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In order to understand how nondemocratic regimes maintain their power, we might think the obvious place to start would be with coercion and fear—images of the Soviet gulag or South American death squads or pervasive insecurity generated by secret police forces. We do indeed need to understand the workings of these technologies of power and control, but we must recognize that the range of tools available to modern authoritarian states is broader than those that are directly coercive. And we should understand also that even in regimes that are capable of startling brutality toward their own population, the surest way to stay in power is legitimacy, that is, the consent of the governed. Although, by definition, nondemocratic regimes do not have the legitimacy that comes as a result of free and fair elections, it is typical and important that they claim to rule in the name of and on behalf of “the people.” Arendt and others speak of mass politics, in contrast to democratic pluralism:Authoritarianism often rests on the notion of the citizenry as a single, homogeneous body that finds its expression in the regime, party, or leader. Taken to an extreme, as in the Third Reich, this can lead to programs of expulsion or extermination of the “other.” How do authoritarian regimes acquire and sustain legitimacy in practice? Sometimes a charismatic leader or one claiming legitimacy through descent or religious sanction may be the source of the regime's claim to power. But more common is a claim by performance, the regime's keeping its side of an implicit or explicit bargain—obedience on the part of the population met with the provision of services on the part of the state, whether this be in the form of development, social welfare, or the provision of security. There may also be the provision of what we might think of as psychological goods, such as national pride. We might naturally associate this idea of state provision of benefits in return for obedience with regimes of the left. But one historian of 20th-century fascism points out that regimes of the right also tended to seek legitimacy through performance, by promising to deliver rapid industrialization and national independence without the social dislocations associated with the earlier industrializing states, thus appealing to social conservatism and people's attachment to order. Adrian Lyttelton (1987) describes Italian fascism in these terms: [It] aimed at modernization without modernity. In other words, it aimed to appropriate the advantages of technical and economic progress, while rejecting the political, cultural, and social changes that had been associated with industrialization in Britain and the USA…. Fascism started from modernist premises (futurism) and ended by espousing policies of a much more traditionalist kind (ruralism); national socialism started from anti-modernist premises (“Blood and Soil”), but ended up by promoting rapid industrialization and urbanization. Similar appeals to “modernization without modernity” have marked many regimes of the later-developing global South. Malaysia's former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, among others, is well-known for his espousal of a doctrine of “Asian values,” by which he meant his regime would deliver economic development without political liberalization, which, he argued, was not in keeping with his society's values and traditions. This approach has had some support from Western economists, politicians, and institutions, although certainly not all. The difficulty with performance-based legitimacy is, of course, that the regime must perform. In the 1950s and early 1960s, there was significant support in political science and related disciplines and in the worlds of policy and politics for the idea that authoritarian regimes could aid in the process of catching up to the more advanced industrialized states. While modernization theory, popular in the early part of the cold war, posited that economic and political development moved hand in hand in the direction of greater liberalization, the idea that a more directive, interventionist state could produce more rapid economic development became accepted, not only among authoritarian regimes themselves and their supporters, but also among some development economists and political scientists, particularly those who studied the Asian Tigers—states such as Taiwan and South Korea that achieved rapid growth under illiberal, interventionist regimes. However, for every Singapore there was a Zaire, the latter being a classic example of a predatory state, where the dictator and his cronies stripped the country of resources and impoverished rather than developed it (the World Bank has termed predatory states transfer economies, that is, those in which political power determines the transfer of resources extracted from society to a particular, nonproductive group or class). Many military regimes pinned their legitimacy on outperforming the allegedly inefficient civilian regimes they had replaced, but as early as the 1970s, cross-national analysis already showed that military regimes varied as widely as their civilian counterparts in their performance, that there was no reason to expect that military regimes would deliver more rapid or more effective development than civilian regimes as a general rule, even while individual regimes of both kinds might perform well. For arguments about the circumstances under which state intervention is developmental rather than predatory, see in particular the work of Peter Evans . The planned economies of the Soviet Bloc did achieve rapid industrialization and were able to compete militarily with the earlier-industrializing West. But ultimately many projects of state socialism built on the Soviet model ended up providing neither bread nor freedom, neither prosperity nor liberty. An American Political Science Association president noted the following in his annual