Major Themes To Look For in This Chapter

MAJOR THEMES TO LOOK FOR IN THIS CHAPTER
■ What exactly we mean by democracy is contestable and has changed over time.
■ Full democracy is an unattainable ideal, but electoral democracies (which we
will refer to as “democracies” in the interests of simplicity) provide broader
popular access to power than authoritarian systems.
■ Both democracies and authoritarian systems are fragile and unstable. Most
states of the world have alternated between them in the last several decades.
■ Authoritarian systems comprise military governments, one-party states, monarchies, and

theocracies. Of these, military governments are especially unstable.
In part II, we looked at the state and at questions that go into the setting of state policies. Now we
have reached a point in the text at which we will begin to look inside
the state. How does “the state”—which comprises many different people—choose a
particular set of policies? What goes on within a state that determines the policies it will
pursue? The state is not a simple decision-making mechanism, and its complex organizational
structure strongly influences the processes of political choice. In the next two
parts—chapters 7–8 and 9–17—we will look at those internal structures.
In this chapter, we will examine two broad types of regime: democracies and
authoritarian systems. A regime is the general form of government of a state, including
its constitution and rules of government. A regime generally continues beyond the
terms of individual officeholders. The United States, for instance, has had a democratic
regime for better than two centuries, across many presidents and lawmakers. A state,
in turn, is in principle more enduring than a regime. For instance, a state may shift
between different regimes, as Nigeria has moved back and forth between democracies
and military governments. Thus, a state is more lasting than a regime, which in turn is
more lasting than individual officeholders.
THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF DEMOCRACY
A democracy is a regime intended to embody “government of the people.” The word

comes from two Ancient Greek words—demos, or the people, and kratos, meaning
to rule. In the ancient Greek and Roman worlds as well as during the Middle Ages in
the west, democracy was viewed negatively. Plato and Aristotle saw it as mob rule.
Plato viewed rule by the people as inferior to a government ruled by wise philosopher
kings or queens who had the knowledge to rule. He saw democracy as the cause of the
execution of his teacher Socrates. As we pointed out in chapter 2, monarchies or some
forms of absolute rule were the norm for how governments or regimes were organized
throughout most of Western history.
Even when the modern concept of the state emerged after 1648, kingdoms were the
most prevalent regime form. Sovereignty was seen as located in the king or queen. By
sovereignty we mean the place where ultimate authority or political power is located.
The concept of sovereignty was first described by French philosopher Jean Bodin
(1530–1596) and then later by John Locke, the latter whom we discussed in chapter
2. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sovereignty was seen as located in
the crown. The emergence of European liberalism and the struggles for political power
between the crown and parliament were over where ultimate power or sovereignty
resided. When John Locke argued for a social contract theory of the state that the
people created, he was making the claim that ultimate sovereignty was located in the
people. He did not call that a democracy, choosing republic as a preferred term.
Moreover, modern conceptions of democracy also arise along with changing
notions of constitutions and constitutionalism. In Ancient Greek writers, such as with
Aristotle, a constitution simply referred to the form of government or its structure. A
government’s constitution could be a democracy, aristocracy, or monarchy. Classical
notions of constitutionalism also included the political culture and values of the people.
However, modern notions of constitutionalism in the West came to mean some basic
document, whether written or unwritten, that organized the government and placed
limits on what it could do.
There is a long history of the concept of what constitutions and constitutionalism are as these
terms evolved from the Middle Ages, and especially the seventeenth century on. At first the idea
of constitutional limits were efforts to limit the power of the crown and declare that somethings
that monarchs did was unconstitutional. Then what is constitutional shifted to whatever the
parliament (in England) said it was. Finally, constitutions came to be seen as documents above
the chief legislative body in the government. This is the notion of constitutions and
constitutionalism that emerged in colonial America and eventually in constitution of 1787. In
many ways, the United States invented the modern notion of constitutions as written documents
that constitute and
define the limits of governmental power. Constitutionalism, along with liberalism and
sovereignty, arose together with democracy to help give the latter the meaning it has
today. Thus, when we refer to democracy we will refer to constitutional democracies.
As pointed out in chapter 2, the United States really was the first example of creating what we
now call a democracy. For the constitutional framers of 1787, again democracy was not the
preferred term. They described the United States as a popular government or republic, preferring
perhaps not to use the term democracy because of the stigma or connotation it still had
historically. What is important to note is that even in 1787 what the United States was might not
be considered a democracy by today’sndefinitions or meanings. The United States had slavery,
women, poor people, and people of color could not vote. People could not directly vote for
president then (and even now) because of the electoral college, and U.S. senators were not
elected but appointed by state legislators. It is also unclear how effective the Bill of Rights was
in protecting fun- damental rights such as free speech. But over time as a result of constitutional
changes, civil rights movements, and other political activity, the United States evolved as a
democracy, as did the concept. The point here is that what we mean by a democracy has changed
over time, as have our judgments regarding how we evaluate various regimes.
Part III: The Citizen and the Regime

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) was an influential American political scientist who
contributed a great deal to our understanding of democracy. Among his contributions
are three. The first is his argument about the evolution of democracy.1
The first stage of democracy was when the Ancient Greeks invented it. For them, democracy was
direct democracy where every eligible person had a direct say and vote on all important pol-
itical matters. But this type of democracy faces limitations. By that, how many people
can directly participate before the democracy gets too large? What if there were 1,000
individuals eligible to participate? How much time could each be given to debate and
discuss each issue? At some point democracy might face practical limits.2
This led Dahl to argue that a second stage of democracy was representative democracy where the
people elected individuals who made decisions for them. Representative democracy
expanded the scope and size of possible democracies. Finally, Dahl has asserted that the
current conception of democracy only encompasses political decisions, and he wonders
whether democracy should also include workplace or economic democracy.
The other major point Dahl makes is to point out that what we call a democracy is
composed of both values and institutions. By that, democracies have a cluster of values
that include voting equality, effective participation, enlightened understanding, control
of the agenda, and inclusion. Each of these values also needs institutions, such as a free
press, voting mechanisms, and other instruments to make democracy work. Making
democracies is about specific values and institutions coming together. Finally, Dahl’s third
point is that democracies require a culture of set of beliefs to make it work. Specifically,
as we discussed earlier when it came to building democracies in Iraq or in postcommu-

nist states, there needs to be among the people and leaders acceptance of certain norms if
this type of regime is sustainable. Chapter 8 will discuss political culture in more details.
It is not possible to do a detailed discussion in this book regarding what a democracy
is and how it has evolved. It is simply important to note that the term and understanding
of democracy have changed over time. Who is part of the people and who get to rule
and how has changed, as has how individual rights are protected in a democracy. By that
we mean if the people rule, how? Most conceptions now say it is by majority rule, but
do majorities have unlimited power? Where do minority rights come in and how do we
balance them with majority rule? Liberal democracy, the combination of European liber-
alism with democracy, is one form of regime, but there are challenges to this type of state.
DEMOCRACY TODAY
As an ideal, democracy may be unattainable, in that in any group all members cannot
share power equally; some will be more articulate than others, some may have special
resources that the group needs, and some will be more assertive than others.
There is a sense, or at least a hope, that in a democracy the full population of
citizens will be actively engaged in debate over alternative policies and in the work of
setting the policies. How fully engaged they are varies across democracies, and whether
they are sufficiently engaged has long been a matter of debate. Examples of this debate
include proposals for referendums, workplace democracy, and citizen caucuses, all of
which are intended to give citizens more detailed involvement in policy making than
is possible just in voting for alternative leaders. Over time the concept of universal
adult franchise or voting rights has emerged as a norm for democracy, yet questions
persist regarding who gets to vote. Is it all adults, or only citizens or permanent resi-
dents? Should those in prison be allowed to vote? Should the voting age be lowered to
allow sixteen-year-old individuals to cast ballot? Could participation and democracy

be enhanced with the internet? The degree of democracy in states is thus a continuum
Chapter 7: Democracies and Authoritarian Systems ■ 163

along the extent to which people share equally in influencing the state’s policies and
who gets to participate and how. In practice, a major break in the continuum distin-
guishes states in which all fully qualified citizens vote at regular intervals to choose the
people who will be in charge of setting the state’s policies, from among alternative can-
didates and with sufficient free information on which to base their decisions. We call
these states electoral democracies. For the rest of this chapter, for the sake of simplicity,
we will simply refer to these states as “democracies.”
At the bottom range of democracies (or perhaps the upper range of authoritarian
systems), there is a broad gray area of authoritarian democracies where we are not
sure whether there is enough democracy in the system to really merit the name. One
example is Russia, where the constitution gives the executive immense power and
President Vladimir Putin has built on this by intimidating opponents and cowing or
seizing almost all the press. Another is the Asian state of Myanmar. For twenty-one
years, starting in 1990, Myanmar was a tightly run military dictatorship. In 2011, the
military arranged a partial opening to democratic politics, establishing an elected parlia-

ment and president. However, in the new constitution they wrote, the military reserved
many powers to themselves. A quarter of the seats in the parliament are unelected and
are allotted to members of the military, and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces
has the constitutional right to take over all power in a “national emergency.” The mil-
itary and the elected government cooperate uneasily, but the military is dominant. This
democracy ended in 2020 with a military coup.
Or consider a different form of an authoritarian democracy, one in which indi-

vidual rights are not respected. Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, talks
of illiberal democracy. This is a democracy with elections, but it does not necessarily
respect the types of individual rights growing out of the European liberal tradition. If
a regime does not respect individual rights but holds elections where majorities rule, is
it a democracy? As we say in chapter 2, socialists and communists criticize capitalism
as producing class domination. Can capitalism and democracy coexist or are they in
conflict and is socialism more compatible with it? Capitalist democracy and democratic
socialism might constitute yet other forms of democracy.
The term “authoritarian democracies” indicates that these states are at the margin
between the two regimes.
Democracy, then, is a range of things rather than a single thing. But as we will
see, there is a real difference between democracies (even if they constitute a range) and
authoritarian systems. Democracy does make a difference.
Most of you are familiar with democratic government from your own experience.
However, although most of the world’s states have been democracies at one time or
another since the 1960s, only a relatively small number of the world’s states are stable
democracies. Democracy requires an implicit agreement by the conflicting groups in a
state to accept the possibility that they will lose out in the making of policy. In effect,
it requires an agreement among labor unions, corporations, farm groups, environmen-

talists, vegetarians, motorcycle enthusiasts, and all other groups to take their chances
on the outcome of a process of policy making in which the population as a whole gets
the deciding voice. Each group accepts that it must abide by the end result and hopes
that it will be able to get enough of what it wants out of the process. This is the “dem-
ocratic bargain.”
When we look at it in this way, it is easy to see why democracy might be fragile.
All that is needed to make a democracy collapse is for one or more important groups to
reject the results of the democratic bargain and to have access to enough power to over-
throw the system. Many parts of the world are beset by problems of overpopulation,
164 ■ Part III: The Citizen and the Regime

ethnic and religious conflict, poverty, and chancy positions in world trade—problems
so fierce that it becomes difficult for powerful groups to face policy defeats philosoph-
ically. The stakes are just too high, and military forces or popular movements often lie
close at hand, willing and able to overthrow the system.

