tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-356586222024-03-06T10:06:37.927+13:00Abandoned FootnotesStray thoughts, notes, and digressive ditties.Xavier Marquezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10099356104979121153noreply@blogger.comBlogger16913tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35658622.post-87315503167613353112023-04-13T00:46:00.001+12:002023-04-13T00:46:53.243+12:00Using Large Language Models to generate democracy scores: An experiment<p> In case anyone is still reading this, I have a <a href="https://xmarquez.github.io/GPTDemocracyIndex/GPTDemocracyIndex.html">big data-rich post</a> on my Github site on using ChatGPT aka GPT-3.5-Turbo and Claude (the Anthropic AI bot) to generate democracy scores. It may be of interest if you read this blog!</p>Xavier Marquezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10099356104979121153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35658622.post-88419642197865757152020-07-18T15:54:00.000+12:002020-07-18T15:54:49.590+12:00Unscrupulous Flattery(A footnote on Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel, “<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0951629820927790">Cults of Personality, Preference Falsification, and the Dictator’s Dilemma</a>”, <em>Journal of Theoretical Politics</em> 32(3) 409-434 [2020])<br />
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Charles Crabtree, Holger Kern, and David Siegel just published <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0951629820927790">an article</a> in the <em>Journal of Theoretical Politics</em> that models cults of personality as <em>screening devices</em>. Their argument is similar to arguments I’ve made <a href="https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2011/05/nauseating-displays-of-loyalty-towards.html">in this</a> <a href="https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2011/03/simple-model-of-cults-of-personality.html">blog</a> and <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2301392">in</a> <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21567689.2018.1510392">academic</a> <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3650704">papers</a>, though much more formal, and with a different twist. So I can’t pass on the opportunity to comment.<br />
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I can’t say I understood all the details of their game-theoretic model, but the basic intuition is simple. The key idea in a screening model of a “cult” (for our purposes here, extravagant flattery of a political leader) is that extreme flattery has a cost for the flatterer, and willingness to pay that cost provides information about the kind of person you are, or the kind of loyalty you can give – information that the leader can then use as part of their “personnel management [strategy], helping [him] sort subordinates into their most useful regime roles” (416).<br />
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On their model, this cost is primarily psychic. Drawing on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification">Timur Kuran’s ideas about preference falsification</a>, they note that repeating barefaced lies or exaggerated praise (things like Hafez al-Assad is Syria’s “<a href="https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=Z9toCgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA40&dq=premier%20pharmacist&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q=premier%20pharmacist&f=false">premier pharmacist</a>”, or Stalin is “<a href="https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=LXo-0FUpZccC&lpg=PA271&dq=the%20coryphaeus%20of%20science%20stalin&pg=PA271#v=onepage&q=the%20coryphaeus%20of%20science%20stalin&f=false">the coryphaeus of science</a>”, or “<a href="https://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/the-facts-on-crowd-size/">this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration … both in person and around the globe.</a>”) has a cost for anybody with a shred of integrity. But those who are genuinely smitten with the leader, or those who are particularly unscrupulous and opportunistic will find this cost less onerous: the first because the barefaced lies are close to what they actually believe (or are at least consistent with their beliefs), and the latter because they have no problem with lying if they can get something out of it.<br />
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In <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2301392">my first paper on this topic</a>, I thought this led to a problem, since a cult could not induce a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separating_equilibrium">separating equilibrium</a> distinguishing the truly loyal from the merely opportunistic in the eyes of the leader. If there are sufficient rewards for participation or strong enough punishments for non-participation, both the opportunistic and the loyal will participate in the cult equally, leading to <a href="https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2011/12/flattery-inflation.html">flattery inflation</a> as particular forms of flattery get devalued when the opportunistic or scared imitate the loyal. In these circumstances the cult could at best serve to deter collective action from the disloyal, not to clearly separate opportunists from loyalists.<br />
