Galperti 2018; Kamenica and Gentzkow 2011)usethis
concept in purely neutral terms. Yet, when such models
are applied to authoritarian regimes, “persuasion”
becomes “manipulation”(Edmond 2013; Gelbach and
Simpser 2015; Rozenas 2016) in the same way as
“information”becomes “propaganda”(Little 2017),
without any difference in the structure of the models.
But the ideological roots are much deeper. The very idea
that autocracies may enjoy popular support is hard to
fathom for democrats. Unless they are “brainwashed”or
“indoctrinated,”how can people conceivably support an
autocrat?
Autocracies are assumed to be inherently brittle, sur-
viving only because people are misled or repressed. This
focus on regime survival diverts our attention away from
their routine functioning. Certainly, all actions by gov-
ernment officials have some effects of regime stability. But
this does not mean that all their actions are motivated by
the drive to survive in power. Autocracies do collect
garbage, regulate traffic, issue dog licenses, and fill street
holes: they govern. In turn, the individuals who populate
these models are assumed to have postures toward the
regimes at every moment of their lives. But ordinary
people are not politically hyperactive in any regime. People
in autocracies do not incessantly live under the shadow of
dramatic historical events; they lead everyday routine lives.
As Pepinsky (2017) incisively observed, “Life in authori-
tarian states is mostly boring and tolerable.”
The target of my critique is neither formal modeling
nor the “rational choice”approach in general but only
some of their typical assumptions and the resulting
conclusions. I realize that not all formal models suffer
from deficiencies I identity and, conversely, that many
studies not using this approach share these deficiencies.
Ideological biases pervade our everyday language: we
refer to very rich people in the United States as
“billionaires”but to their autocratic equivalents as
“oligarchs”; we speak of “police brutality”in democracies
Adam Przeworski is the Carroll and Milton Professor
Emeritus at New York University. Previously he taught at the
University of Chicago and held visiting appointments in
India, Chile, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. A
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
National Academy of Science, and the British Academy, he is
the recipient of the 1985 Socialist Review Book Award, the
1998 Gregory M. Luebbert Article Award, the 2001 Woo-
drow Wilson Prize, the 2010 Lawrence Longley Award, the
2010 Johan Skytte Prize, the 2018 Sakip Sabanci Award,
and the 2018 Juan Linz Prize. He recently published Why
Bother with Elections? (2018) and Crises of Democracy
(Cambridge University Press, 2019).
doi:10.1017/S1537592722002067
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association. This is an Open
Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which
permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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but of “police repression”in autocracies. Most of my
comments are directed at models of incomplete informa-
tion, whether about the state of the world, the compe-
tence of the rulers, or the preferences of others. My
central complaints are that these models ignore the efforts
of rulers to provide the material or symbolic goods that
people value (in technical language, they model only the
subgame in which the state of the world is given exoge-
nously); that the psychology they assume (“beliefs,”their
relation to actions, the set of possible postures toward the
regime) is inadequate to predict actions; and that they are
often too abstract to generate testable predictions. In
turn, I find models that predict regime change directly
from the preferences of some actor, such as “the repre-
sentative agent”or “the elite”(Acemoglu and Robinson
2006), to be too limited in their micro-foundations to
elucidate the dynamics of these rare events. I do believe
that these faults are redeemable, even if I do not know
how to remedy them, so that my critique is not aimed at
the formal modeling approach as such.
My dissatisfaction with these models has personal roots:
they just do not “feel right”for someone who actually lived
under such regimes. Moreover, it is fed by ethnographic
studies, such as Wedeen’s(1999) work on Syria on which I
rely extensively, as well as personal accounts and novels,
which are often more telling than models. I know that
what does not feel right for some may be persuasive for
others, but the list of questions that this view leaves open is
long and some of the puzzles are deep.
Ifind particularly doubtful our assessments of polit-
ical support for authoritarian rulers and regimes.
1
Mus-
solini claimed in retrospect that “strictly speaking, I was
not even a dictator, because my power to command
coincided perfectly with the will to obey of the Italian
people”(quoted in Cassese 2011). Clearly, one can easily
reject his claim as an ex-post excuse for repression. But is
it true that the Italian people did not want to follow
Mussolini? Is the popularity of Messrs. Putin or Xi due
only to their use of nasty, nondemocratic, instruments?