And it does not even have to be that a democracy is “overthrown” in a dramatic
move by the military or a popular movement. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point
out that over the last twenty or thirty years, most of the times when democracies have
regressed into autocracy, they have done so because a properly elected official slowly
and systematically undermined the institutions of the democracy.3
If a leader cares more
about his or her political position than about the constitution of the state, then—espe-
cially in presidential systems, which we will look at in chapter 15—it is often possible
for that leader to pack the courts with sympathizers, change the system of elections,
curb the media, and in other ways eliminate the formal and informal mechanisms of
democracy that limit the president’s power. The state may continue to hold elections, but
under circumstances in which the opposition has no real chance of attaining power. In
recent decades we have seen this happen in Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines,
Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. No democracy, even a well-established
democracy, can be complacent. The very openness that is a requirement of democracy,
and its greatest strength, can also be a great weakness.
As one might suspect, under these circumstances, only a small number of the world’s
states are stable democracies. Of the 104 states that were independent as of 1960, only
29 have had an uninterrupted record of electoral democratic government over the time
since then.4
Most of these are prosperous industrialized states whose people can more
easily afford to compromise on the “democratic bargain.” However, some poor states
such as India, Jamaica, Malta, Botswana, and Costa Rica have also had steady histories
of democratic government. It is also encouraging to realize that autocracies have their
own weaknesses and are often less stable than democracies. Almost all these 104 states
were democratic at least some of the time. In fact, the most common experience of
states is to have moved back and forth between democracy and autocracy; the example
of Nigeria, pages 69–70, is a good illustration of this.
THE COMING AND GOING OF DEMOCRACY
Over the last forty years, the world has seen how fluid the movement between democ-
racy and authoritarianism can be.
Since 1973 Freedom House has annually ranked the various political regimes in
the world. It does so along two dimensions. One, it ranks regimes as free, partially
free, and not free. A regime that is free would ostensibly be a democracy. It also uses
a seven-point scale (1 is the best, 7 the worst) when it comes to measuring political
rights and civil liberties. Over time the number of states or regimes ranked as free
(democratic) has changed; from the 1970s until recently the number of democracies
has increased. Beginning in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Freedom
House has seen democracy under siege, with there being a roll back in the number of
democracies.
From the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, there was a marked surge in the
number of democracies, as you can see in figure 7.1. In 1977, 31 percent of the world’s
states were democracies. By the mid-1990s, 61 or 62 percent were democracies. Over
this period, democracies moved from being the exception to the rule.
First, southern Europe saw three shifts from right-wing dictatorships to democracy
in the late 1970s: in Greece, Portugal, and Spain. A bit later, a wave of democratization
swept Latin America, as several states reestablished democracies after periods of mil-
itary (mostly right-wing) dictatorship: Ecuador and Peru in 1978, Bolivia in 1982,
Argentina in 1983, Uruguay in 1984, Brazil in 1985, and Chile in 1989.
Finally, in 1989 and 1990, along with the wave of democratization in the for-
merly communist states of Eastern Europe (East Germany, which has since merged with
former West Germany; Poland; Czechoslovakia; Hungary; Bulgaria; Romania; and

Yugoslavia), several states scattered around the world moved to democracy: Algeria
over the period of 1989–1991, Haiti in 1990, South Korea in 1987, Nepal in 1990,
Nicaragua in 1990, Pakistan in 1988, the Philippines in 1986, and South Africa in 1994.
This was not a story of uniformly forward progress. After establishing democracy
in Algeria, the military was afraid that the fundamentalist Islam party would be vic-
torious, and it abruptly banned elections in 1992. In Haiti, the military ousted newly
elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in a 1991 coup; he was only reinstated in 1994
after strong pressure from the United States and the temporary occupation of Haiti by
U.S. troops. The military overthrew the democratically elected government in Pakistan
in 1999 and installed their commanding general in power. Democracy is tenuous in
most parts of the former Soviet Union. And the new elections in Africa include only a
few in which a government has been replaced; often, the old dictators have managed to
prevail under the new democratic rules, sometimes through ruthless violence. Although
there were many such backslidings and failures, overall there was a clear movement
toward more democracy over a period of about twenty years.
These shifts occurred in regional waves, but they were all part of a larger wave of
democratization, often called simply the Third Wave of democratization.5
Movements to
democracy have generally occurred in three worldwide waves. The first wave of democ-
ratization came in the wake of World War I, as Germany became a democracy in 1918
and new democracies emerged in Eastern Europe. At about the same time, a number of
Latin American states also established democratic regimes. Many of the democracies
established at this time, however, failed either under the economic pressures of the Great
Depression or in the violence of World War II. A second wave of democratization occurred
after World War II, as countries such as Germany and Italy reestablished democracy and
large numbers of former European colonies in the Third World achieved independence.
Again, while many of those democracies survived, many also fell to military coups.
Figure 7.1 Percent of the world’s states that are democratic, 1977–2021.
Source: Freedom House, Freedom in the World, various editions.

The Third Wave started in the late 1970s with the successful reintroduction of
democracy to Spain and Portugal, and as seen in figure 7.1, the number of democracies
grew to be about 62 percent by the mid-1990s. The growth of democracy during these
two decades was dramatic, but it is perhaps just as notable that since the mid-1990s,
there has been essentially no net growth in the number of democracies. Political scien-
tist Larry Diamond has dubbed this period, starting with a coup in Pakistan in 1999
that overturned that country’s democratic government, the “democratic recession.”6
In the wake of the democratization of the former Soviet Union, a number of commen-
tators crowed prematurely about the triumph of democracy. There was even a widely read
essay with the rather silly title, “The End of History?” by Francis Fukuyama that argued
that the question of democracy was now permanently answered and the ideological conflicts
ushered in by the nineteenth century were dead.7
However, history never stops. Democracy

has many strengths, including especially the greater dignity it confers on all citizens and its
relatively strong protection against arbitrary treatment by governments, but it is fragile.
Just as there can be waves of democratization, there can be waves of authoritarianism.
The 1930s were such a period, as Germany, Italy, Spain, and various Eastern
European states overthrew democracy. And in the 1950s and 1960s, a wave of dicta-
torship spread over South America and Africa.
Most recently, the worldwide great recession of 2007–2008 had effects much like
the worldwide depression of the 1930s, weakening democracies everywhere. Not many
regimes switched totally from democracy to authoritarianism; as you see in figure 7.1,
in 2017, democracies still made up 62 percent of the world’s states. But as ordinary
citizens saw their economic circumstances stagnate for a decade, populist movements
with little respect for the niceties of democracy found willing support from large num-
bers of citizens, and the foundations of democracy were weakened in many countries.
Populism is a political style in which a politician taps frustration among ordinary people
and their resentment of elites to get support for disrupting existing economic, social,
and political institutions. Populism can be either of the left or the right. Often popu-
lism of the right combines with anti-immigrant feeling. Especially in central Europe,
populist leaders have moved some democracies close to being authoritarian systems. In
Poland, for instance, a populist government elected in 2015 has passed legislation to
control the media, neutralize the courts, and restrict public protest. In Turkey, Recep
Erdogan, prime minister and then president since 2003, has established authoritarian
rule by purging military officers and replacing them with his supporters, and by arrest-
ing huge numbers of journalist, academics, and other sources of independent commen-
tary. He has established state control of most major media. He has packed the courts
with his supporters. Turkey today is an authoritarian democracy. Freedom House even
downranked the United States under the presidency of Donald Trump, contending that
his form of populism and questioning of electoral integrity, especially after the 2020
elections, weakened American democracy. Other factors, such as the rise in economic
inequality that we discussed in chapters 4 and 5, may have also contributed to that.
In other states that were not democracies, but where there were attempts after 2008
to establish democracy, it has proved harder to succeed in democratization than it was
in the latter decades of the twentieth century. In the “Arab Spring” of 2010, for instance,
popular movements attempted to establish democracies in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen,
and Bahrain. Though authoritarian rulers were successfully overthrown in Tunisia,
Libya, and Egypt, only in Tunisia did democracy succeed in establishing itself.
So, the current state of the world is that the number of democracies remains at
roughly the same static level we have seen since the late 1990s. But these democracies
appear to be more fragile than they were.

POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS
What brought about the push for democracy in the 1980s and 1990s? Three possible
reasons are fatigue of some authoritarian regimes, international pressures, and people’s
desire for security against arbitrary abuse.
In a few cases, authoritarian systems became “tired” and lost popular support. In
Spain and Portugal, long-term dictators died, and their regimes had already lost steam
long before their deaths. In Argentina, the military government lost a war with Britain.
Most dramatically, the exhaustion of the Soviet Union at maintaining its control of
Eastern Europe was a critical element in the wave of democratization in that region in
1989, and the corruption and senility of its Communist Party led to the victory of dem-
ocracy in the Soviet Union. The exhaustion of the old system was evident in a botched
coup attempted by the communists in the Soviet Union in 1991. The old party could
not muster enough imagination and organization to take advantage of what was a good
opportunity to reestablish its rule.
Also, in many cases at this time there was international pressure on nondemocratic
regimes to change, orchestrated by activist networks from around the world. Spain,
Portugal, and Greece came under pressure from their neighbors to become democratic,
and the carrot of membership in the European Union was offered to them implicitly
if they established democratic systems.8
South Africans were under international trade

and investment sanctions for several years to force them to give democratic rights to
their black majority, and those sanctions helped lead to democratic government in
1994. Nicaragua’s government held free elections under quasi-military pressure from
the United States, which promoted a civil war in the country to force a change in
regime.
Probably more important than either international pressures or the weakness of
the old regimes, however, were two remaining factors: a desire for human rights and
security against abuse and, especially in the communist states of Eastern Europe, eco-
nomic failure. A desire for security and dignity must have been high among the reasons
for democratization in South America, where many of the military regimes had been
brutally oppressive. In Argentina and Chile, thousands of people disappeared during
the dictatorships and are presumed to have been tortured and killed. In the Philippines,
the murder of an opposition leader sparked the move for democracy. In East Germany,
after the overthrow of the communist regime, it was learned that the secret police had
maintained files on six million people, out of a total population of sixteen million, and
had employed hundreds of thousands of informants. In the formation of most dem-

ocracies, a yearning for dignity and security has always played a large part. This was
true in the establishment of the first democracies in Europe and North America in the
nineteenth century, and it is true today.
These are some of the factors that we think led to the widespread shift to democ-
racy over the last forty years. Concentrating on the sources of democratization, as we
have done here, does carry the risk that we can move toward viewing the coming of
democracy, and the continuation of democracy, as natural and normal. They are not.
As we noted in the preceding text, for example, a new democracy may often establish
itself lacking a broad base of support that would allow it to survive. A shift to democ-
racy may even bring with it some side effects that make democracy more difficult to
sustain. Democracy’s openness often unleashes regional nationalist pressures that had
been held in check by more oppressive regimes. Unless the state is strong and lucky, it
may be pulled apart. Alternatively, the danger to the state may then prompt an anti-
democratic reaction from the military, and the state may end up back at dictatorship.
What the preceding discussion points to also is a debate in the field of compara-
tive politics over whether democracies are made from the ground up or from the top
down. By that, are democracies created or destroyed as a result of what people think or
demand, or does it happen as a result of elite bargaining and efforts by them to check
one another? There is substantial evidence for both of these claims, with the truth prob-
ably being that stable democracies need a buy-in from both the masses and the elites.
WHAT DID WE LEARN FROM THE THIRD WAVE?