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But Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel note that a dictator does not always want to exclude the opportunistic and unscrupulous, since they actually <em>need</em> such people in their governing apparatus. In particular, the repressive agencies of a dictatorship require people who have no qualms about torturing, killing, or expropriating others, <em>enforcers</em> who don’t trouble themselves much with their conscience to achieve the dictator’s goals; and people who are willing to repeat barefaced lies are likely to be good at doing other morally dubious activities. As the (likely apocryphal) quote from Napoleon they use as their epigraph puts it, “the man who will say anything will do anything”.<br />
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To be sure, the unscrupulous may also be dangerous to the dictator – they are more likely to be corrupt, or more willing to betray the ruler if the occasion arises. Unscrupulousness need not imply loyalty. By the same token, loyalty need not imply total unscrupulousness; the loyal may be willing to do distasteful things up to a point, but object that <em>these</em> things don’t really serve the interest of the ruler, or lose their loyalty if asked to do too many such things. Moreover, the loyal and the unscrupulous may be best fitted to different tasks within a regime’s apparatus of rule – perhaps the more loyal are best suited to propaganda or supervisory roles, while the more unscrupulous are best suited to enforcement roles. So there’s still an adverse selection problem here, even if it’s a bit less urgent from the dictator’s point of view. The main contribution of Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel is to show formally that, under some conditions – in particular, when the preferences of the loyal and the unscrupulous for roles within the regime match the preferences of the dictator – levels of cult participation can sufficiently separate those who are loyal and unscrupulous from those who are merely unscrupulously opportunistic, enhancing the utility of the cult as a screening device. The model thus depicts the cult as a boutique HR department for the needs of the discerning dictator.<br />
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A couple of explicit limitations and complications of the argument are worth noting. First, Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel indicate that their focus is on leader cults in dictatorships; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/10/why-trump-administration-officials-try-so-hard-to-flatter-him/">extreme flattery in democracies</a> is beyond the scope of their model, I assume because in principle democracies should not have great need for people willing to engage in repression (we’ll come back to this point). Moreover, they also explicitly limit the scope of their model to elite interactions. Their argument is not meant to be a guide to why ordinary people might participate in the rituals of a cult of personality, possibly because their activity is neither directly observed by the dictator, nor likely to result in a role in the regime. Finally, they also note that the model assumes the dictator <em>only</em> cares about the signaling value of cult participation; if they cared about, say, the ego gratification they got out of it, they would have a harder time distinguishing the loyal and unscrupulous from the merely unscrupulous. A rational dictator should not “believe their own hype” - they may end up like Ceaușescu if they do.<br />
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<a href="https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2012/04/charles-tillys-poetry-and-use-of-models.html">Models are maps</a>. They need not be “realistic” representations of the underlying social reality as long as they are similar enough to it in some limited respect to guide inquiry, or to allow one to do some form of inferential play. So I am not going to complain about particular assumptions of this model; it’s fun to play with. But I do have some reservations, or rather I can see some limitations that are worth exploring.<br />
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There are certainly cases where the model does seem to help us make sense of historical patterns of leader flattery. For example, the top Bolsheviks around Stalin in the late 1920s and 1930s were all ruthless people, though they varied in their level of commitment to the leader. Consider <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazar_Kaganovich">Lazar Kaganovich</a>. Like many other Bolsheviks Kaganovich was capable of brutality in pursuit of revolutionary goals (crushing peasant uprisings or arresting “saboteurs”), but he was also unusually unscrupulous in support of Stalin (falsifying votes in the Central Committee in 1934 to help re-elect him as General Secretary), and seemed to be genuinely in awe of him, treating the latter “more reverently than Sergo [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergo_Ordzhonikidze">Orzhonikidze</a>] or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastas_Mikoyan">Mikoyan</a>,” as <a href="https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=7kZNnKlKNp4C&lpg=PT73&dq=200%25%20stalinist&pg=PT73#v=onepage&q=200%25%20stalinist&f=false">Simon Sebag Montefiore recounts</a>:<br />
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He so admired the <em>Vozhd</em>, he admitted, that “when I go to Stalin, I try not to forget a thing! I worry every time! I so worry every time. I prepare every document in my briefcase and fill my pockets with cribs like a schoolboy because no one knows what Stalin is going to ask.” (<em>Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar</em>, <a href="https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=7kZNnKlKNp4C&lpg=PT73&dq=200%25%20stalinist&pg=PT73#v=onepage&q=200%25%20stalinist&f=false">p. 64</a>)</blockquote>