(see Frye et al. 2015 on Russia; Chu 2011 on China). Are
postures toward autocratic regimes consistent with
beliefs? What does it mean to “believe”?Arepeople
duplicitous when they collaborate with authoritarian
regimes? Can we tell what is rational to do under
different choice sets? And in the end, what does it mean
to “support”any regime?
As these questions make clear, some of them cannot be
answered by using game-theoretic apparatus, and perhaps
some cannot be answered at all. But I hope to persuade
others that if we are to understand how authoritarian
regimes function, we need to drop both our ideological
and methodological blinders. In what follows, I first briefly
lay out the ideological assumptions shared by most models
of authoritarian regimes and then delve into issues that I
find puzzling.
Assumptions
Rule of a Minority?
I blithely wrote some years ago that “dictators are dictators
because they cannot win elections, because their prefer-
ences diverge from those of the majority of the population”
(Gandhi and Przeworski 2006, 2). I am now eating these
words because there certainly must have been at least some
periods in the histories of some autocracies when they
enjoyed widespread popular support.
As Schumpeter (2010 [1942], 221) observed,
“Instances abound—perhaps they are the majority of
historical cases—of autocracies, both dei gratio and dicta-
torial, of the various monarchies of non-autocratic type, of
aristocratic and pluralistic oligarchies, which normally
commanded the unquestioned, often fervent, allegiance
of an overwhelming majority of all classes of their people.”
The authority of the rulers in such regimes did not
originate from their capacity to persuade but from their
preassigned place.
2
During the twentieth century, such
autocracies were replaced by revolutionary regimes pro-
claiming to be a civilizational alternative to democracy:
communism, fascism, “socialism with Chinese
characteristics.”At least during some period, these regimes
probably enjoyed popular support. Yet even such autoc-
racies are almost extinct by now. Modern autocrats claim
that they rule not only on behalf but also on bequest of
“the people.”What is new is that, to validate this claim,
modern autocrats hold elections, elections that they win.
We know from empirical research (Cox 2008; Geddes
2009; Przeworski 2015) that political leaders who hold
elections of any kind, even those without opposition, have
a longer expected tenure in office than those who do not.
But reading popular support from results of controlled
elections is tricky.
3
When communists produced 99%
turnout in single-list elections, they were just showing
offtheir grip over the societies they ruled: such elections
informed everyone about their coercive capacity but not
about their support. But when elections admit some
opposition, how to separate the weights of coercion,
manipulation, and authentic support is not obvious
(Little 2012; Luo and Rozenas 2018). In the end, just
assuming that autocrats cannot enjoy popular support is
pure ideology, but interpreting the results of elections is
difficult.
Everyone Hates Repression?
Is it possible that masses of people would support violent
repression? They did during the Stalinist purges of the
1930s (Goldman 2007), during the Cultural Revolution
in China (Walder and Lu 2017), and during the anti-
semitic campaign in Poland in 1968.
The standard view is that repression is used by autocrats
to deter opposition, and probably most of the time it is
2Perspectives on Politics
Reflection |Critique of Authoritarian Regime Models
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used for this purpose. In turn, repression used against
certain groups, rather than against individuals who are
suspected to hold anti-regime postures, may well be
supported by other groups. What is repression against
some groups may be co-optation for others.
4
Rozenas
(2020, 2) observes, “A group that is supportive of the
regime becomes an even stronger supporter when another
group is repressed, because it infers that the repressed
group will be deterred as it does not expect the supportive
group to reciprocate in opposing the regime.”Yet the use
of group-targeted repression may just cater to crass prej-
udices: antisemitic in Nazi Germany or Communist
Poland, anti-Muslim in contemporary Myanmar, anti--
Indian in El Salvador. Strictly distributive considerations
may also play a role: restricting the access of Jews to some
professions was welcomed by non-Jewish majorities in
Nazi Germany because it created opportunities for them.
The waves of repression in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s
China were unleashed to protect the leaders from the ire
of the masses by scapegoating the “bureaucrats,”and it
appears that their repression was supported by many
workers and peasants.
5
Bases of Support
An opening sentence of a recent paper summarizes in a
nutshell, “How do autocrats govern? Roughly speaking,
the literature has identified two broad sets of strategies that
autocrats use to hang onto power and pursue policy goals:
they can manipulate information, through censor ship and
propaganda, and they can repress”(Gehlbach et al. 2021).