The challenge of explaining the Third Wave has helped to further a fairly substantial
shift in the whole field of comparative politics. Explaining distinct and specific events
as compared with analyzing ongoing stable situations leads us to emphasize individ-

uals’ choices, and especially the choices of individual leaders and popular movements.
Stable situations are often appropriately analyzed by looking at stable, broad back-
ground factors such as the constitution, the balance of groups’ power, broad economic
structures, and the historical background of the state. However, a specific event that
occurs at a given point in time is usually not determined in a precise way by such
factors. So, to analyze such an event, we must look more specifically at the particular
actors involved—at their strategic situations and their decisions.9
We call this approach
agent-centric explanation; that is, it puts individuals’ choices (“agency”) at the fore-
front, rather than social or economic structures. The great interest attracted by the
wave(s) of democratization at the end of the twentieth century helped to shift the study
of comparative politics somewhat in this direction. In the terms we used in chapter 1, it
increased the “interpretive” aspect of comparative politics (see p. 20).
1. The Importance of “Pacts.” An early work that formed the basis for much fur-
ther analysis of the Third Wave was a broad review by O’Donnell and Schmitter
of what were then the most recent cases of democratization, primarily in Latin
America and southern Europe.10 This study did not so much develop a theory as
note and comment on similarities across cases.
One important conclusion the authors reached was that it may be important for
successful democratization that the democratizers form pacts with those whom they
are ousting to ensure a smooth transition and to lay a good base of support for the
future democracy. Such pacts might include, for instance, amnesty from prosecution
for crimes committed under the dictatorship; symbolic affirmation of the old regime, as
in the maintenance of a powerless or weak monarch; or guarantees of funding for the
army. “Pacts” figured importantly in Spain and the Latin American states.
As always in looking at democratization, however, there are few universal truths.
In the wave of democratization across Eastern Europe in 1989, which occurred after
the study by O’Donnell and his coauthors, pacts were not nearly so important. Unlike
southern Europe, this was not a case of ousting a military associated with powerful
domestic forces, which had to be dealt with gingerly. Rather, the ousted force was
primarily the Soviet army, and broad nationalist sentiment coincided with the demo-
cratic thrust. Therefore, the new democratic leaders in Eastern Europe did not need to
bargain very much with their discredited predecessors. Also, broad-based social move-
ments were much more at the forefront of these moves to democracy than had been the
case in southern Europe, and the members of these movements had little tolerance for
generous pacts with the old regime.
2. Sudden Changes. Many of the recent shifts to democracy have taken observers
by surprise. No one predicted in 1988, for instance, that by the end of 1989

many Eastern European states would be democracies, and in the fall of 2010,
no one predicted that a year later dictators would have been toppled in Tunisia,
Egypt, and Libya.
One scholar has provided a good explanation for why these shifts might be sudden
and difficult to predict.11
Under an authoritarian regime, there are few rewards and many punishments for
anyone coming out in favor of democracy. However, this is a function of how likely it is that
democracy will be established. If democratization in the end succeeds, there will be many
rewards and no punishments for those who had come out in favor of it. The key factor is
that the net rewards of coming out may tip suddenly as the probability of success shifts over
from less than even to greater than even. Figure 7.2 depicts this graphically. As the proba-
bility of success rises from zero to 0.2, 0.3, or 0.4, the net rewards for favoring democracy
do not increase much. In fact, regimes may crack down more on opponents as their situ-
ation becomes slightly less secure. Suddenly, however, a tipping point is reached at which
time the danger in favoring democracy appears to decrease. People find that when they
demonstrate in the street, there are thousands of other people there, too many for the gov-
ernment to handle. Almost overnight, favoring democracy can shift from being a dangerous
activity, restricted to the hard core, to an easy activity that may carry future rewards.12
3. Economic Crisis or Not? Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman have pointed
out that a transition to democracy occurs differently if it comes in response to an
economic crisis in the state than if it occurs under good economic conditions.13
Some examples of crisis transitions are the 1989–1991 Eastern European tran-
sitions and most of the Latin American transitions. However, a number of East
Asian transitions, such as those in Thailand and Korea, occurred in the presence
of prosperity, as did transitions in Spain, Turkey, and Chile.
When an economic crisis spurs a transition, the ruling authoritarian government
often has little credibility and cannot influence the path of the transition much at all.
Pacts are less important in such transitions, and the military are less likely to retain any
influence in the new regime. In Turkey and Thailand, with their “noncrisis” transitions,
Figure 7.2 Probable reward for coming out in favor of democracy, as
probability increases that democracy will in fact be established.

the resulting democracies had to constantly look over their shoulders to see how the
military viewed any decisions. When Turkey formed a pro-Islamic cabinet in 1997, for
instance, the military forced it to dissolve after several months because they thought it
would weaken the secular, Western-oriented doctrines that they supported.14
Politics is also likely to be more open after crisis-driven transitions, with fewer restric-
tions on broad participation by a full range of parties and interest groups. As a result, the
politics that follow are likely to be marked by greater representation of the political left,
and to be more tumultuous, than the politics that follow a noncrisis transition.
4. State Policies to Support Democracies.
Another important point we learned about democracies is that formalism is not
enough. By that, simply having a constitution that on the face looks democratic or calls
itself a democracy is not enough. Democracy requires more than formal institutions of
government to operate. Political scientists have found many perquisites or corequisites
for democracies. For example, as we discussed in chapter 3 and will discuss later in this
chapter and the rest of the book, there are social requisites for holding a state together.
The same is true for a democracy. Trust in one another and the government is critical,
as is addressing corruption. There is evidence that maintaining an open civil society
is important to democracy, as is a certain level of economic development and perhaps
equality. In some cases, state policies can facilitate all this. One might argue that the
neoliberal economic policies of the last forty years that have decreased government
regulation in the economy in some states have led to an undermining or confidence in
democracy. Globalization of world economies may have also done that in the sense that
it has arguably made it more difficult for governments to address some domestic issues,
thereby undermining confidence in them by their people. There are other factors that
too may contribute to democracy building, whose absence might also have undermined
the movement toward this type of political regime since the 1970s.
Several websites that deal with democratization and sustainable democracy are as
follows:
National Endowment for Democracy: www.ned.org
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International
IDEA): www.idea.int
United Nations Development Programme: www.undp.org; click on “Our Focus,”
and then on “Democratic governance and peacebuilding”
Network Institute for Global Democratization: www.nigd.org
Comparative Democratization Project, Stanford University: web.stanford.edu/
dept/iis/democracy/Home.html
Freedom House: https://freedomhouse.org/
Varieties of Democracy: https://www.v-dem.net/en/
Comparative Constitutions Project: https://comparativeconstitutionsproject.org/
WHY ARE PROSPEROUS COUNTRIES LIKELY TO BE DEMOCRACIES?
One of the most regular and predictable things in the comparative study of politics is
that prosperous countries are much more likely to be democracies than poor countries.
We noted noble exceptions, such as India and Costa Rica, but there are really not all
that many exceptions. The median per capita income (PPP) of democracies in 2016 was
$14,500 and of nondemocracies, $6,500.15 There is nothing natural or inevitable about
this. Poor people want dignity and security from abuse as much as rich people. Why is
it that they are less likely to enjoy democratic government?
One explanation, of course, could be that democracies are better at fostering eco-
nomic growth than nondemocracies, and so countries that are democracies become more
prosperous over time than nondemocracies. We do not think this is true, though. We will
give our reasons in more detail at the end of this chapter, but for the moment it may be
enough to note that democratic India did not grow more rapidly over the last fifty years
than Communist China, although both started at about the same level of poverty.
At any rate, if you will allow us for now to stipulate that the economies of dem-
ocracies do not grow more rapidly than the economies of nondemocracies, then there
must be something about prosperity that makes a state more likely to be a democracy.
What could be the reason for this? Rather than look at ways prosperity might cause
states to become democracies, it is probably more fruitful to realize that states become
democracies for all sorts of reasons having little to do with economic prosperity—the
collapse of Soviet military power in Eastern Europe in 1989, the breakup of colonial
empires in Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, international pressure on South
Africa in 1990, and the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003—and look
instead at whether, once a state has for whatever reasons become a democracy, pros-
perity has anything to do with the chances that it will remain a democracy.16
Figure 7.3 shows a very clear relationship, in which the probability that democracies
are overturned marches steadily lower with each increment of prosperity.17 At per capita
annual income under $1,000 (in purchasing power parity dollars), the probability that a
democracy would have been overthrown in any given year from 1951 to 1999 was more
than 0.08; the probabilities decrease steadily, until they are approximately zero at per
capita annual income more than $7,000. By contrast, the probability that an authoritarian
system would have been overthrown and replaced with democracy is pretty much unre-
lated to the prosperity of the country; these probabilities wander throughout the figure.18
It appears that this holds the key to our question: Why are prosperous countries
more likely to be democracies? States may become democracies for all sorts of reasons,
but once they have become a democracy, if they are prosperous they are much more
likely to remain one than if they are poor. The same is not true of authoritarian systems.
Figure 7.3 Probabilities of overthrow in democracies and authoritarian systems.
Source: Based on Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, "Political Regimes and Economic
Growth." Journal of Economic Perspectives 7 (3) (1993): 51–69.