(Stalin apparently reacted to Kaganovich’s “schoolboyish” adoration by “teaching him how to spell and punctuate” – Kaganovich was, like many other Old Bolsheviks, a self-educated autodidact, a cobbler with only minimal formal education).<br />
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“Iron Lazar” was one of the main promoters of the Stalin cult: he coined the term “Stalinism,” and was among the first to write paeans to Stalin in state media (a practice other senior Bolsheviks disliked in private but did not actively resist; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Molotov">Molotov</a> once disdainfully said that Kaganovich was “<a href="https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=7kZNnKlKNp4C&lpg=PT73&dq=200%25%20stalinist&pg=PT73#v=onepage&q=200%25%20stalinist&f=false">200% Stalinist</a>”). While Molotov, Orzhonikidze, Mikoyan, and others often argued with and disagreed strongly with Stalin well into the 1930s, and Stalin often had to apologize to them (at least in the late 1920s and early 1930s), Kaganovich was more pliable.<br />
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It might seem reasonable to infer that his high level of participation in the Stalin cult (indeed, his founding role in it) was one reason he survived the turbulent 1930s (he died in <em>1991</em>!), while other Bolsheviks, who were certainly ruthless and unscrupulous (if deeply faithful to a certain ideal of revolutionary communism), sometimes had a harder time credibly signaling their commitment to Stalin (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergo_Ordzhonikidze">Orzhonikidze comes to mind</a>). Their willingness to debase themselves to credibly signal their loyalty to Stalin certainly varied; these people had strong egos!<br />
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But note that extreme flattery from top Bolsheviks could not give Stalin information about their ruthlessness or lack of scruples; he <em>already</em> possessed a better source of that information, as the top Bolsheviks had shown time and again what they were capable of. <em>Task performance</em>, not cult participation, was sufficiently informative about their capacity for violence in the turbulent 1920s and 1930s that willingness to debase themselves in front of Stalin could not add anything to what was already known about their lack of scruples in pursuit of revolutionary goals. In this sense the cult may have helped to separate the loyal and ruthless from the purely ruthless, though even here the separation may have been imperfect (the seemingly amoral <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria#Head_of_the_NKVD">Beria</a>, who would have betrayed anyone if he had seen any benefit, ended up in charge of the NKVD).<br />
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This analysis could be pursued further; unlike in many other dictatorships, in the case of Stalin we have a lot of archival evidence about the motivations and interactions of those in the inner circle of rule. But I am not certain we would find that the main effect of extreme flattery at the top level of the party was to provide clear information to Stalin about the loyalty and unscrupulousness of senior Bolsheviks, or that Stalin encouraged or tolerated such flattery for for that reason. My unsystematic reading (and I’m no expert!) of the interactions at the top of the CPSU in the 20s and 30s suggests that the effect of the cult was more to deter collective challenges to Stalin as the latter consolidated power than to allow him to determine more clearly who was loyal and who wasn’t; in a sense the cult, by forcing the public recognition of Stalin’s superior status among top Bolsheviks and making it harder for them to coordinate against Stalin, <em>diminished</em> the importance of personal loyalty. In an environment that created a strong collective action problem for anyone wishing to defect, he needed to have fewer genuinely committed supporters like Kaganovich.<br />
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The <a href="https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2012/10/ten-thousand-melodies-cannot-express.html">Chinese case</a> is even more equivocal. There the main elite promoters of the Mao cult during the mid to late 1960s, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, were not themselves more obviously loyal to Mao than others; Lin Biao himself seems to have had no illusions about “old Mao” (Leese, <em>Mao Cult</em>, <a href="http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=iqjviY6aFloC&lpg=PA288&vq=boundless%20hot%20love&pg=PA288#v=onepage&q=fabricate&f=false">p. 90</a>), and Mao himself remained <a href="http://books.google.co.nz/books/about/Mao_Cult.html?id=iqjviY6aFloC&redir_esc=y">utterly suspicious of their motivations</a>. As in the Soviet case, moreover, participation in the cult did not provide additional information about <em>lack of scruples</em>; we can assume that at the top of the CCP there were no naifs. There the cult (= extreme flattery at the elite level) seems to have been used far more as an instrument of factional warfare (deterring collective action by opponents) than as a way of signaling exceptional loyalty or unscrupulousness <em>to</em> Mao.<br />