Authoritarian rulers build their support by using repres-
sion and manipulating information. Does it make any
difference whether they deliver material and symbolic
goods that most people value? Is it irrelevant that average
Chinese incomes increased sixfold since 1978? That
Russians value the restoration of order provided by Putin?
6
That both Chinese and Russians find pride in nationalist
adventures?
7
Some distinctions are necessary here. There is a large
class of models that focus on structural factors, typically
comparing autocracies with democracies. These models
highlight the importance of accountability mechanisms,
power sharing within the elites, particular institutional
arrangements, and the difficulty of autocrats to commit
(Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Benhabib and Przeworski
2010; Besley and Kudamatsu 2007; Che, Chung, and
Qiao 2013). In turn, models that focus on information
analyze only subgames in which the distribution of the
states of the world is taken as given. If the state of the world
happens to be good, the autocrat does nothing. If it
happens to be bad, the autocrat censors information,
explains away the bad news that filter through the censor-
ship by propaganda, and, if both censorship and propa-
ganda fail, activates repression. So, autocrats do nothing to
make states of the world more likely to be good: they do
not promote growth, pay attention to income inequality,
build armies, invest in the performance of sport teams in
international competitions—nothing that people may care
about.
8
Guriev and Treisman (2019) document the evolution
of autocracies from relying on brute force to relying on
manipulating information. But I find it striking that they
never consider actual performance—only information
about performance. Yet performance informs by itself:
the poor peasants of Chongqing who now live in nicely
kept city apartments with incomes that have doubled every
five years do not need to be informed that they are better
off. Smart autocrats may use performance to convey
information (on Hitler’s autobahns see Voigtlaender and
Voth 2019), but they do so because performance speaks
for itself. Bayesian models of persuasion are intellectually
attractive, but it stretches imagination to think that sup-
port for the Chinese Communist Party is due to its
manipulation of information.
9
The preoccupation with repression, censorship, and
propaganda as props that maintain the regimes implicitly
assumes that performance—the delivery of whatever peo-
ple want—is insufficient for an autocrat to survive. Sup-
pose it is not. The empirical question is whether the
application of such instruments can be ever sufficient if
things are truly bad. I suspect that information manipu-
lation is at most a fig leaf when things go badly and a
sweetener when they go well. At least, I know of no
evidence that information manipulation has saved auto-
crats who would have otherwise fallen.
How Autocracies Fall?
Various counts of breakdowns of authoritarian regimes
show that only about one-eighth occur as a consequences
of mass protests “from below”(Svolik 2012). Yet, most of
the literature models mass protests (Edmond 2013; Ginkel
and Smith 1999; Lohmann 1994; Shadmehr and Bern-
hardt 2011), and one can only suspect that it is because we
have several types of models that apply to such events.
The dichotomous distinction between “from below”
and “from above”(of divisions within the elite resulting in
coups) may be too sharp. In many breakdowns of author-
itarian regimes, information about divisions within the
elite incited popular mobilization, while popular mobili-
zation generated divisions within the elite (Przeworski
1991). When the authoritarian elite is confronted with
mass protests, it divides about the strategy of coping with
them: “hardliners”want to repress, and “reformers”want
to compromise because the support of a moderate oppo-
sition would increase their power within the authoritarian
ruling bloc. When the opposition learns about the divi-
sions within the elite, it senses that it has allies among the
“reformers,”so it mobilizes. Static equilibria of such
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situations have been studied by Casper and Tyson (2014),
but to the best of my knowledge, their dynamics have not
been analyzed.
Authoritarian regimes do fall, but such events are rare in
comparison to instances in which one autocrat replaces
another. Sometimes such replacements result from coups
within the ruling elite, as when General Viola removed
General Videla; sometimes one autocratic regime is
replaced by another, as when the mullahs succeeded the
shah. Autocrats who maximize their expected tenure in
power defend their regime because they cannot survive
regime change: to the best of my knowledge, there was
never an autocrat who democratized and remained in
office after having won a competitive election. But the
converse is not true: regimes stay while autocrats go. The
question, then, is under what conditions will people living
in an autocracy consider that they would be better off
under democracy than under an alternative autocrat. Most
of the time, democracy is not in the realm of possibilities,
so all people can do is to attach their hopes to replacing one
autocrat with another. Perhaps it is only when all the
autocrats fail that regime change appears on the political
horizon.
Puzzles
Is Propaganda about Facts or Interpretations?