Whether they are overthrown in any given year does not seem to have much to do with
whether they are prosperous or poor.
What is it about democracy that might make its survival peculiarly dependent on
prosperity? Remember that at the beginning of this chapter, we wrote about the “dem-
ocratic bargain,” an agreement by which all groups in society agree to abide by the
results of an election and await their chance at power in the future. For this to happen,
the losers must feel reasonably secure for the present while they wait to take power
at some point in the future. This must surely be easier to do in a society with ample
resources. If a drop of one-fourth in your income means that you must sell the cow,
this will probably mean more to you and your children than a one-fourth drop in
income means to an average West European, although obviously both are harsh events.
Because disaster is always closer to citizens of a poor country, it is likely that those
citizens, more than the citizens of richer countries, would try to make their system
provide predictable outcomes. Similarly, losing a job that once paid well but was lost
because the company moved, closed, or you were replaced by automation, also creates
economic insecurities that could undermine support for democracy, especially if the
government does not take any action to help. That is, when under stress, poorer coun-
tries should be more apt to shed the unpredictable future of democratic power-sharing.
However, it is not just the poorest people in those countries who will seek the certain-
ties of an authoritarian system. It will usually be a powerful group in the state, such as
the military, a large ethnic group, or a business coalition, that seeks to tie things down
rather than leave things open in the democratic bargain, often, perversely, because of
their fear of the poor. In an impoverished country, everyone is on edge.
DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM
Many people think of democracy and individual freedom as almost synonymous. Cer-
tainly, it is apparent that democracy and individual freedom must have some sort of
connection. After all, democracy and a variety of individual freedoms derived originally
from the same basic principles of liberalism.19 For purely practical reasons, democracy
requires at least minimal levels of freedom of speech and freedom of association if the
public bargaining that is the essence of democracy is to proceed at all.
However, a variety of other freedoms—such as freedom of religion, free markets
(see the next section “Democracy and Capitalism”), freedom to travel where you will,
freedom to consume alcohol—are not necessary and inevitable companions of democ-
racy, although we may find in practice that they usually go together.
A good example showing that freedom and democracy do not necessarily imply
each other is Hong Kong, which as a British colony until 1997 never had a democratic
government but had an open society with many liberal freedoms such as a free press,
freedom of religion, and freedom of speech and association. Now in the last few years
with China taking more control over the political affairs of Hong Kong, how the dimin-
ishing democracy and personal freedoms coexist is a matter of both political science
interest and of interest to the residents there. The United States furnishes examples from
its history in which, although we are a democracy, we have seen the level of freedoms
rise and fall. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the system
of legal racial segregation in many parts of the country through the first two-thirds of
the twentieth century, the McCarthy period in which freedom of expression was lim-
ited—all help to demonstrate that there is not an automatic correspondence between
democracy and freedom. Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration that freedom and
democracy do not automatically coincide is that for the first half century of its demo-
cratic history, the United States continued a brutal, institutionalized system of slavery.

Journalist and author Fareed Zakaria has presented an interesting argument along
these lines, arguing first (as we have done in the preceding text) that democracy and lib-
eral freedoms do not always or necessarily imply one another, but then drawing the fur-
ther argument that under some circumstances a less fully developed democracy may be
more conducive to freedom than an “all-out” democracy.20 He points out that several
countries in Southeast Asia have gradually developed liberal freedoms before establish-
ing electoral democracy (Singapore, for instance, which has a very clean government,
enjoys a much more open discussion of politics than in the past, but is still an essentially
undemocratic government; Taiwan, which only instituted electoral democracy in the
1990s, but had a very open society well before that; and South Korea, which similarly
instituted electoral democracy only in the 1990s). He also notes that some states that
opened up electoral democracy rapidly in a sudden transition from an authoritarian
system—Russia is one of his prime examples—only succeeded in creating a playground
for shady characters and powerful economic interests. Other examples of how dem-
ocracy and freedom evolve take us back to South Korea in chapter 5, or Hungary, as
noted earlier, which in the last few years seems to be trying to create a different model
of electoral democracy that does not include liberal freedoms.
The question of how and whether democracy and individual freedom are linked
arises especially as authoritarian systems move to democracy because in some coun-

tries authoritarian systems have gradually become more liberal and open, often with
no shift to democracy for some years. Democracy has then come—or not come—only
as a last step. Thus, it has been necessary, in analyzing the process of democratization,
to separate the two processes. It appears that democratization may work best where it
has been preceded by slow liberalization, which has provided time for opposition lead-
ership to form, for organizations of representation to be established, and for working
relationships to be established between the old regime and the forces for change. For
example, in Brazil, the military regime in 1974 began a process of abertura, or “open-
ing,” under which discussion became more open, local governments became more inde-
pendent, and political parties could form. It was not until 1985 that Brazil established
democracy.21
However, countries often do not have the luxury of a gradual prior liberalization.
If democracy comes quickly, as it did in the fall of Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern
Europe in 1989 or in the Arab Spring in 2011, democracy and liberalization (if it
comes) must come at the same time.
DEMOCRACY AND CAPITALISM
Another pairing that often seems natural to people is democracy and free-market cap-
italism. Partly this may be because the most prominent democracy in the world, the
United States, is also the most prominent capitalist, free-market economy in the world,
but to some extent the two also have a rough natural affinity. Both are based on the
aggregation of individual choices as a way to make collective decisions, and both reflect
the basic liberal value of making individuals responsible for their choices.22 Both dem-
ocracy and free-market capitalism originated in the same ideology, classical liberalism.
So, these two have much in common, and it is no surprise that most democracies of the
world have market-based economies. Some would argue that political and economic
freedom reinforce one another, and both require there to be a limited government. That
is, the supposed reasons by the two are often associated with one another.
However, there have been plenty of nondemocratic states in the past that used
market mechanisms for their economy.23 Hong Kong, again, is a good example. It oper-
ates with an open-market economy, yet has never had a fully democratic government,
either under Britain or now as part of China. Many dictatorships and military govern-
ments in Africa rule states that essentially have market economies. Nazi Germany oper-
ated with a market economy. China, even as it has been putting down the movement
for democracy since 1989, has allowed a rapid evolution of its economy away from
communist planning and toward market mechanisms. Chile under the military ruler-
ship of Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990 had limited government regulation of the
economy, but little democracy. Many countries of the world have also had significant
and expansive welfare states that regulate the economy, such as the Scandinavian states,
and these are ranked among the most democratic in the world.
Therefore, there is no automatic connection between democracy and capitalism,
and the Eastern European states could in principle have made a shift away from com-
munist economies without moving to democracy. Very likely, however, their rejection
of the past and their desire for change and integration with the West were such that it
seemed natural to become “Western” in politics as well as in economy. A radical change
in the economy would have been very difficult without a thorough change of leaders;
therefore, a basic governmental change of some sort was probably necessary, whether
or not it was a move to democracy.
AUTHORITARIAN SYSTEMS
We noted at the beginning of this chapter that both democracies and authoritarian sys-
tems are fragile: of the 104 states that have been independent since 1960, only 29 have
had an uninterrupted record of electoral democratic government during that time. Of

those same 104 states, only 13 have had an uninterrupted authoritarian system across
the same period. In the sections that follow, we will (1) look at some of the major forms
of authoritarian government and (2) explore the sources of their fragility and success.
An authoritarian system is any state in which those who hold power in the govern-
ment are not formally responsible in their exercise of power to the broad citizenry of
the state. In other words, it is a state that is not a democracy. The authoritarian alterna-
tives to democracy are by no means of one piece. Consider this sampling:
• The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1917–1991). From the Russian

Revolution (1917) until a couple of years before the breakup of the union in 1991,
power in the Soviet state was lodged clearly with the Communist Party. It was
self-sustaining, recruiting new young members who could progress through it to
build careers. Although Stalin’s rise to power in the 1930s was bloody, after Stalin
the party saw five peaceful, orderly transitions of leadership. As far as we know,
the party made decisions collectively from within, with strong leadership by the
party head and a great deal of influence from such groups as the army. Ordinary
people did not have a great deal of personal freedom, but—compared with the
bloody past—laws were at least predictable and dealings with the governmental
apparatus were usually orderly.
• Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). Myanmar became independent from
Great Britain in 1948. It has been ruled by the military since 1962. In 1990, the
military allowed elections, but when the prodemocracy party won overwhelm-
ingly they refused to yield power, and imprisoned the leader of the party, Aung
San Suu Kyi. Prodemocracy movements periodically challenged the military junta,
most notably a series of demonstrations led by Buddhist monks in 2007, which
the government suppressed brutally. In 2010, the military staged an election in
which their favored party won more than 70 percent of the seats in parliament,
but many observers judged that election invalid. The military went on after that
election, however, to open a partial democracy. They freed many political pris-
oners, legalized labor unions, and held a genuine election in 2015, which Aung
San Suu Kyi’s party won. She served as state counselor and civilian leader of the
country until a 2021 military coup placed her under house arrest again. Even
during the supposed civilian rule, the military played a dominant role. Under the
constitution they wrote, one-fourth of the seats in the legislature were reserved for
military officers appointed by the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. And
in addition to his power to appoint a fourth of the legislature, the Commander in
Chief also has the power to declare a state of emergency and take over the gov-
ernment for the duration of the emergency. When the military decided to drive the
Rohingya minority out of the country in 2017 in a massive program of arson and
rape, the civilian government was unable to control what the army was doing.
• Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has been an absolute monarchy since early in the
twentieth century, with power lodged in the Saud family. This is a large, extended
family that provides not only the king but also most of the council of ministers
and other high government officials. For decades, while the king figured impor-
tantly in the making of decisions, this was a genuinely collegial effort in which the
council of ministers (including the king) discussed issues and decided on policies.
The Saud family cemented its rule by allying itself with conservative Islamic lead-
ers of the Wahhabi sect. This alliance allowed the monarchy to pursue economic
development in a stable political setting, while the Wahhabists were free to ban
alcohol, prevent women from driving cars, and in general, maintain a very strict,
conservative social code. In November 2017, this system was shaken up by the
young crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, who ordered the arrest of scores of
high-ranking royalty and important business leaders. He took on himself the main
political offices of the government and broke the government’s cooperation with
the Wahhabists. His professed aim is to modernize Saudi Arabia.
• Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly known as Zaire). Zaire became
independent from Belgium in 1960 and immediately plunged into a civil war
fomented by Belgian mining interests. After a chaotic period of civil war, coups,
assassinations, and attempts to establish democracy, Colonel Joseph-Désiré
Mobutu seized power in 1965, with strong support from the United States.
Mobutu established a one-party state and remained in power from then until
1997, as president and, at various times, chair of the single party and head
of the armed forces. Charges of massive corruption and widespread abuses of
human rights characterized his rule, and there were a number of challenges to
his power, but Mobutu proved adept at maintaining his rule despite unrest by
giving ground at critical moments and retaking it when the opportunity arose. In
1997, however, a rebel group led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a longtime opponent
of Mobutu from the eastern region of Zaire, finally defeated Mobutu’s forces.
Mobutu fled, and Kabila renamed the country and established himself as presi-
dent. His regime was marked by the same sort of oppression as Mobutu’s reign,
but he was never able to establish full control of the country. He was assassi-
nated in 2001 and succeeded by his son, Joseph Kabila, who initiated a presum-
ably democratic constitution and was elected president in 2006. Joseph Kabila
has ruled from that time as president but is barred by the constitution from serv-
ing more than two terms. His presidency was supposed to have ended in 2016,
but he repeatedly pushed back the date of the next election; in November 2017,
he finally announced an election date, December 30, 2018. In January 2019 the
electoral commission announced that Félix Tshisekedi had won the vote and
he was sworn into office. Many claim a deal had been struck between him and