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There’s another problem, evident in the example of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saparmurat_Niyazov">Saparmurat Niyazov</a> that Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel use to open their paper, which is that many manifestations of a cult depend on large-scale uses of resources and bureaucratic power. When the Turkmen government spends millions on statues of Niyazov, uses its airwaves to promote the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhnama">Ruhnama</a>, and so on, the <em>audience</em> for these manifestations of power is not Niyazov (except incidentally), and the poor saps who had to attend the design meetings for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_Monument">Neutrality Monument</a> or coordinate the publication of Niyazov’s works were likely not being promoted for their loyalty and unscrupulousness. (I don’t know, and I don’t know if anybody does know, if people at the top of the Turkmen government elite <em>were</em> rewarded for enabling these things; perhaps one day we might understand more about the bureaucratic politics of cult-building in Turkmenistan, as well as about the elite interactions leading to these excesses).<br />
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In some ways, the Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel model of elite flattery seems to apply more to a context like that of the Trump administration than to the classic personality cults of the 20th century, which went far beyond elite flattery to incorporate not only large-scale uses of bureaucratic power but also mass participation. This is only idle speculation, but it seems to me that in today’s USA, extreme flattery of Trump among close associates of the President does seem to go hand in hand with a willingness to break other norms. Moreover, because the reputational costs of such flattery are reasonably large outside the Trump administration, it serves as a credible signal that one is tying one’s fate to the President. If Trump wants people to break norms that have constrained previous presidents, it thus makes sense for him to recruit precisely the people who flatter him outrageously; he can probably separate the loyal and unscrupulous from the merely unscrupulous or the disloyal in this way.Xavier Marquezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10099356104979121153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35658622.post-17734468159361861782019-12-05T10:45:00.000+13:002019-12-06T00:01:02.448+13:00DictatorsIn my corner of Twitter, I recently became obliquely aware of <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=xi%20jinping%20not%20a%20dictator&src=typed_query">a kerfuffle about Michael Bloomberg saying that “Xi Jinping is not a dictator”</a>. (Twitter is funny that way: sometimes all you get is a trace of some public person’s comment as reflected in memes or snark, and it takes some effort to find the original motivation for the jokes. It’s like a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_chamber">cloud chamber</a> for political events). Not that this blog has any interest in current affairs, but I thought I actually had something to say about the question of the terms we use to talk about non-democracy, and I haven’t written here in a while.<br />
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At one level, this is an entirely unimportant and uninteresting controversy. The term “dictator”, like all political terms, can obviously be used as a weapon in the endless skirmishes for positional advantage in American politics and culture; and failure to label Xi Jinping as a “dictator” is easily equated with support for the crackdown in Hong Kong and repression in Tibet, Xinjiang, and elsewhere in China.<br />
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Similar controversies often arose when <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez">Chávez</a> was alive (was he a dictator?), and still do occasionally with other people as well (is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Orb%C3%A1n">Orbán</a> a dictator? Putin? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recep_Tayyip_Erdo%C4%9Fan">Erdoğan</a>?). They all have a similar structure: the person denying “dictatorship” status focuses on some attribute of the leader in question that seems incompatible with a standard “image” of dictatorship – e.g., the lack of violence against particular people, free election to the post of president or term limits, formal or informal accountability to selected constituencies, popularity – while those arguing for dictatorship tend to focus on the non-democratic aspects of the system over which the leader presides (lack of freedoms, use of violence, lack of formal accountability to other constituencies, life tenure). Though these disputes are ostensibly about correct descriptions – is this person a dictator or not? – their (usually obvious) point is coalitional – does the person making the descriptive claim belong in this or that group? (Unsurprisingly, Chinese leaders themselves <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-politics/xis-role-as-party-core-is-not-a-sign-of-dictatorship-official-idUSKBN12V15D">prefer not to be called dictators</a>, despite the fact that the Preamble of the Constitution of the People’s Republic still straightforwardly endorses the “<a href="https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/China_2004?lang=en">people’s democratic dictatorship</a>”).<br />