All rulers—those selected in clean elections, those who
hold this ceremony without putting their power at stake,
and those who do not even bother to hold them—claim
reasons that they should be followed, and people are
willing to follow them if they believe these are good
reasons. The leader (an elected president, el Caudillo, il
Duce, ein Fuhrer), the Party, or the State defines who
belongs to the collectivity and identifies the interests this
collectivity has in common. The Leader offers to the
people, in the words of Antonio Salazar, delivered in a
speech in 1934, “a well-constituted order, rational as an
expression of the nation organized, just in subordinating
particular interests to the general, strong because of having
as its basis the authority that cannot be rejected and should
not be rejected”(emphasis added; quoted in de Oliveira
Marques 1998, 432). Coercion is rationalized as “the
subordination of particular interests to the general”:
according to an eminent fascist leader, Alfredo Rocco,
fascism was inspired by the idea of “liberty conditioned on
the protection of general interests”(liberta condizionata
dalla tutela degli interessi generali; quoted in Cassese 2011).
This is obviously “propaganda,”but it is ideologically
sobering to keep in mind that “propaganda simply means
the presentation of facts and arguments with a view to
influencing people’s actions or opinions in a definite
direction. In itself, therefore, “propaganda does not carry
any derogatory meaning and in particular it does not imply
the distortion of facts”(Schumpeter 2010 [1942], 4).
10
After all, the very ideological foundation of representative
institutions is the myth that people rule when they are
ruled by others (Morgan 1988,13–14). Propaganda is an
instrument of rule in every regime. Its function is not only
to prop up a regime against potential threats but also to
propagate shared beliefs, mobilize people toward shared
goals, and coordinate actions, as in “United We Stand.”
Is propaganda about facts or interpretations? Is it Bayes-
ian persuasion or model persuasion? It must be the latter:
Otherwise, what would be the difference between propa-
ganda and censorship? As Rozenas and Stukal (2019, 982)
observe with regard to Putin’s Russia, “Bad news is not
censored, but it is systematically blamed on external
factors.”Propaganda must be a comprehensive framework
that ties together the past, the present, and the future. It
must be incessantly reiterated, providing a causal interpre-
tation of all punctual events, making it costly for individ-
uals to evaluate all its claims (on “exhaustion propaganda,”
see Horz 2017). Here is something I do recognize as
propaganda:
All frames promote party ideology to construct a political big
picture that links individual frames and bestows an overarching
meaning upon them. The country’s social and economic devel-
opment and respective policies in times of transition are thereby
embedded in a long-term perspective, encompassing both a
historic dimension and a future vision. The reference to the
party’s historic mission to lead China into a promising socialist
future and the emphasis on the CCP’s commitment to social and
economic development that benefits the people accentuate the
elites’efforts to serve the common interest. (Bondes and Heep
2013, 324)
Why Does Censorship Work?
The autocratic justification for censorship is that it screens
harmful or false information. For example, the Portuguese
Constitution of 1933 specified (in Article 3), “The cen-
sorship will have the aim to impede the perversion of
public opinion as a social force and should be exercised to
defend it from all the factors that disorient it from truth,
justice, morality, good administration and common
good.”A July 1946 decree of the Polish Communist
government instituted censorship “to avoid misleading
public opinion by information that does not correspond
to reality”(quoted in Tokarz 2012). The welfare effects of
censorship might not be always negative: think of news-
paper titles that report that someone, one of millions, had
negative side effects from vaccination against COVID.
Yet, governments that can censor some information can
use this power to censor all information that is inconve-
nient to them, whether it is false or true.
Censorship is an observable signal that the monopolistic
communicators fear that people would coordinate on rival
beliefs or that rulers are hiding something or seek to
mislead the public. The immediate question is why cen-
sorship would ever be effective. Snyder and Ballentine
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(1996,14–15), for example, thought that people in
communist regimes discounted government messages
because they were censored. Yet censorship is widely used,
and it seems to work often (Enikopolov and Petrova
2015).
Models of censorship assume that nature generates a
stream of states of the world that may be favorable or not to
the regime, and the autocrat then adopts a strategy of
communicating these states to the public. One reason why
censorship works may be that, even if people have dis-
counted censored messages, they do not know what has
been censored. Shadmehr and Bernhardt (2015) argue
that when citizens do not receive information about some
state of the world, they do not know whether there was
nothing to report or that information bad for the regime
was censored.
11
Censorship works because people do not
think about information they do not see.