Kabila and that the election was rigged. Throughout his rule, Kabila—like his
father—has never been able to establish full control of his country. The civil
wars continued, fomented by Congo’s neighbors, and have almost broken the
country into a set of independent regions. More people have died in these wars
in Congo than in any other conflict since World War II. These problems persist
under Tshisekedi.
These examples are roughly representative of authoritarian systems. First, they are
quite varied politically. They range from conservative and religious Saudi Arabia to
the bureaucratic Soviet Union to the authoritarianism of the Democratic Republic of
the Congo. Second, many of the authoritarian systems are not organized stably. The
Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. Mobutu did not ultimately retain power in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, but his successor was as much an authoritarian as
he was, and his successor seems equally as authoritarian.
MILITARY GOVERNMENT
The most dramatic alternative to democratic government is military government, in

which a group of officers use their troops to take over the governmental apparatus and
run it themselves. This is called a coup, from the French coup d’état (strike at the state).
For instance, in 2012, dissident soldiers from the north of Mali took over the presiden-
tial palace in a coup and seized the government.
Only a handful of the world’s states are under military government. We might have
expected that military governments would be quite common. After all, the military in
any state control more armed power than anyone else. If they choose, as a group, to
oust the existing government—or even if only a part of the military choose to do so and
the rest decide to sit it out—there is no one who can stop them. Civilian governments
must depend for their safety on the military’s satisfaction, on their disunity, or on their
reluctance to take over the government. While each of these protective shields is evident
in many military groups, it must not be unusual that all three would from time to time
fail and that the military would break out in a coup. This is particularly likely in a new
state, where a tradition of civilian government has not had time to take hold. It is not
surprising that military coups occur from time to time around the world.
In a few states, coups have become so routine that they have almost been institu-
tionalized as the normal method of governmental change. In such cases, other political
forces become involved informally, much as they would under other arrangements. One
or another military faction may seek out key groups such as labor unions as potential
allies, and—even though they do not themselves bear arms—their weight is felt.24
In Bolivia, for instance, until the state became a democracy in 1985, factions of
the armed forces in the past regularly depended on other political groups when they
were attempting a coup. In 1978, the army, aided by left-wing allies in the unions and
political parties, overthrew a right-wing government. After an attempt at an election in
1979, a right-wing coup was tried, but it failed because its leaders were not able to get
the support of Congress. In 1982, yet another military group was forced out of office
by a general strike led by the unions. In a bizarre way, coups under these circumstances
become a system that draws a fairly wide range of people into the political process.
Usually, however, they are more isolated events.
Military governments vary greatly in their political role. In Myanmar, the mili-
tary ruled without interruption from the time they seized power in 1962 until 2015,
when they opened the country up to a partial democracy that they still dominate. In
Nigeria, a series of military governments ruled from 1966 to 1978 and again from
Chapter 7: Democracies and Authoritarian Systems ■ 177 www.CartoonStock.com.
1983 to 1999. During much of that time, except for the corrupt and vicious rule of
General Sani Abacha from 1993 to 1998, there was considerable civilian support for
the military regimes. In Turkey, the military took over the government three times
after World War II—in 1960, 1971, and 1980—each time when Turkey’s democratic
government was verging on chaos. The Turkish takeovers were at the time broadly
supported and were followed by a return to democracy after stability was restored.
In 2016, however, an attempted coup to oust Turkey’s president Erdogan failed, and
Erdogan went on to use the coup attempt as an excuse to establish authoritarian con-
trol of the state.
Military governments also vary widely in the one thing in which we might have
expected that they would be similar: their political direction. They are not all of the
political right or of any other direction, even though the usual stereotype is of the right-
wing officers’ coup. Some coups are clearly of the right or the left, but many are not
identifiable as either. Their political direction depends on which group of officers leads
the coup. There are many officers of the left in most countries, as well as of the right,
especially if recruitment is not limited to the upper class.
These two aspects of coups—that they sometimes become incorporated in the
broader political process and that they have no clear political complexion, of the
left or of the right—have made political scientists a bit cautious in assessing them.
In a study of Venezuelans’ views of democracy and military coups, David J. Myers
and Robert E. O’Connor found that Venezuelans considered occasional coups part
of the normal political process but distinguished sharply between coups and military
dictatorships:
Self-professed democratic Venezuelans perceive no incompatibility between endorsing
democracy and supporting an occasional coup to rectify problem situations. Approving
military intervention differs from favoring long-term military dictatorship. We find no
evidence of the latter but widespread support of the former. Many respondents seemed
to view coups as a device equivalent to a parliamentary vote of no confidence. It is
indeed a serious action but is consistent with their understanding of democratic rules.25
Military coups were more common the 1970s and 1980s, especially in Africa. However,
Poland, supposedly a socialist or communist state, was placed under military rule or
martial law in 1981 under General Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski to suppress the labor
union Solidarity that was trying to democratize the country. Some also argue that after
the democracy protests in Beijing, China, at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, that
country effectively placed the people under military rule. The disappearance of military
coups and governments may be explained in part by how strongmen in many states use
rigged elections and other mechanisms to maintain rule, using the formality of voting
as a means of legitimizing rule. When we get to chapter 11, we will discuss how author-
itarian regimes can maintain control by outlawing parties or arresting opposition. In
2020, Alexander Lukashenko was reelected president of Belarus after he had arrested
or chased away opposition leaders. In Russia, Alexei Navalny is the main opposition
candidate to Vladimir Putin and his party. Navalny has been arrested several times by
the Russian government on a variety of charges, and there are claims the Russian gov-
ernment tried to poison him while abroad. In 2021 when Navalny returned to Russia
he was arrested by Russian authorities, just several months before national elections.
WHY AREN’T THERE MORE MILITARY GOVERNMENTS?
Good or bad, though, it is still surprising that the military does not govern more coun-
tries. There are not as many coups as we might expect, and most military governments
stay in power only a few years. This may be partly because most states take pains to
Demonstrators celebrate a military coup ousting Robert Mugabe, who had ruled
Zimbabwe for thirty years.
Christopher Scott/Alamy Stock Photo.

imbue their military officers with inhibitions against political intervention. Adolf Hitler
required officers to swear oaths of personal allegiance to him, for instance; and in the
training of its officers, the U.S. government ensures in many ways that they will under-
stand their proper role to be nonpolitical.
However, more important than such inhibitions are a series of significant problems
that military governments face—problems that make officers reluctant to take and hold
power. A uniquely serious problem for them is that of legitimacy. Legitimacy is a wide-
spread belief among the people of a state that a particular form of government is appro-
priate, and that its officials are therefore entitled to rule. We can see why this might pose
special problems for a military government. A military government takes power through
no regular process but simply seizes it, so how can it claim that no other group should
similarly displace it? A democratic government is legitimized by the electoral process that
produced it; a monarchy is legitimized by the rules of succession on which it is based; a
communist government is legitimized by Lenin’s theory that the Communist Party must
lead the revolution. However, no process of selection legitimizes the military government.
Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword, they say, and a military government
must always be concerned to justify its existence. To this end, many military governments
add civilians to their governing apparatus or set future dates for a return to democracy.
Others try to rally the people through wars and appeals to nationalism.
Another problem of most military governments is that while their leaders may be
skilled politically, there is little in the profession for which they have been trained that
makes this especially likely. Military organization is usually marked by a fairly orderly
passage of commands from higher officers to lower officers, without a great deal of
argument in between. We should not exaggerate this orderliness, but many military
officers are clearly frustrated by the jabber of daily political requests and arguments
with which they must deal once they have taken over the power of the state.
Yet another problem for military governments is the problem of succession. How
does the system provide for transfer of power from one leader to another, either on the
first leader’s death or because it appears to be time for a change? Democracies accom-
plish this through regular elections. Monarchies accomplish it by the designation of a
child or other relative to be the monarch’s successor. However, in military governments

there is no clear institutional basis for arranging the transfer of power.
Finally, many military governments are fairly shaky alliances, united primarily by
their opposition to the regime they have displaced and likely to fall apart as new issues
arise that may divide their members.
As a result of these problems, purely military governments are rather fragile. Unless
they set up the institutions to transform themselves into one-party states (see the next
section), there is a good chance that they will eventually yield to the establishment of
democracy. If a military regime is internally divided or has problems generally in gov-

erning, and if enough of the key figures concerned feel that the uncertainty of the out-
come of democratic choice is preferable to the certainty of any other particular group
being in control, the stage is set to introduce democracy—or reintroduce it, as the case
may be.26 In the last two decades of the past century, for example, twenty-two states
switched at least for a time from purely military government to democracy.27
ONE-PARTY STATES
Most authoritarian systems are not straight military governments but one-party
states. The one-party state is distinguished by the fact that the government is based
on and supports a political party, and that this is the only party allowed in the state.
One-party arrangements have often had their origins in military coups. For example,

in Libya, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi seized power in a coup in 1969 and established
the Arab Socialist Union as the sole political party; its general congress, chaired
by Gaddafi, was in effect the chief governing body of the state. Other one-party
arrangements have originated in national independence movements, which were then
institutionalized as the single party. In Tanzania, for example, Julius Nyerere led
the movement for independence, and his independence movement, the Tanganyika
Africa National Union, won seventy of the seventy-one seats in the first election to
the National Assembly. Four years later, a constitution was written that established
it as the state’s sole party. A number of one-party states originated in socialist revo-
lutions, either indigenous, as in the cases of Cuba, China, and the USSR, or imposed
by the USSR, as in the cases of (pre-1989) East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and other
Eastern European states. Today, China, Russia, and Belarus are effectively one-party
states too.
What distinguishes these states from other authoritarian systems, especially from
straightforward military governments, is the existence of a reasonably large national
political party that bolsters the government and provides an institutional basis for it.
Compared with military rule, the one-party state offers a more stable and responsive
form of government. The military government is necessarily limited by the field of
vision of the officers who hold power. There is little provision for dealing with broad
factional conflict or for the intrusion of diverse opinions. The government came into
existence by irregular means; therefore, there is no regular set of arrangements to pro-

vide for the replacement of old leaders by new. These are things that the single political
party may provide.

