Joseph Wright on How Autocratic Regimes Behave– And Why They Collapse

What is the statistical impact of factors like levels of economic development and autocratic subtype (whether an autocracy is monarchical, military, personalist, or single-party) on the duration of autocratic regimes and of periods without democracy (autocratic spells)?

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Wright: Historically, since the end of WWII, regimes with powerful ruling parties where elites within the party have substantial power have been the most durable. I call those dominant-party regimes or single-party regimes. Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and those that still persist today, like Cuba, Vietnam, and China, are in that category. On the flip side, dictatorships that come to power in military coups where a military junta rules together collectively have historically been the most fragile dictatorships. That is, they are the most short-lived, and in fact, dictatorships ruled by the military tend to be those that are most likely to end in a transition to a new democracy.

 

When it comes to economic factors, through most of the Cold War period and even into the 1990s, a prominent theory in social science suggested that as countries with dictatorships get wealthier, they’re more likely to democratize. Many scholars and policymakers observed a strong correlation between economic development and democracy and interpreted this to mean that as dictatorships develop, they would peacefully transition to democracy. We call that modernization theory. I think this is particularly relevant for thinking about China because it was this thinking that was largely behind US policy to open up trade with China in the late 1990s. The idea was that US investment would flow into China, Chinese manufacturing would boom, China would trade these manufactured goods with the US and the rest of the West, the Chinese economy would grow rapidly, and the government would democratize as the country developed. However, that didn’t turn out to be the case. The first part of the equation has held up well in the past few decades: foreign investment did in fact pour into China, especially after China entered the WTO in 2001, and the Chinese economy has grown rapidly in the past three or more decades, lifting perhaps as many as half a billion people from poverty. But as China has grown richer, the Chinese government has not in fact democratized. In the past decade, CCP rule in China has become more authoritarian and less democratic no matter how you define democracy.

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What about the impact of temporary economic issues, like a recession or depression, on autocratic regime durability?

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Wright: We’ve looked hard for that stuff, and one would think that that would be a good predictor– that when there’s an inflationary crisis, financial crisis, currency crisis, or growth crisis, it would destabilize dictatorships. It turns out there’s not strong empirical evidence for that. The reason is probably because those things don’t always catalyze protest movements, and even when they do, cases like China in 1989 illustrate that regimes can still use repression to put them down. As a result, there isn’t a super strong correlation or predictive power of economic crises destabilizing dictatorships.

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Is there any research on the impact of a major military conflict on regime durability?

 

Wright: It’s not my wheelhouse, but I think the short answer is that for conflict to destabilize a regime, the conflict has to go badly for your side. A conflict that you win or are perceived as winning actually helps you stay in power. If key domestic groups perceive the conflict as being a loss, the classic case being Argentina in the Falklands War, in which the Argentine military dictatorship lost badly, it might help set in motion a relatively peaceful transition to democracy. Similarly, in Idi Amin’s Uganda, he had a conflict with Tanzania and the Ugandan military wasn’t being paid due to devastating economic sanctions, so the military dropped their support for Amin. In that case, there was a confluence of factors that explain why the conflict led to the fall of the regime: an invading army plus really devastating economic sanctions. On the other hand, there are lots of dictatorships where they lose a conflict and domestic groups perceive their leader to have lost the conflict, but it doesn’t destabilize the dictatorship. The reason for that is that there aren't accountability mechanisms in the regime: it's hard for the mass public or even elites to hold the leader accountable for losing a conflict.

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We’re all familiar with anecdotal cases where being perceived as failing in a war brought down a regime, but it sounds from your answer like that may not be a clear statistical trend.

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Wright: Yeah, we don’t find strong evidence for that.

 

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02  China's Autocratic Regime: Dominant-Party or Personalist Dictatorship?

​In your data set, you categorized China as a single-party dictatorship rather than a personalist dictatorship. Do you believe China has since moved into the category of a personalist dictatorship? If not, what do you think would need to happen for it to merit recategorization?

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Wright: Single-party or dominant-party regimes oftentimes historically lack multi-party elections for the chief executive, as is true in China. Additionally, the party tends to have very firm control over the military, which is still the case in China today under the commissar system. The second key thing that happens in dominant-party regimes is that the power within the party tends to reside in a collective of the elites, oftentimes the top party executive committee. In the Chinese case, this would be the Politburo Standing Committee.

 

Many personalist regimes also have a ruling party, but the party is more likely to have been created by the leader and controlled by the leader. That means that the leader has the power to appoint and purge members of the party, including and particularly members of the party executive. The leader is likely to control party resources and have the power to force nominations of the party’s candidates if there are elections and be able to appoint loyalists. And so while a lot of personalist dictatorships have parties, it’s very much centered on the leader himself.

 

So in many ways I think that the CCP has been and remains to this day a dominant-party regime, in the sense that the CCP still controls the military and internal security apparatus. Further, the party has extensive reach into local government structures and reaches its citizens through everything from education to pensions to healthcare. In that sense it is still a dominant-party regime.