12
In the extreme,
there is one kind of information that is never disclosed,
because it is most dangerous to the regime: information
about divisions within the elite.
Authoritarianism is a system in which there is only one
authority that can communicate in public. Yet even if
preferences have been manipulated by propaganda and
censorship, the claim that people would have held differ-
ent preferences had they been exposed to a plurality of
reasons is counterfactual, and counterfactuals are unverifi-
able by construction. Hence, although the presence of
propaganda and censorship can make us skeptical about
the “authenticity”of people’s beliefs, it does not offer a test
of whether people’s preferences induced by such beliefs are
caused by these mechanisms.
13
Public and Private Beliefs
Here is a Polish joke about a meeting of a local cell of the
Communist Party:
Comrade Secretary delivers a speech on “The Dangers of Amer-
ican Imperialism.”Then all the comrades in the room express
their opinions. All, but Comrade Kowalski. It is late Friday night,
and everyone wants to go home, yet Comrade Kowalski remains
silent. Finally, Comrade Secretary turns to Comrade Kowalski,
“Comrade Kowalski, I delivered my speech, all the comrades
expressed their opinions, and you, you say nothing. Don’t you
have an opinion?”To which Comrade Kowalski sheepishly
replies, “Oh, Comrade Secretary, the opinion I do have it. But
I do not know if I agree with it.”
Wedeen (1999) tells a similar story about Officer M.
Comrade Kowalski did not believe that American
imperialism is dangerous, but he had the opinion that it
is. What was his “belief”? He did not update, despite
having received a public signal from the Comrade Secre-
tary, and instead stuck with his prior. But he signaled
publicly that he is willing to act as if he did update.
Comrade Secretary was not trying to change beliefs
about American imperialism. He was just demonstrating
to all the comrades in the room that their beliefs do not
matter. His prudential advice was, “Do not act on your
beliefs. Believe whatever you want, but this is how you
should act.”Game theorists would reply that there is
nothing mysterious in people acting in ways not consistent
with their beliefs if they fear sanctions. Yet does it mean
that I still believe, or does the impossibility of acting on my
true beliefs affects them, and I come to believe what I am
told to believe? Or do I believe both at the same time?
Preventive repression—repression intended to prevent
anti-regime individuals from acting or even from commu-
nicating their sentiments in anonymous interactions—is
insidious. Fear becomes a habit, and when we act out of
habit, we do not rationalize every act. Some actions are not
to be undertaken, some thoughts are not to be commu-
nicated: this becomes instinctive. Compliance may entail
fear, but this fear is so deeply internalized that it does not
appear as a motor of actions and not even as a restriction of
freedom.
The question is, Which beliefs do people reveal when
they answer survey questions saying that they support the
Chinese Communist Party or President Putin? This is a
question to which neither external observers nor the
rulers have an answer. As Sen observed already in 1973
(258; emphasis added), “People may be induced by social
codes of behaviour to act as if they have different prefer-
ences from what they really have.”Wedeen (1999, 82; see
also Wintrobe 1998)observes,“Requiring citizens to act
‘as if’leaves the regime in the predicament of having to
evaluate popular sentiment through the prism of
enforced public dissimulation.”Theregimedoesnot
know how contingent is the manifest support that it
receives.
The question can be posed in a different language.
When political science was dominated by social psychol-
ogy, we spoke in the language of “attitudes,”defined as
“behavioral predispositions.”What was the attitude of
Comrade Kowalski? As Kuran (1995) observed, “prefer-
ence falsification”implies that actions cannot be predicted
from professed beliefs.
Cognitive Status of "Beliefs"
What does it mean to “believe”? Many years ago, a friend
and I were being hosted by the dean of the Economics
Department of the University of Havana. My friend asked
the dean what she teaches, to which her answer was “The
Capital.”“And do you believe that what Marx says in The
Capital is true?”my friend continued. The dean’s shock
was betrayed by an uncomprehending blank gaze. Shrug-
ging her shoulders, she replied, “It is in the program, so I
teach it.”It is expected of me to do it, so I do it: no “beliefs”
are entailed. Is it true that actions must be supported by
“beliefs”?