A national party is likely to embrace at least a reasonable range of the social groups
in a state—labor leaders, industrialists, intellectuals, and military leaders. Not all these
may be equally happy with the party; however, they have little choice but to coop-
erate with it if asked. The party, on its side, needs to involve them if only to keep tabs
on potential troublemakers. As a result, the single party as an organization is usually

able to have a broad feel for opinion in the countryside. It provides institutional links
between the government and the population.
Second, the party can provide an arena in which varied political positions can
develop into factions. In this way, new conflicts may develop within an existing system
rather than arising outside it and posing a threat to it.
Finally, the single party may provide a set of arrangements by which a nation can
accomplish a transition of leadership. An example of this capacity was the fairly easy
transition from Konstantin Chernenko to Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union after
Chernenko’s death in 1985. During Chernenko’s illness, there had been some process at
work by which the Communist Party leadership decided who would take over from him.
The one-party state must be distinguished from a democracy with a dominant-party
system.28 A few democracies have party systems in which a single party has dominated
government over a long period. Italy is a good example: from 1945 to 1994, without
a break, the Christian Democratic Party received the largest vote of any party at each
election, and except for a couple of years, it dominated all coalition cabinets during
that period. (It finally fell from grace in 1993 as a result of its leaders’ involvement in
massive scandals.) What distinguished Italy from the one-party states during this period
is that other parties were able to organize and did so. It was also universally recognized
that those other parties would gain office if enough people voted for them—and this
did finally happen in 1994.
To summarize our treatment of one-party states, this is the most frequent form
of authoritarian government. It may originate in all sorts of ways—military coups,

movements for national independence, socialist revolutions, and many others.
Distinctively, the one-party state has one (and only one) political party that the govern-
ment fosters. This party adds to the government’s capacities and helps to make these
regimes more stable than straight military governments.

MONARCHIES AND THEOCRACIES
There are two other significant forms of authoritarianism in the world:
• Monarchies are systems in which the power to rule is inherited through descent
in a family. Most monarchies of the world are in the Mideast and are often rela-
tively underdeveloped states not much touched by modernity. Monarchies would
not figure importantly in our study of politics today, except that several of them
sit on huge reserves of oil. That is a good way to attract people’s attention. Some
examples of oil-rich monarchies in the Mideast are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and
Kuwait.
Do not confuse monarchies with “constitutional monarchies” like Great Britain,
Spain, or Sweden where a hereditary monarch exists as part of a democracy. Constitutional
monarchs play a purely symbolic and ceremonial role. (We will discuss these further in
chapter 14.)
• A theocracy is a state ruled by a set of religious leaders, who derive their power
from their positions in the religion. Its legitimacy comes from the shared faith of
the citizens. Iran is the most prominent theocracy today. Vatican City, a tiny sov-
ereign territory ruled by the pope, is another example, if a minor one.
There is no particular set of principles we can lay out for how a theocracy is ruled
because power in the state is simply a function of how power is acquired and exercised
within the religion. Some religions, like the Catholic Church, are strictly hierarchical,
with a single clear leader at the top. In contrast, Islam in all its forms is very loosely
organized, and power is a function of how widely respected a religious scholar is. At
any given time, there are usually many diverse leaders within an Islamic group.
Theocracies are few today, but popular movements in many Islamic states are
pushing for the establishment of theocracies in their state.
DEMOCRACY VERSUS AUTHORITARIANISM:

MATERIAL CONSIDERATIONS
It may seem odd to ask the question, which is better—democracy or an authoritarian

system? People all over the world have “voted” often for democracy through popular
movements, revolutions, and “with their feet” through emigration. The basic appeal
of democracy is surely the individual dignity it confers, at least implicitly, on each cit-
izen, and the partial protection its rule of law offers against arbitrary actions by the
government. However, there have often been arguments about other good things in
life as well, and whether they were easier to achieve under democracy or under an
authoritarian system. Some have argued, for instance, that economic growth is easier
for a poor country to achieve if it is not burdened by the debates of democracy but can
instead focus its efforts under authoritarian leadership.
In this section, drawing on the research of Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez,
José Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, we will look both at the question of how dem-
ocracies compare with authoritarian systems in economic growth, and in the overall
quality of life as measured by life expectancies.29 In both of these comparisons, democ-

racy looks good, so the more material aspects of life give the same answer as the basic
values cited previously—democracy trumps authoritarianism.

First, with regard to economic development, Przeworski and others show through
careful measures both of democracy and of economic development that the average
performance of democracies over four decades was about the same as that of authori-
tarian systems. States with both sorts of regime grew at about a 4 percent annual rate.
However, these averages conceal a major difference between authoritarian systems and
democracies. Although on the average both regime types were equal, the range of pos-
sible outcomes for authoritarian systems was wildly greater than for democracies. All
the states whose economies grew at an annual rate of 7 percent or more were author-
itarian systems—but so were almost all the states whose economies grew at a rate of
less than 1 percent annually. With democracies, given that economic policy represents
some sort of a negotiated bargain among the economic interests of society, you get
results that are all in the same, moderately positive ballpark. With authoritarian sys-
tems, because the government is free to put all of its eggs in one basket, you can get
results ranging from miracles to disasters.

With regard to general well-being, consider table 7.1, which shows the life expec-
tancy of people in authoritarian systems and democracies, for states at varying levels
of prosperity.30 The main thing determining life expectancy is how well-off the state is,
but at each level of per capita income those living in democracies can expect to live sig-
nificantly longer than those in authoritarian systems (as much as 5.6 years longer, for
the most prosperous states).
We conclude this look at the material differences between democracy and author-
itarianism with the triumphal note of Przeworski and his colleagues: “Thus, we
did not find a shred of evidence that democracy need be sacrificed on the altar of
development.”31
“POWER AND CHOICE” AGAIN
To return to the theme of our text, authoritarian systems—especially the military gov-
ernments—might appear to embody a rather pure strain of politics as power. After all,
when political control depends on who has the guns it is hard to deny that power is at
work. However, it is a common mistake to think of authoritarian systems simply as raw
examples of power at work.
Table 7.1 Life Expectancy under Authoritarianism and Democracy
Per Capita Income, $ Life Expectancy,
Democracies
Life Expectancy,
Authoritarian Systems
Difference
0–1,000 47.2 46.4 0.8
1,001–2,000 56.3 52.2 4.1
2,001–3,000 63.6 59.2 4.4
3,001–4,000 67.3 64.2 3.1
4,001–5,000 70.2 65.0 5.2
5,001–6,000 71.3 68.6 2.7
6,001+ 73.2 67.6 5.6
Source: From Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando
Limongi, Democracy and
Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990 (New York:
Cambridge University Press,
2000), 258. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
One-party governments often see themselves as pursuing communal objectives and
develop organizational mechanisms for bringing a wide spectrum of opinion to bear on
the government’s decisions. Even military governments usually portray themselves as
heeding the country’s call, and there is often broad support among the people for a mil-
itary coup. We shall deal with governments such as these more wisely if we remember
that the picture is not black or white but that politics in these states—as in democra-
cies—consists of power and choice.
EXAMPLE 7.1
Authoritarian Drift in Venezuela?
I
n reading the following example, note the possibilities for
authoritarian suppression of dissent even in a functioning
democracy.
Venezuela has been an electoral democracy since the
1950s. From the 1950s until the late 1990s, it was dominated
by two political parties, both tied to the upper middle class,
who maintained their support by a good deal of pork-barrel
spending and corruption. This system was upended in the late
1990s by Hugo Chávez, an army officer who became presi-

dent in 2006.
In 1992, Chávez had attempted to carry out a military

coup against the government, accusing them of corruption
and of disregarding the needs of the poor and of indigenous
peoples. The coup failed, but the government allowed him to
broadcast his surrender nationally. His fiery speech, in which
he said his movement had failed “for now” instantly made him a national figure. After he
was released from jail in 1994, he became active politically. He was elected president in
1998, in a campaign that attacked both major parties and their corruption and promised
a new, revolutionary program for the country. He won 56 percent of the vote, mostly from
the poor and the lower middle class.
Chávez was an engaging, sometimes crude figure. His rambling Sunday morning show
on state television, Aló Presidente, was energetic and unpredictable. His rule was marked by
new initiatives to help the poor, by the rise of new political elites aligned with him, and by
rising conflict with the middle and upper classes. He was reelected in 2000, 2006, and 2012
by healthy margins, but also had to survive a coup attempt in 2002 that almost succeeded
because of broad support for the coup from the middle class. In 2009, he won a referendum
to abolish the two-term limit for the presidency; this allowed him to run again in 2012.
His aggressive programs stimulated the growth of a new liberally oriented opposition,
based on the middle class and led by university students. Between the revitalized middle-class
opposition and declining support among the poor, his strength had diminished in recent
years. In the 2010 National Assembly elections, his party and its communist allies received
slightly less of the vote than the opposition parties did. Gerrymandered districts (with distorted
boundaries designed to help his party) allowed Chávez to retain control of the Assembly, but
his majority was by then too small to change the constitution or to vote him the power to
rule by decree, which he had often done in the past.