 

However, there’s evidence to suggest there’s growing personalization. This is where leaders grab power over the party, and they consolidate power over other Chinese elites. We saw this before in Chinese history. In the run up to and during the Cultural Revolution, Mao abolished the central organ through which the party elite had power, which was the Central Committee Secretariat, the highest administrative body of the party. He gave himself the power that they had, and he even created a loyal paramilitary, the Red Guards, to discipline potentially disloyal party elites.

 

In the past decade, Xi has done some things like purge the military in an anti-corruption campaign to ensure he gets loyalists, but more importantly, he has taken unilateral control over the selection of the members of the PBSC, and in that process he’s abolished the informal rule of presidential term limits. He’s also re-engineered the regime propaganda machine to create a cult of personality around himself, just as Mao did.

 

The one thing I think that Xi has not done and I think would spell bad news not only for the entire world but also for Chinese citizens and elites is that even though Xi has purged some of the top commanders in the PLA, he has yet to create a separate military or internal security unit loyal to him alone to counterbalance the PLA. That would be a very bad sign of things to come.

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Would you still put China in the bucket of a single-party regime for the purposes of your statistical analysis?

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Wright: The fact of the matter is that we don’t try to put dictatorships into buckets anymore. What we try to do is measure key features of them, like the level of personalism in a dictatorship. If we were to do that today for Xi Jinping, the Chinese regime would be right in the middle of the scale. This is not the kind of dictator as in North Korea, as Saddam Hussein was in Iraq, or even as Putin is in Russia. Nor is China’s personalism as high today as at the peak of Mao’s power.

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Can you tell us why you’ve moved away from trying to put regimes into buckets, since that was part of the methodology of your paper?

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Wright: Yeah, so the reason is that cases don’t always fit one bucket or the other. The Chinese case is a great illustration of this. The world is just not clean enough to put everything into a box. We address this by trying to measure certain traits within dictatorships and develop a measure of the level of personalism in a dictatorship. And a lot of the pernicious consequences of personalist dictatorship – such as repressing citizens or starting conflicts – that I talked about, you still find those patterns when using this measure rather than putting regimes into one category or another. This allows us to examine what causes dictators to be able to become personalist dictators. We can ask questions about the changes over time in a dictatorship that allow a leader to grab power from other elites in the military or ruling party. 

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03  Personalism, War-Starting, and CCP Regime Durability

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Regarding the sliding scale of personalism, when you talk about how the Xi regime is not as extreme as some others, what impact does that have on some of the statistical factors you explore?

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Wright: Moving from the middle to the high end of personalism, you’re more likely to be repressive towards your own citizens, you’re more likely to start an international conflict, the regime is more likely to end violently, and you’re going to be less cooperative internationally. Personalist dictatorships are bad both domestically and internationally.

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Your paper discussed how expectations of post-ouster punishment can impact autocratic leaders’ decisions to start wars. More generally, if an autocratic leader has a heightened expectation of being ousted or a heightened expectation that the regime could collapse, would that have an impact on their likelihood of starting a war?

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Wright: There are some compelling theories for why that would be the case, and I do think there’s some evidence consistent with that.

 

Looking at George W. Bush’s polling numbers, there are only three times that they went up. There’s September 11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the capture of Saddam Hussein. Everything else in his approval rating is basically trending downwards. There’s prima facie evidence there that these international conflicts and the perception of winning something cause people to rally around the flag. That’s true for dictators as well. That’s certainly what you see with Putin. He has tried very hard to portray the conflict in Ukraine as a not only necessary war but a war that they’re winning. He’s used big public rallies to convince citizens and elites alike that he’s winning and that this is a positive thing, and that should be good for his durability.

 

It’s harder for dictators to bargain internationally, and the reason for that is there’s just less transparency. When you don’t have a clear understanding of your opponent’s capabilities, that makes it difficult to bargain on one hand, and on the other hand that leads directly to the possibility of conflict. So if you’re an autocratic leader and you’re being threatened and you lack transparency and domestic accountability, you are more likely to start wars.

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Given what you know about the Chinese regime and all of these trends in the international historical data, if there were to be a conflict over Taiwan that went ill for China, how likely do you think it is that the Chinese regime would endure?

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Wright: There are a lot of things going on in China. I doubt that a conflict itself would be destabilizing if the CCP ran into military difficulties, and I think that’s for two reasons. One is that the Chinese regime has a strong capacity to shape public opinion in China. It’s unclear to me that citizens would mobilize against the regime in the face of perceived conflict loss. The more likely scenario, which I still don’t see as particularly likely at all, is that this conflict brings sustained economic losses, trade dries up, chips stop flowing, and the green tech revolution is stalled, which tends to have downstream applications. But the Chinese regime has persisted through some really bad economic times. I don’t perceive anything close to having that kind of negative economic impact. 

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