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This is unavoidable and to be expected; ostensibly descriptive terms have always been used in cultural and political struggles to increase or decrease the status of people and places, and their meaning is therefore “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4544562#metadata_info_tab_contents">essentially contested</a>.” Moreover, because they have long histories of use in these struggles, all such terms become sedimented with multiple valences that are impossible to “bracket off”. When we talk about “democracy” or “dictatorship” we invoke a plenitude of historically accumulated meanings and values that cannot simply be wished away by appeal to the dictionary. Yet alongside the political use of these words there is also an analytic use. (I’m a Weberian; I still see a distinction between <em>Wissenschaft</em> and politics, so sue me). From this point of view, the proper analytical use of a term like “dictatorship” should be informed by its historical roots, which in turn point the way to certain core ideas, but cannot be identical with its current usage in political struggles.<br />
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The history of the word “dictatorship” is probably familiar to readers of this blog; indeed, I <a href="https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2011/01/decline-of-tyranny-and-rise-of.html">sketched it here a long time ago</a>, and then wrote about it at more length in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Non-Democratic-Politics-Authoritarianism-Dictatorship-Democratization/dp/1137486309">chapter 2 of my book</a>. The name of an ancient Roman republican magistracy, a person temporarily entrusted by the Senate to “save the republic” in emergency situations without being encumbered by procedural niceties, it already had a bad odour by the time of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulla">Sulla</a>. These connotations were further cemented by Caesar’s assumption of the office <em>in perpetuum</em>, but none of this mattered for a very long time, as dictatorship was associated with republics, and republican forms of government basically ceased to exist for many centuries afterwards in the West. (The word for a bad ruler in non-republican contexts was tyrant or despot, not dictator; as Hobbes caustically put it, tyranny was “<a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hobbes/thomas/h68l/chapter19.html">monarchy misliked</a>”).<br />
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Accordingly, “dictatorship” came again into common usage in English and other European languages the mid-19th century, and <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/hqd9mo5c9jj444f/The_Fates_of_Democracy.pdf?dl=0">more clearly at the beginning of the 20th century</a>, when “democracy” (republics with universal suffrage) became more fully established; dictatorship is the pathology of republics, not of monarchy. And initially at least users of the word harked back to its “positive” or neutral sense; <a href="https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=G1MJLmn5QpYC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA64#v=onepage&q=el%20supremo&f=false">José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia in Paraguay even declared himself “perpetual dictator” in 1816</a>. Dictatorship is also associated with the invention of terms like “Caesarism” in the 19th century to describe regimes like those of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_III">Napoleon III</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck">Bismarck</a>, which combined appeals to “popular” legitimation, republican forms, and authoritarian features; these were the first people in a long time that could be described as “dictators” in European politics, and writers looked back to <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265729593_Caesarism_Charisma_and_Fate">the analogy with Caesar to think about them</a>.<br />
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When Marx and Engels appropriated and positively valorized the idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (a term coined by Marx’s associate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weydemeyer">Joseph Weydemeyer</a>), which they contrasted with the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”, they thus had already a rich cluster of meanings to draw on. There is the idea that dictatorship is rule without regard for law or traditional norms in special situations; that dictatorship is associated with republican forms, and can be extended, even “perpetual”, yet is not an inheritable office; and the idea that dictatorship (unlike tyranny) need not be, as a matter of definition, used for ill. To this I would say that they added the idea that dictatorship could be a system, not just an individual office, and the “dictator” could be a party or a class.<br />
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I’m guessing that this last conceptual addition made it possible for political scientists to use the term “dictatorship” to talk about all forms non-democracy – that is, to set up the modern opposition between democracy and dictatorship. In the <a href="https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-age-of-democracy.html">age of democracy</a>, even divine-right monarchy could be understood as a form of dictatorship, despite the conceptual opposition in classical political thought between these terms. But this came at a cost, insofar as the rich variety of non-democratic political forms became associated with the pre-existing connotations of the term “dictatorship.”<br />