Chávez always had an ambivalent attitude toward democracy. Between his release from
jail in 1994 and his election as president in 1998, he and his followers debated whether it
was better to seek power by military revolution or by democratic election. In office, he con-
ducted and abided by free and fair elections. However, he tried to use a number of devices
similar to those of authoritarian leaders like Putin of Russia to secure uncontested power
within a democratic framework. In 2006, for instance, Chávez decreed that no licenses
would be allowed for television stations that promoted “fascism” and coups. Among other
results of that decree, the most popular radio/television station in Caracas was closed. In the
2012 election, Chávez’s regulatory commission ruled that his opponent was limited to three
minutes of television exposure each day, but all television channels were required to interrupt
their regular programming whenever Chávez wanted to speak.
He also harassed the opposition parties in other ways. Before regional elections in 2006,
for instance, 260 candidates (almost all from the opposition) were barred from running.
When an opposition figure was elected mayor of Caracas in 2008, Chávez supporters occu-
pied his offices and the national government took away most of the functions of mayor,
transferring them to a federal official appointed by Chávez. After an opposition figure was
elected governor of the western state of Zulia, Chávez cut the state’s budget by one-third.32
The opposition parties did well in the National Assembly elections of 2011, but Chávez
and his supporters took advantage of their control of the lame-duck Assembly (in the interval
before the new members were sworn in) to pass new rules drastically to weaken it. This
negated the opposition’s victory. The lame-duck members passed a law allowing Chávez to
rule by decree for the following eighteen months, and they passed new rules to restrict the
meetings of the Assembly to only a few days each month and ban any television channels
but those run by the government from broadcasting Assembly debates. The last of these
provisions allowed the president to gag any debates that were embarrassing to him.
Chávez largely subordinated the judiciary. For instance, when Judge María Lourdes Afiuni
ordered the release of an opposition figure who had been detained for three years without
trial, Chavez had her arrested. A Human Rights Watch report in 2008 stated that the presi-
dent had “effectively neutralized the judiciary as an independent branch of government.”33
In these and other ways, Chávez tightened his control of government, but Venezuela
was still a democracy, although barely. However, Venezuelan politics entered a new and
dangerous phase when Chávez died of cancer in 2013 and was replaced by his vice pres-
ident, Nicolás Maduro. Lacking Chávez’s popularity and charisma, Maduro has resorted to
numerous additional devices since 2013 to stifle opposition and dissent.

After opposition parties won a two-thirds majority in the Assembly election in 2015,
Maduro used the old lame-duck parliament to pack the supreme court with supporters. The
court then issued decrees stripping the Assembly of virtually all its powers. In 2017, Maduro,
in an unconstitutional move, created a “constituent assembly” to replace the Assembly; it
was stacked to give Maduro a large majority. This was an unpopular move (a poll showed
that two-thirds rejected the new constituent assembly, and only 23 percent approved of
Maduro), but nonetheless, Maduro succeeded in this overthrow of the Assembly.34 In the
May 2018 presidential election, Maduro banned the three main opposition parties from par-
ticipating. Some other opposition leaders were imprisoned or exiled. Some candidates chose
to boycott the election claiming it would be rigged. By this point (mid-2018), the once-vi-
brant opposition parties were deeply discouraged and in disarray. Maduro did eventually win
the election with the lowest turnout in decades. Many observers determined the election was
far from free and fair.
Aside from the grievous loss of democratic government, the Chávez–Maduro era has
been an economic disaster for Venezuela. By 2018, inflation was running at 3,000 percent
per year, and unemployment stood at 30 percent. The country has defaulted on its debts
and has virtually exhausted its financial reserves. While some claim that Maduro has reacted
the way he did to preserve a socialist revolution against imperial forces and outside interven-
tion such as from the United States, others assert that Venezuela is simply a case study in a
strong executive undermining the institutions of democracy and in the process destroying the
economy as political confidence has fallen.
At www.freedomhouse.org you can find annual evaluations of the state of democ-

racy and individual freedoms in Venezuela and all other states of the world, published by
Freedom House.
EXAMPLE 7.2
Theocracy in Iran
I
ran has a government that is a blend of democracy and theoc-

racy, but with the theocratic aspect clearly dominant. The pre-
sent system emerged in 1979 from a revolution to overthrow
the unpopular emperor of Iran, Shah Mohammed Reza.
Iran’s system is one in which there is a democratically
elected parliament, the Majles, and an elected president. The
elections are freely contested, but are managed indirectly by
the clerics, who can bar any candidates they choose from run-
ning. Despite their managed character, the elections are lively events, and have in the past
sometimes put into power reformers who wanted to gradually ease the Islamic character of
Iranian life. The current president, Hassan Rouhani, is a moderate. The Majles, whose mem-
bers were elected in 2016, is dominated by conservatives because the Council of Guardians
(representing the clergy) barred almost all reformist candidates from running.
Existing alongside the democratic structure, but much more powerful than the demo-
cratic structure, is a somewhat loosely organized theocratic governing body. The heart of this
is the Supreme Leader, a figure who emerges by informal, consensual selection from among
the learned elders of the faith in Iran. Once selected, the Supreme Leader rules for life. The
first Supreme Leader was Ayatollah Khomeini, who had led the revolution against the Shah.
At his death in 1989 he was succeeded by Ayatollah Ali Khameini, who rules today.35
The Supreme Leader has immense powers, and there are no checks on how he
exercises them:
• He is commander in chief of the armed forces.
• He sets overall policy for Iran and can annul acts of the president and Majles.
• He controls immensely rich foundations, which hold all the wealth seized from the
monarchy when it was overthrown.
• He appoints the Friday prayer leaders of the mosques and controls the Shi’i seminaries.
• He appoints the heads of the radio and television networks.
The Supreme Leader is aided in his control of the democratic side of things by the Council
of Guardians, who examine the compatibility of all laws on legislation with Islamic law and
the Islamic Constitution of Iran. They can annul any law. They also review the credentials
of all candidates for the Majles and the presidency and can eliminate any candidates they
choose. Half the members of the Council of Guardians are appointed by the Supreme
Leader; the other half are judges whom the Majles choose from a list prepared by the judi-
cial branch of government.

In short, the Supreme Leader is indeed supreme. This does not mean, in practice, that
he rules arbitrarily or by whim. He is chosen in the first place because he represents in his
views something of a consensus of the clerical establishment, and Shi’i Islam is a very open,
free-wheeling structure with much room for dissent. The Supreme Leader rules from within
an establishment in which individuals continually raise many viewpoints, and in a country
where public opinion is a force with which to be reckoned. If nothing else, the Islamic state
always has to deal with the possibilities of passive resistance by the public, and it has to be
careful not to get totally out of step.
For instance, state censors prevent almost all Western films and music from entering
the country—yet a large black market exists in which, at least in the cities, Iranians can get
almost any sort of entertainment they want. This is tacitly tolerated by the theocratic state.
Like all authoritarian systems, we see that the Iranian theocracy is neither absolute nor
unchallenged. The peculiar mix of democracy and theocracy in Iran, however, is probably
unstable in the long run. If the Supreme Leader receives guidance from God, what does it
matter whether 51 percent of the voters agree with him? Alternatively, if the people of Iran
are to rule, what place is there for a Supreme Leader? Iran has suffered from a decades-
long crisis of legitimacy. In the end, a basic question is, “What use [is] a Supreme Leader in
a democracy, and what use [are] elections in a theocracy?”36
EXAMPLE 7.3
The “Arab Spring”: A Failed Wave of Democratization
As of late 2010, the only countries in North Africa and the
Middle East that were arguably democracies were Israel,
Lebanon, and (to the extent that it has democratic aspects)
Iran. The rest were a mix of autocratic monarchies, military
governments, and one-party states. Despite rich oil resources
in some of the countries, there was widespread poverty and
unemployment. Especially among younger citizens there was
a great deal of frustration with what were largely seen—both
domestically and abroad—as corrupt and backward regimes.
A spark flew into this tinder on December 17, 2010, when a young fruit seller in
Tunisia was stopped by the police for selling without a license. He was a poor man, the sole
support for his widowed mother and six siblings, and he tried to refuse when the police
ordered him to forfeit his cart to them. In the altercation a policewoman slapped him. To
protest the humiliation of being slapped, he set himself on fire in front of a government
building. His martyrdom was captured on cell phone video and circulated widely, setting
off large protests in the country. After a month of large street demonstrations calling for
the ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had been dictator of the country for twenty-four
years, Ben Ali fled the country and took exile in Saudi Arabia.
The rapid success of Tunisians in ridding themselves of their autocratic government
inspired uprisings across the region that became known as the “Arab Spring.” Eventually, the
wave of demonstrations spread through the spring of 2011 to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain,
and Syria, with somewhat lesser but still significant waves of unrest in Algeria, Lebanon,
Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Iraq, and Sudan. The rapid spread of demonstrations, and the dem-
onstrators’ ability to mobilize people rapidly on very little notice, were a direct result of their
use of new social media and electronic communications.

Let us look briefly at each of the six main countries to see what happened.
Tunisia: In Tunisia, the uprising successfully established democratic government. In
the first parliamentary election in 2011, the Islamist party won 37 percent of the vote, with
the rest of the vote scattered among eighteen other parties and independents. Lacking a
majority of seats in the parliament, the Islamists formed a coalition based on compromises
among various groups. Eventually, this government was able to work out a new, demo-
cratic constitution that was passed almost unanimously in 2014. Like the coalition that
wrote it, it embodied compromises; for instance, it established Islam as the state religion,
but protected freedom of belief for all religions. In that same year, 2014, Tunisia solidified
its democracy by holding its second parliamentary election. When a new party received
more votes than the Islamists in that election, control of the government passed peacefully
to them—the hallmark of democracy.
Egypt: On the eve of the Arab Spring, Egypt was a one-party state that Hosni
Mubarak had ruled as president for twenty-nine years. The main opposition party, the
Muslim Brotherhood, had been banned from significant political activity, along with other
opposition parties, though they were allowed token representation in the parliament.
The Tunisian example sparked large-scale demonstrations in late January, culminating in
a march estimated by the press at two million people on January 31. The protests were
peaceful, but by early February, attacks by Mubarak supporters—some riding camels with
whips through the crowded demonstrations—heightened tensions. The military remained
neutral, neither taking the side of the government nor of the demonstrators. Mubarak
played for time by making a series of concessions, but he ran out of time in early February,
when the Supreme Council of Egyptian Armed Forces announced that he was stepping
down and that they would rule.
The military ruled Egypt for the next sixteen months, during which they wrote a constitu-
tion, oversaw parliamentary elections, and set up a presidential election. The demonstrators,
who were only loosely organized, found themselves ill-equipped to compete in the election
with more traditional and well-organized groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. They were
never able to form an effective party.
Muhammad Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was elected president. It had
been thought that the military would hold Morsi in close check, and indeed they had written
into the constitution a number of devices by which they could wield power and, in their
eyes, protect the new democracy. However, Morsi ousted most of the leaders of the Supreme
Council of the Armed Forces six weeks after the election and established full control of the
government. He then issued a new constitution that allowed him almost unlimited powers.
His seizure of power led to widespread protests over several months, and in 2013, General
Abdel Fatah al-Sisi led a military coup d’état that unseated Morsi. Al-Sisi became president in
2014 and has led a largely military government that rules Egypt more autocratically than the
one-party state of Mubarak. Effectively, Egypt’s “Arab Spring” is dead.
Libya: Muammar Gaddafi had ruled Libya for more than forty years, having first
taken power in a military coup and then cemented his power by establishing a one-party
state. In February 2011, antigovernment demonstrations began and soon spread across
the country. The demonstrators were strongest in Benghazi, in the eastern part of the
country, and eventually set up an alternative government there. Gaddafi sent troops to
put down the insurrection, but as his army approached Benghazi, a coalition of states led
by the United States, France, and Britain intervened with a massive bombing campaign to
cripple the army’s offensive. A civil war ensued between Gaddafi’s forces and the oppo-
sition, which eventually led to Gaddafi’s death and a tenuous victory by the opposition.
However, there had been little organized political activity under Gaddafi, and after
his defeat no group was able to establish enough control to lead the state. The period
since 2012 has been marked by a fragmented civil war in which a variety of armed groups
vie for territory and influence.