Did the Cuban dean act of fear or only conformity? In
Wedeen’s(1999, 81) view,
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Although the power involved in compelling such performances
may seem to be of a lesser order than the power to alter beliefs,
people are nevertheless required to enact a prescribed, politically
congenial self for public presentation. Symbolic practices of
power interfere with people’s political “subjectivities,”with their
sense of themselves as political persons. Moreover, people can
learn to be comfortable with their involvement, to identify with it
as though it were something natural and inevitable and, ulti-
mately, so they may—with no external urging—come to treat
any non-involvement as an abnormality, as arrogance, as an
attack on themselves, as a form of dropping out of society.
In the cafeteria of the Central Committee of the Polish
Communist Party, over lunch, everyone used the ritual-
ized official language: “the working class,”“class conflict,”
“Comrade Secretary”(Szlachcic 1990). In their world
there were no “workers”but only “the working class.”If
asked, they could not even define what “the working class”
is, but they actually did see the world in such terms. Were
they pretending, conforming, or what?
Complicity or Duplicity?
We all know this story: “Driven by hunger, a fox tried to
reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was
unable to, although he leapt with all his strength. As he
went away, the fox remarked, ‘Oh, you aren’t even ripe yet!
I don’t need any sour grapes.’”
How do I justify my complicity to myself?
14
My choices
are to act against the regime, undermining its stability; to
do nothing; or to actively collaborate, contributing to its
stability. The decision to support must be psychologically
tormenting for someone who does not like the regime.
Perhaps this is why Wedeen thinks that supporters must
hide their motives from themselves: why they are com-
plicit but not duplicitous. Wedeen (1999, 77) writes,
“Complicity is doubly degrading when people deny to
themselves that they are behaving in complicit ways.
Ideology is insidious because it allows people to hide their
reasons for obedience from themselves.”Active support for
the regime is an act not of deliberate deception but of some
kind of rationalization of their motives. This may well be
true, but the psychological mechanism remains opaque.
“Rationalization”is a mechanism that generates logical
consistency between beliefs and actions but causality may
still run from actions to beliefs (Satz and Ferejohn
1994).
15
The empirical status of Freudian psychodynam-
ics is doubtful these days, but some defense mechanisms—
denial, displacement, repression, sublimation, or what not
—are required if I am to successfully hide my true motives
from myself.
Active collaboration is often rationalized by the belief
that working from within to improve the regime is the only
effective course of action, even when it involves heinous
acts.
16
When all resistance is fu tile, one can at least try to
steer the regime toward one’s values rather than remaining
passive. Moreover, the material rewards for collaboration
are often high. As a French TV series, A French Village,
admirably depicts, both collaboration and resistance can
be driven not only by ideological commitments and
opportunistic motivations but also by purely emotional,
sometimes even sexual, impulses. In situations of conflict,
what are reasons for some are rationalizations for others,
and they are hard to distinguish. Both the motives and the
postures of people who populate these regimes are com-
plex: there are some active opponents, most people do not
think every day about politics, some collaborate actively
for opportunistic reasons, and some act for authentically
ideological motives. Distinguishing these postures matters
because they imply different propensities to respond to
signals and ultimately different “attitudes”: predispositions
for different types of actions.
17
Can the psychology of postures toward regimes be
captured by expected utilities? The expected utility is the
same when the reward from the successful outcome is very
high (someone truly hates the regime and believes revolu-
tion would bring paradise) while the probability of success
is miniscule and when the reward is low while the prob-
ability is high. Yet, if you agree with Sen (1988) that
people value having a choice, these utilities cannot be the
same. In Sen’s classic example, I may starve because I am
poor or because I decided to fast: the outcome is the same,
but the utility of this outcome is different. In his words
(1988, 292; emphasis in the original), “Doing x and
choosing to do x are, in general, not equivalent.”But even
without relying on Sen, consider an ardent regime oppo-
nent who realizes that no one can do anything to bring the
regime down. Living in a status quo that one finds odious,
and seeing no possibility that it could be changed, one feels
impotent, despondent, and perhaps angry.
18
It is just
psychologically implausible that someone who feels
intensely but cannot do anything would value this state
of the world equally as someone who cares less and sees a
good chance that it would happen.
Are Some Beliefs Invalid as a Criterion of
Representation?
The fundamental assumption of liberal conceptions of
representation is that the preferences to be represented
are exogenous with regard to the relation of representation.
The “will”of the people is a primitive, given before anyone
does anything. Pitkin’s(1967, 140) claim that “the repre-
sented must be somehow logically prior”leads her to reject
the possibility that someone can be represented if the wills
are affected in the process of representing. Her red line is
“manipulation”: representation “is perfectly compatible
with leadership and with action to meet new or emergency
situations. It is incompatible, on the other hand, with
manipulation or coercion of the public”(233).
