An excerpt from Guriev and Treisman’s paper that summarises their key arguments is below.
“How do dictators hold onto power? The simplest answer is by means of violent repression. A long string of autocrats—from the military dictators Franco and Pinochet to the personalistic tyrants Mobutu and Somoza—have left behind them rivers of blood. Totalitarians such as Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot combined terror with ideology. Besides murdering millions, they indoctrinated citizens into creeds that demanded the sacrifice of individual interests to a higher goal. In a similar way, religious dogmas have prescribed obedience to incumbent rulers in monarchies and theocracies.
However, a less violent and ideological form of authoritarianism has recently come to rival the old-style autocracies. From Alberto Fujimori’s Peru to Victor Orban’s Hungary, illiberal leaders have managed to consolidate power without isolating their countries from global markets, imposing outlandish social philosophies, or resorting to mass killings. Rather than terrorizing or indoctrinating the population, such leaders survive by manipulating information so that citizens believe—rationally but incorrectly—that the leader is competent and benevolent. Having thus secured popularity, they use formally democratic institutions to ratify their rule, despite having neutered any genuine political constraints or accountability.
Compared to most other dictators, the rulers of such informational autocracies use violence sparingly. Rather than jailing thousands of political prisoners, they harass and humiliate opponents, accuse them of fabricated non-political crimes, and encourage them to emigrate. Moreover, unlike old-style autocrats, who sought to publicize their brutality in order to deter others, informational autocrats often conceal their responsibility when killings occur. Their goal is to be popular rather than feared. At the same time, they have to persuade the public that they do not need political violence to stay in power.
The manipulation of information is not new in itself—some totalitarian leaders were great innovators in the use of propaganda. What is different is how they employ such tools. Where Hitler and Stalin sought to reshape citizens’ goals and values by imposing comprehensive ideologies, informational autocrats are more surgical: they aim only to convince citizens of their competence to govern.
The informational autocracy shares with other authoritarian states the goal of empowering its leader to operate with little or no accountability. But informational autocracies accomplish this in a different way. Besides Fujimori’s Peru and Orban’s Hungary, other examples include Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Mahathir Mohamad’s Malaysia, Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. The concept is an ideal type, so actual cases may exhibit only some of the characteristics. China’s recent party bosses also fit in some respects, but whereas the other leaders inherited flawed democracies and undermined them further,the institutions hollowed out in China were those of totalitarian communism.
The phenomenon is not completely new. One can see Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore as a pioneer of such “soft autocracy.” As we show later, Lee perfected the inobtrusive management of private media and instructed his Chinese and Malaysian peers on the need to conceal violence. Alberto Fujimori’s unsavory intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos was also a key innovator, paying million dollar bribes to television stations to skew their coverage. “We live on information, “ he told a reporter in one unguarded interview. “The addiction to information is like an addiction to drugs” (McMillan and Zoido 2004, p.74).
“…While some old-style dictatorships remain,more and more have at least some characteristics of the informational autocracy. There are probably a number of reasons. In a world of advanced technology and economic interdependence, isolating one’s country to preserve ideological purity has become extremely costly. Indeed, the internet makes it almost impossible to keep out foreign information completely and to prevent citizens from communicating autonomously. For this reason, concealing state violence becomes harder. Rising education levels also dictate more sophisticated approaches to social control.
Since the Cold War ended, aid donors and Western-dominated international institutions have pressured poor countries to respect human rights, raising the premium on models of dictatorship that simulate democracy. At the same time, the power of centralized media to set the agenda and distort popular beliefs remains impressive. All this has led autocrats to pursue the same goals by different means—by monitoring and shaping information flows rather than by relying on intimidation and ideological brainwashing.”
Guriev, S & Treisman, D. March 2016. How Modern Dictators Survive:An Informational Theory of the New Authoritarianism. [Online]. 1, 1. Available at: https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/sem2016/development/guriev.pdf [Accessed 6 December 2019].
Pablo's Tales 