Yemen: Ali Abdullah Saleh had ruled Yemen since 1978, overseeing a patronage system
with vast corruption, based on the support of several important local tribes. When the unrest
of 2011 spread to Yemen, Saleh—ever the wily politician—bobbed and weaved for much of
the year, pretending to accept power-sharing arrangements that he never followed up on,
fleeing to Saudi Arabia and then unexpectedly returning—but he was eventually forced out
in 2012. His vice president Mansur al-Hadi won the election to replace him (with 99.8 percent
of the vote, not a sign of vibrant democracy), but he was overthrown in 2015 by rebels from
the Houthi sect, based in the north of Yemen. Since 2015, the country has been caught in a
very bloody civil war, in which Saudi Arabia has intervened on behalf of the Hadi government,
and Iran has sent support to the Houthi rebels.
Bahrain: Bahrain is a small state on the Persian Gulf. It has been a monarchy since its
inception; the majority of its citizens are of the Shi’a sect of Islam, but the state has always
been governed by members of the minority Sunni sect. Peaceful protests in early 2011 began
with demands for human rights and for more representation of Shi’as, but after a number
of demonstrators were killed, the demonstrators’ demands grew to include abolishing the
monarchy. Marches continued, growing to be as large as 100,000—out of a population of
1.4 million! In March, the king requested military help from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates, and the uprising was brutally suppressed.
Syria: Syria has been governed since 1971 as a one-party state, first by Hafez al-Assad
(until his death in 2000) and then by his son Bashar al-Assad. From March through July 2011,
protests spread throughout the country, calling for the ouster of al-Assad. The government
responded harshly, killing a number of protestors. At the end of July, the government launched
a major tank offensive against cities where large protests had occurred, but by the end of
the year, the opposition had developed its own Free Syrian Army. Since then, the country has
been caught in a terrible civil war on several fronts, with Kurds fighting for independence
from Syria, the Syrian army fighting for al-Assad, a dwindling democratic opposition fielding
its own army, and intervention from other countries, including Iran, Russia, and the United
States. The war has been terrible, with hundreds of thousands dead, and approximately half
the population displaced as refugees either within Syria or in neighboring countries.37
The events of these uprisings have been heartbreaking. Initially, they raised great
hope that peoples who had been oppressed for decades would now be able to control
their destinies. But in all but one country, these hopes were dashed—and often the final
outcome has been worse than the autocracy that preceded the Arab Spring. What can
we learn from these events?
One thing that is clear is that a preexisting civil society can make a great difference in
democratization, and indeed may be essential. Of the six states we have looked at, Tunisia
had the strongest civil society, composed of labor unions and other groups. The state most
like it was Egypt, but civil society there was not as strong as in Tunisia. In the first election in
each country, the well-organized Islamists won a straight majority in Egypt and felt embold-
ened to seize power. But in Tunisia, the Islamists won only 37 percent of the vote—other
groups there were organized enough to mount significant campaigns—and they were forced
to seek a coalition through compromise.38 Beyond Egypt and Tunisia, civil society was very
weak in the other countries, and democracy really never had a chance.
Another thing we can see in these cases is that modern social media make it possible
for political messages to spread like lightning. This is a threat to autocrats, which is a good
thing—Mubarak’s Egyptian government tried to ban cell phone usage during the demon-
strations in Egypt, for example. But it may be that electronic communication is too effective,
making it possible to mobilize people who have not been otherwise prepared to engage in
politics. Electronic communication made it possible for demonstrators in the Arab Spring to
get the message out to overthrow the system, but it did not provide the basis for building a
new system to replace it.
EXAMPLE 7.4
The European Colors Revolutions
The USSR contains many republics, at least so to speak. The state that made up the Soviet
Union supposedly contained many independent socialist republics, joined together coop-
eratively under the leadership of the communist party. The reality was that these various
republics, such as Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine were part of an authoritarian
state, and they lacked any meaningful independence. Their governments were appointed by
the communist party leadership in Moscow, and they took their ultimate orders for them. In
fact, their geographic boundaries and in some cases their identity was artificially constructed
by the USSR, even if there were historical ethnic groups and traditions that helped define the
people of these areas.
When the USSR broke up in 1991 the republics that made up the Soviet Union became
independent states. In some there were efforts to build democracies and shed central plan-
ning or communism and replace these with market economies. Some states were more
successful than others. The Baltic states, composed of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, made
good progress to transform themselves in market economies and form democracies, inte-
grating themselves in the West. All of them became members of NATO and the European
Union. Yet many of the other former republics struggled with their transitions. Some kept
in place the old Soviet leadership, some made little or no change in their economics, or
made little progress toward democracy.
However, across many of these post-Soviet states, political uprisings occurred that are
referred to as the Color Revolutions. By color revolutions the reference is that a specific
color tied to that country for historical reasons seemed to inspire or galvanize political
movements that dislodged the old leadership and replaced it with new leaders. These rev-
olutions include as the most famous Georgia (“Rose,” 2003), Ukraine (“Orange,” 2004),
and Kyrgyzstan (“Tulip,” 2005), and Armenia (“Purple” 2018). In all these cases, existing
leadership, often carryovers from the Soviet era, were ousted. The people lost trust in
their governments because of corruption, inefficiencies, or simply a demand for democ-

racy they assumed was to occur when the USSR collapsed, and their countries achieved
independence.
In all these states their respective Color Revolutions ousted existing leadership and
replaced them with new presidents or prime ministers. However, as happened with the
Arab Spring states, the new leadership did not mean a straight path to democracy and
an end to corruption and cronyism or favoritism. To this day, these four countries have
leaders who turned into strongman. It is not clear how powerful the national legisla-
tures are. By all measures, such as with Transparency International and Freedom House,
corruption and lack of democracy remain problems. Finally, the four countries have
failed to see their economies take off and dramatically improve the life and welfare of
people.
Battles over political reform continue in these four countries. Some argue that a Color
Revolution began in Belarus in 2020 when people hit the streets to protest what they per-
ceived as a flawed or corrupt election that kept Alexander Lukashenko in power. The fate
of that Revolution is still in doubt. But the larger question for political scientists is why these
Color Revolutions started, why they stalled or failed, and what can we learn from them.
Finally, why did the Baltic states make the transition to democracy but these other states
did not.

Major Themes To Look For in This Chapter

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MAJOR THEMES TO LOOK FOR IN THIS CHAPTER

■ Authoritarian systems comprise military governments, one-party states, monarchies, and

THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF DEMOCRACY

A democracy is a regime intended to embody “government of the people.” The word

Part III: The Citizen and the Regime

as we discussed earlier when it came to building democracies in Iraq or in postcommu-

allow sixteen-year-old individuals to cast ballot? Could participation and democracy

Chapter 7: Democracies and Authoritarian Systems ■ 163

military arranged a partial opening to democratic politics, establishing an elected parlia-

democracy ended in 2020 with a military coup.

Or consider a different form of an authoritarian democracy, one in which indi-

it requires an agreement among labor unions, corporations, farm groups, environmen-

164 ■ Part III: The Citizen and the Regime

close at hand, willing and able to overthrow the system.

If a leader cares more

THE COMING AND GOING OF DEMOCRACY

Chapter 7: Democracies and Authoritarian Systems ■ 165

former West Germany; Poland; Czechoslovakia; Hungary; Bulgaria; Romania; and

166 ■ Part III: The Citizen and the Regime

that overturned that country’s democratic government, the “democratic recession.”6

However, history never stops. Democracy

Chapter 7: Democracies and Authoritarian Systems ■ 167

South Africans were under international trade

had employed hundreds of thousands of informants. In the formation of most dem-

168 ■ Part III: The Citizen and the Regime

WHAT DID WE LEARN FROM THE THIRD WAVE?

as compared with analyzing ongoing stable situations leads us to emphasize individ-

We call this approach

Chapter 7: Democracies and Authoritarian Systems ■ 169

170 ■ Part III: The Citizen and the Regime

Chapter 7: Democracies and Authoritarian Systems ■ 171

172 ■ Part III: The Citizen and the Regime

Chapter 7: Democracies and Authoritarian Systems ■ 173

arises especially as authoritarian systems move to democracy because in some coun-

DEMOCRACY AND CAPITALISM

had an uninterrupted record of electoral democratic government during that time. Of

• The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1917–1991). From the Russian

Chapter 7: Democracies and Authoritarian Systems ■ 175

176 ■ Part III: The Citizen and the Regime

The most dramatic alternative to democratic government is military government, in

Chapter 7: Democracies and Authoritarian Systems ■ 177 www.CartoonStock.com.

178 ■ Part III: The Citizen and the Regime

Zimbabwe for thirty years.

Christopher Scott/Alamy Stock Photo.

Chapter 7: Democracies and Authoritarian Systems ■ 179

child or other relative to be the monarch’s successor. However, in military governments

democracy. If a military regime is internally divided or has problems generally in gov-

180 ■ Part III: The Citizen and the Regime

existence by irregular means; therefore, there is no regular set of arrangements to pro-

party may provide.

on potential troublemakers. As a result, the single party as an organization is usually

Chapter 7: Democracies and Authoritarian Systems ■ 181

regimes more stable than straight military governments.

DEMOCRACY VERSUS AUTHORITARIANISM:

It may seem odd to ask the question, which is better—democracy or an authoritarian

182 ■ Part III: The Citizen and the Regime

quality of life as measured by life expectancies.29 In both of these comparisons, democ-

values cited previously—democracy trumps authoritarianism.

results ranging from miracles to disasters.