Pitkin’s assumption is patently unrealistic. Represen-
tation is never a unidirectional relation in which people
6Perspectives on Politics
Reflection |Critique of Authoritarian Regime Models
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592722002067 Published online by Cambridge University Press
want something and the representatives do or do not
implement it. It is a dynamic relation, a tatonnement, by
which individuals adjust their preferences based on
beliefs induced by the representatives, and the represen-
tatives make decisions that anticipate the reactions of the
represented to their messages. As Schumpeter (2010
[1942], 215) put it, “The will of the people is the product
and not the motive power of the political process.”
Moreover, all regimes use coercion to prevent actions
harmful to the collectivity. Even Bentham (1988 [1776])
argued that the legislators should be promoting “social
actions”at the cost of “self-regarding”ones. But this is
nothing other than using coercion in defense of common
interests, so it cannot serve to disqualify a relation as
representative.
Endogeneity of preferences, even if shaped by manip-
ulation, is not sufficient to disqualify a relation as repre-
sentative. But this need not imply that all endogenous
preferences are equally valid as the criterion of represen-
tation. Here is Bay (1958, 322): “If support for the regime
is manufactured by way of a monopoly control over the
media of mass communication, supplemented by severe
coercion against oppositional elements …, one must
conclude that no amount of public support to the regime
can prove that the people’s genuine interests are not being
exploited in the interest of the ruling few.”Yet note that
although Pitkin makes a normative claim, Bay makes an
epistemic one: claims that a regime enjoys support are
unverifiable when the streets are quiet. When people
cannot object, the absence of protests is uninformative:
we cannot tell whether they do not protest because they
believe that the government is acting in their best interest
or because they fear repression. The usefulness of the
concept of representation is limited: when Paris is burning,
we see that people do not accept the government as
representative, but when Beijing is quiet, we cannot tell
whether that holds true.
Is "Support" Information-Contingent or Alternatives-
Contingent?
In models going back to Schelling (1973) and extending
through global games, the calculus made by each individ-
ual monotonically depends on the proportion of other
individuals opposed to the regime. Such models make
prima facie sense, but they rely on the assumption that the
size of the opposition is informative about the probability
that the regime will fall. The question is whether “support”
for the regime is contingent on information or on per-
ceived alternatives, whether people support it because they
believe that the regime is good or because they believe
there are no alternatives. In Communist Poland most
people opposed the regime, but no one believed that
communism could fall because the Soviet Army would
not allow it. Only when it became clear that the Soviets
could not or would not intervene did numbers begin to
matter.
As Sen (1993) pointed out, not choosing the same
element from different choice sets is not logically incon-
sistent. What one chooses depends on the options one
faces: “An imperative assumption underlying the defini-
tion of consistency is that the choice context must be the
same when determining whether two or more acts of
choice are contradictory”(Mahmoud 2017, 5).
19
People
may not like the available options (Sen 1997, 745; think of
Sophie’s Choice), but one can choose only from the avail-
able options. Only when the survival of a regime becomes
uncertain does the option to act against the regime become
conceivable.
Moreover, how can people evaluate states of the world
that they never experienced (Sen 1993)? People in dem-
ocratic countries are told that autocracy is bad because it is
repressive; autocrats tell their people that democracy is bad
because it is disorderly; and most people under both types
of regimes believe what they are told. Would Mr. Smith
from Iowa support the CCP if he lived in Guandong;
would Ms. Zhou from Guandong be an ardent democrat if
she lived in Iowa? I know no way to answer such questions.
The question whether democrats bring about democracy
or democracy generates democrats has been studied, but
the evidence is scarce and hard to interpret (Maravall
1995, chap. 5). All we know is that we should be distrust-
ful of preferences endogenous to regimes, which unfortu-
nately holds for democracy as well.
In the End
Although this essay may seem highly critical, it is not
intended to question recent advances in our understanding
of authoritarian regimes, which are incisively summarized
by Gehlbach, Sonin, and Svolik (2016). This is just a
friendly nudge to delve behind ideological and methodo-
logical assumptions that in my view limit our grasp of
complex, sometimes bewildering realities of these regimes.