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I think this is a bit unfortunate, not only because of the gap this opened between scholarly and popular uses of the term “dictator” (many people think of a “dictator” as the name for one particular <em>kind</em> of non-democratic ruler, not as a generic term for all such rulers) but also because it hides a number of important conceptual distinctions within non-democratic systems. (As you may have noted, I prefer the very general term “non-democracy” to talk about what many scholars call simply “dictatorships”).<br />
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In particular, we can distinguish, roughly, between how <em>authoritarian</em> control over society is (that is, how much of social life is patterned and directed by centralized uses of state power), and how much is the authority of a top leader divorced from control by norms, laws, or other elites more generally; and it is the latter dimension that many people tend to focus on when they talk about dictatorship. Implicit in Bloomberg’s comments, for example, is the idea of the dictator as the unaccountable or unbound leader; and having taught a course on dictatorships for many years I can testify that many of my students come in with the same idea. (I talk about this in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Non-Democratic-Politics-Authoritarianism-Dictatorship-Democratization/dp/1137486309">my book</a> at more length - this is just the capsule version).<br />
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These two “dimensions” of non-democracy often go together, but they can also be decoupled. Consider a place like Vietnam today (where I just visited, so it’s on my mind). A one-party state, most of my readers would be unlikely to call it a democracy, despite the fact that its constitution asserts <a href="https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Socialist_Republic_of_Vietnam_2013?lang=en">the principle of democracy</a>, Vietnamese media has been significantly liberalized since the early 2000s, and there’s even some competition in elections to the legislature and within the VCP – <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1669708">certainly more so than in China, and potentially with implications for economic and other outcomes</a>. After all, this is still a country that tightly restricts competition for state power and where independent political organization is not allowed; it is <em>authoritarian</em> in the sense that a great number of activities – especially those connected with the competition for state power – are tightly restricted by the state.<br />
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Yet it would be difficult to name a single leader as the “dictator” of Vietnam; specialists in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Vietnam">politics of Vietnam</a> talk instead about a “troika” (the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the President, and the Prime Minister) of mutually accountable and similarly powerful figures, all of whom are ultimately answerable to the Central Committee of the party, which has <em>not</em> been a rubber-stamp body since probably the death of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%AA_Du%E1%BA%A9n">Le Duan</a>. While one could bite the bullet and say that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Secretary_of_the_Communist_Party_of_Vietnam">Nguyen Phu Trong, the current General Secretary of the VCP</a>, is Vietnam’s dictator, since Vietnam is a “dictatorship” (= “a non-democratic regime”) and he is by common consent the most powerful figure in the regime, this would sound a bit weird. Better, in my view, to say that Vietnam has an authoritarian regime where the leadership is more or less constrained by formal and informal rules, and so there’s no single “dictator”.<br />
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In this framework, what you get is a two-dimensional space where non-democratic regimes vary along the two dimensions of social control or “authoritarianism” and elite accountability or “personalism” (or “dictatorship”). In theory, you could have regimes where social control is fairly extreme (on the “totalitarian” side of the spectrum) but top leaders are tightly constrained by norms of collective leadership, for example, and vice-versa. We can even use data to get a rough picture of these regimes. Using a measure of “personalism” in non-democratic regimes from the latest book by Geddes, Wright, and Frantz (<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/comparative-politics/how-dictatorships-work-power-personalization-and-collapse?format=PB"><em>How Dictatorships Work</em></a>, about which more in a later post perhaps) and a measure of civil society control from the <a href="https://www.v-dem.net/en/">Varieties of Democracy</a> dataset we can get this picture (this is interactive, hover over a dot to see the name of the leader):<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="500" scrolling="no" src="//plot.ly/~xmarquez/1.embed" width="640"></iframe>