address as Soviet Communism was collapsing: There is a growing awareness that authoritarian rule, whether Leninist or not, can be a liability in achieving progress. The idea that centralized authority enhances the state's ability to shape society has been dealt a blow by the record of performance of the states that have tried to carry the idea to the extreme. Ideology and cultural authoritarianism are also useful tools for authoritarian regimes. While not even the totalitarian states have achieved the nightmare vision of Orwell's 1984 in terms of constant and ubiquitous surveillance and propaganda, of language stripped of meaning and citizens very thoughts controlled by the state, most authoritarian regimes have intervened significantly in the domain of culture and public expression, through censorship and propaganda, to mold the environment and channel public discourse in useful directions. A striking instance of this is the mass spectacle, whereby regimes command masses of people to perform complex displays, providing both a sign of the regime's power and a disciplining exercise for the performers themselves. The German Marxist critic Siegfried Kracauer discussed the meaning of such displays in his essay collection The Mass Ornament , and they can be seen in filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda film Triumph of the Will, documenting the Nazi rally at Nuremburg in 1934. More recent North Korean and Syrian examples are shown inA State of Mind and discussed in Wedeen's Ambiguities of Domination. Other, more day-to-day conditioning of populations can be achieved through mass organizations such as political parties, regime-controlled trade unions, and similar institutions that function to discipline populations but not necessarily to mobilize them. The tools of fear and coercion are an important complement to the tools of legitimacy and mobilization. Military and paramilitary forces, secret police and intelligence services, prison camps and torture chambers have all been key instruments of 20th-century authoritarian regimes and remain important. The eternal puzzle of quis custodiet ipsos custodes?—who guards the guards themselves?—applies here. Saddam Hussein maintained a complex system of rival intelligence agencies, spying on each other as well as the general population, the military, and so forth, and ultimately reporting only to him. The interesting questions are not so much about the functioning of such institutions but about how and why they break down in some circumstances while continuing to perform in others. Why did the Shah's forces stop firing on revolutionary crowds but People's Army troops did not refuse to crack down on protesters in Tiananmen Square a decade later? Authoritarian Regimes in an Age of Democratization Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes, and the wave of liberalization in Latin America that together make up what Samuel Huntington (1993) described as the “the third wave of democratizaion,” much attention has been paid to transitions from authoritarianism to democracy (see Chapter 33, titled “Processes of Democratization,” in this handbook). However, contrary to some who saw in the end of the cold war an end to ideological competition and the beginning of an age in which liberal democracy and free-market capitalism would spread worldwide, political scientists interested in authoritarianism have plenty of material to study in the 21st century. There are aborted or semitransitions, yielding what Fareed Zakaria of the Cable News Network calls “illiberal democracies” or semiauthoritarian regimes, such as Russia. And while there have been very real transitions to democracy in parts of the world, authoritarianism persists in China, North Korea, Central Asia, much of the Middle East, and many countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Explaining the resistance of the remaining autocracies to global pressures toward liberalization, or, on the other hand, resisting the “end of history” mind-set and analyzing the authoritarian regimes on their own terms rather than as aberrations, has provided interesting challenges for students of comparative politics. Many of those specializing in the Middle East, for example, have been concerned with these questions. Syrian analyst Aziz Al-Azmeh argues for the importance of ideas and discourse in understanding the persistence of authoritarianism in the Arab world. The discourse of democracy has been co-opted by accident or design in a way that doesn't engage with core democratic ideas or values. Rather, a “populist discourse on democracy” has come to dominate, and populism is an ally of authoritarianism, not least because of the identification of “the people” with the state. Brownlee's cross-regional analysis takes institutions, rather than discourses, as the basis of its explanation of the resistance of regimes to democratizing pressures. His argument is that in the cases he studies, the key to regime survival is the creation of a dominant party that provides incentives to elites to stay aligned with the regime and can punish those who defect. The absence of such an institution in the case of Iran, for example, means elite politics are more fractious and politics in general more dynamic and open than in Egypt. This institutional approach deliberately compares Middle Eastern cases with those outside the region, rejecting any exceptionalist explanation for its relative lack of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, scholars continue to try to explain the particular problem of the Arab states as “the world's most unfree region”. Contributors to Oliver Schlumberger's edited volume consider state-society relations, the structure of the regimes themselves, the interaction of economics and politics, and the interaction of states with the international arena in their search for explanation. The field remains rich in research possibilities.
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