My doubts concern whether the models elucidate the
puzzle of popular support for autocratic regimes. I fear
that, driven by methodological fashions, several models
focus on autocratic practices that have a minimal effect on
the functioning and the survival of these regimes. I doubt
that the conceptual apparatus of game-theoretic models
that entail “beliefs”can cope with the psychological pro-
cesses that make people remain passive, actively collabo-
rate, or actively oppose autocratic regimes.
20
I had a
lifelong friend who, after consuming a half-liter of vodka,
still exclaimed, “The Party is always right.”I could never
understand him, and I have not seen a model that would
help me do so.
Which of these doubts apply to democracies as well?
What is “opinion”in “public opinion”? Is propaganda
more prevalent under autocracy than under democracy? Is
centralized political repression more dissuasive than fear of
7
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592722002067 Published online by Cambridge University Press
decentralized social opprobrium? Are actions based on
beliefs or driven by a desire to seek safety in a confirming
group membership? Are the preferences that people hold
more stable when they are exposed to conflicting messages,
as J. S. Mill (1989 [1859]) believed? We do not know the
answers to these questions.
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this article suffered from comments by
Tiberiu Dragu, James Fearon, Stephen Holmes, Carlo
Horz, Zhaotian Luo, Bernard Manin, Arturas Rozenas,
Igna-cio Sanchez-Cuenca, Mehdi Shadmehr, and Milan
Svolik.
Notes
1 See also Przeworski (2019) from which the following
passage in taken.
2 Whether authority results from places occupied in
some hierarchy, such as the father in a family, or from
being able to persuade has been a subject of contro-
versy between Arendt (1954), who held the first
position, and Friedrich (1958) who advocated the
second.
3 On this topic, I have learned from Arturas Rozenas.
4 I owe this formulation to Carlo Horz (personal com-
munication).
5 The irrationality of this support is wonderfully cap-
tured by Victor Serge’s(2004 [1949]) The Case of
Comrade Tulayev: the vice-director conspires to have
the director sent to Siberia, so as to become director,
whose vice- director conspires, and so it goes.
6 Using a series of public opinion data, Matovski (2018)
argues that Russians care above everything else about
stability and order, which are provided by strong-
armed leadership, and they are averse to any alter
natives that may be destabilizing.
7 Greene and Robertson (2020, 3) report that the surge
of emotional engagement in Russia after the annexa-
tion of Crimea “did much more than boost the
fortunes of the regime: it transformed the way
Russians saw their lives, their futures and even their
past, creating a wave of positivity.”
8 The only model I found that considers both policy
improvements and information manipulation is by
Chen and Xu (2015), who argue that they are sub-
stitutes.
9 For a blood-curdling allegory of the Chinese regime
see the story “Gubaiku Spirit”in Chen (2020).
10 Mercier and Sperber (2011) argue that the main
function of reasoning is not to pursue truth but to find
arguments that persuade others: “reasoning has
evolved and persisted mainly because it makes human
communication more effective and advantageous.”
Propaganda is then just a political extension of this
inherent human predisposition.
11 In the Shadmehr and Bernhardt (2015) equilibrium,
the ruler never completely censors all bad news but
ends up censoring more than it would have had he or
she been able to commit to a scheme of information
disclosure.
12 I owe this formulation to Andrew Little (personal
communication). For the experimental evidence for
this assertion, see Enke (2020).
13 See Chen and Yang (2019) for an experimental study
designed to get at this question.
14 Czeslaw Milosz’s, The Captive Mind (1953), is admi-
rable is sketching the variety of personal trajectories
that led Polish writers to embrace communism.
15 In Ernest Jones’s classical definition, rationalization is
“the inventing of a reason for an attitude or action the
motive of which is not recognized.”According to
Festinger (1957), people invent such reasons to rec-
oncile logical inconsistencies among beliefs or between
beliefs and actions.
16 Sofer’s(2020)Man of My Time is an exceptionally
painful account of such collaboration.
17 Ginkel and Smith (1999) distinguish between two
types of protesters.
18 For the despair at the futility of resistance, see Haff-
ner’s(2003) 1939 memoir, which was horribly mis-
titled in English as Defying Hitler; it was called Memoir
of a German in the German original.
19 At stake here is the axiom of the independence of
irrelevant alternatives.
20 On the general difficulty of distinguishing beliefs
driven by “directional motives”from those based on
different priors, see Little (2022). On the importance
of emotions, see Greene and Robertson (2020).
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