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Now, this is a purely illustrative picture. I don’t have space to delve into the construction or quality of this data, and I certainly don’t believe all of it. Moreover, the “personalism” data only goes to 2010, so it does not allow us to see what Xi Jinping would look like here. The numbers do not have a real scale either - they represent an arbitrary index. But it does show that there is a lot of variation along these dimensions. Consider China:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr-2x-oGaYB8GYdoiyuMMdAI4k7Ca0UjGTHBY3lEyPYfU0Yun6si9lEq4Pgk_z29Llj3tqj6x8U_cicYvGqUTtD1dodv1RPow_OazXa6rPFTfzFevRZ9lnJOJIzHXwVVkd0nJq/s1600/unnamed-chunk-2-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="1344" height="457" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr-2x-oGaYB8GYdoiyuMMdAI4k7Ca0UjGTHBY3lEyPYfU0Yun6si9lEq4Pgk_z29Llj3tqj6x8U_cicYvGqUTtD1dodv1RPow_OazXa6rPFTfzFevRZ9lnJOJIzHXwVVkd0nJq/s640/unnamed-chunk-2-1.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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According to this measure, the peak of “dictatorship” in China (Mao in the 1960s) is during the Cultural Revolution, which is also the peak of social control. But Mao did not always have this degree of power; earlier he was more of a first among equals, and as the cultural revolution dragged on he also lost prestige, though social control remained high throughout his tenure. In the 1990s, Deng and Hu represent lower levels of personal power – collective leadership eventually became more established at this time – as well as an opening of social control.<br />
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The graph's four quadrants represent four distinctive patterns. The “dictators” – leaders with high personal power, unbound by norms, institutions, or the elite – are at the top of the graph. These are the people we might expect: Trujillo, Mobutu, Qaddafi, Franco, the Duvaliers, the Kims, etc. Their regimes take their name from them; they are “dictatorships” in the sense that they can be identified with their dictator. But in some cases (e.g., <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Compaor%C3%A9">Compaoré</a> in Burkina Fasso, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathieu_K%C3%A9r%C3%A9kou">Kérékou</a> in Benin, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnassingb%C3%A9_Eyad%C3%A9ma">Eyadéma</a> in Togo) they did not manage to get the state to exercise much social control (at least by this measure! results may vary on other measures!). Or consider Venezuela, which Geddes, Wright, and Frantz code as a non-democracy from 2006:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjmiVISKiWNwZh3m0UtySgqf57mIyA4o09gdGUCA6CxpzQhXJJchRWr82Sgem8UVsYzEBg3wdYArDXXIx-p6eHphBUi0cOKfw81MKbTOWD3kAGIGGGDMzcNwRJ1b_HuAFmgayc/s1600/unnamed-chunk-3-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="1344" height="456" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjmiVISKiWNwZh3m0UtySgqf57mIyA4o09gdGUCA6CxpzQhXJJchRWr82Sgem8UVsYzEBg3wdYArDXXIx-p6eHphBUi0cOKfw81MKbTOWD3kAGIGGGDMzcNwRJ1b_HuAFmgayc/s640/unnamed-chunk-3-1.png" width="640" /></a><br />
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Here Chávez appears as a ruler with high personal power, more so than the military dictator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcos_P%C3%A9rez_Jim%C3%A9nez">Pérez Jiménez</a>, who was constrained by a military Junta. But control over civil society was not extraordinarily high during his tenure, unlike during the military regime (note Pérez Jiménez was overthrown in 1958 - hence that “low social control” point in 1958, since V-Dem data is coded at the end of the year).<br />
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At the bottom of the graph, by contrast, we have non-democratic regimes that are not defined by their occupants, because their rulers are much more tightly constrained by norms, institutions, or other elites. In the lower-right corner, in particular, we have regimes that are sometimes confused with democracies. These are places like Taiwan in the early 1990s, or Mexico in the 1980s and 90s (where the President was term limited and constrained by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_Revolutionary_Party">PRI</a>, other parties existed and were able to organize and compete in elections). Some of these regimes engaged in targeted repression, but it would be a bit weird to say that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernesto_Zedillo">Zedillo</a>, for example, was the “dictator” of Mexico – though Mexico at the time was authoritarian (even if only in the mild “<a href="https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/levitsky/files/SL_elections.pdf">competitive authoritarian</a>” sense coined by Levitsky and Way).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKovOk3f2NNZbwlSa2bxYn7JYxP52qUfWiZG8kDPOw5u9jPTDn5e-W_kPof8gzvGe0O3OgMJzRJizLRO-4HdPFV4LdLIE9Q6zKzbVijOtnRI1NdEfuNVv2-GVzQHBl5Pzfs5nA/s1600/unnamed-chunk-4-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="1344" height="456" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKovOk3f2NNZbwlSa2bxYn7JYxP52qUfWiZG8kDPOw5u9jPTDn5e-W_kPof8gzvGe0O3OgMJzRJizLRO-4HdPFV4LdLIE9Q6zKzbVijOtnRI1NdEfuNVv2-GVzQHBl5Pzfs5nA/s640/unnamed-chunk-4-1.png" width="640" /></a><br />
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There is an interesting question here about how leaders come to have personal power – i.e., how they become full-fledged “dictators” in the popular sense of the term. This is a question that Geddes, Wright, and Frantz explore in <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/comparative-politics/how-dictatorships-work-power-personalization-and-collapse?format=PB">their book</a> in some detail, and about which I hope to say more later. For now, however, note only that a leader who is unbound by legal or traditional constraints either has what Weber called “charismatic” authority (e.g., Mao in the mid-1960s), or the kind of control over resources that allows them to bypass such legal and normative constraints (e.g., Mobutu in his later years). But that's a story for another post.Xavier Marquezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10099356104979121153noreply@blogger.com0