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Key features of Authoritarian States, Political corruption - Coggle Diagram
Key features of Authoritarian States
Emergence of Authoritarian States
Conditions
Incidental
Individual seeks to exploit the divide between democracy and authoritarianism, would be autocrats hide behind a democratic banner.
Accidental
Leaders face more opposition than expected, such as when a new state is created from a previous state, to hold on to power, power is concentrated, opposition coerced and rights suspended.
Economic factors
Economic instability or poverty leads to search for an alternative to solve problems, sometimes extreme ones.
Poor social mobility
Social division
Certain social groups are favored above others, or institutionalized discrimination prevents certain groups from enjoying equal opportunities and rights. Absence of social solidarity, the state is often forced to resort to more authoritarian means to repress minority interests and rights.
National and linguistic divisions
Weakness of political system
Loss of public confidence
Poorly developed political systems
Little respect for the systems
Impact of War
War, in general, but Total War specifically, impacts the socio-economic abilities of a state to function properly.
All states in total war struggle to feed, house and protect a civilian population which has been deliberately targeted by the enemy’s military strategy. Wartime and post-war economies struggle to adapt to changed demands, as economic dislocation results in unemployment or shortages in consumer goods. It is hard to maintain the consent of the governed if the state is unable to provide what it is supposed to provide.
Political system impacted as all states that fight wars have to become more authoritarian in order to win. Even the most liberal democracy must centralize control over the economy, society and culture: it nationalizes industry, conscripts civilians and controls the media in ways that would be unacceptable in peacetime.
Makes society more intolerant. War needs individuals to go with the interests of the group: the nation and the fatherland. Feelings of patriotism and hatred of the others are fostered, not reason and empathy. People who actually do the fighting and the killing show long-term effects of social alienation, dehumanization and comradeship which make it very difficult to re-adjust to peacetime conditions and civilian authority.
Wars, civil wars, and coup d'états help form regimes with the help of a sympathetic society in unity with the military
Political culture
Very parochial culture, in which citizens have neither knowledge nor interest in politics.
Very big subject political culture. Citizens are aware of central government and are heavily subjected to its decisions with little possibility for participation or dissent.
Methods
Persuasion and coercion
Role of leaders
Tendency of overemphasizing the heroic role of their leaders in the rise to power.
Strongmen as leaders because authoritarianism venerates hierarchy and unlimited power.
Cult of personality
Leadership may not always be singular, sometimes it is a group of people
Ideology
Left-wing groups only appeal to the masses and inevitably face the full force of state coercion.
More important to the emergent left-wing authoritarian states
The leaders of the right have to balance their populist appeal to the masses with a different more subtle appeal to the socio-economic elites who fund them and provide them with political points of entry.
Right wing ideology can even reject the concept of an ideology, as part of their defining anti-intellectualism.
Fascism embraces the importance of ‘action.’
Ideology is more important to single party authoritarian states than it is to military dictatorships. Parties that seek power use ideology as a way of distinguishing itself from its rival groups. This helps create an internal coherence and inspirational goals to aspire to. By contrast, for a military dictatorship, discipline and coherence are a defining characteristic in which the pursuit of power is an end in itself.
ideologically driven authoritarian states, are likely to be ideologically more ambitious, more radical and less willing to work within established state norms.
Use of force
Coercion
Force has been used against those who oppose regime change.
Employed against opponents of the possible authoritarian regime, but also employed to help instill discipline within the group attempting to seize power.
Often includes violence
Propaganda
Persuasion
Efforts made to influence the public opinion of both the elite and popular in favor of the authoritarian regime.
Often propaganda campaigns are conducted in the context of genuine democratic elections, here the authoritarian regime garners significant levels of popular support before going on to gradually seize power.
Consolidation and Maintenance of Power
Strategies
Legal measures
Laws and constitutions are introduced that do not require multiple party legislative approval or any popular consensus.
These typically reduce the liberty of individuals, criminalize dissent and victimize minority groups in society. Other things removed are freedom of expression, religious freedom, and the right to privacy. Absence of the rule of law that is the most significant characteristic of an authoritarian state, as individual might be arrested and held for an indefinite period of time without access to a lawyer and without having enjoyed a fair trial. In prison, they might be denied basic rights and be subject to physical and psychological abuse and torture.
The new institutions of the prerogative state are defined by their extra-legal status, the fact that would lack any authority in a normative state.
The ability to control the type of people who will exercise power in the state. Controlling who can exercise authority allows the state to reward loyalty and punish dissent. Individuals are appointed because of their ideological suitability, not mere ability. Individual appointments require loyalty to the state; judges, police commissioners and civil servants will on a daily basis reinforce the political and ideological prejudices of the regime.
Creates a patronage system
Force
Secret police
Police agencies that are involved in covert actions against political enemies of the state.
Real or imagined opponents can be abducted by ‘preventative arrest’, indefinitely detained, tortured and murdered without any real ‘crimes’ having been committed and without any due legal process being followed.
Surveillance
Crackdown on privacy and secrecy
Privacy allows for freedom, no privacy means one is not acting freely; one has no control over their actions and therefore is controlled.
The secret police (or other designated agencies) of the prerogative state are primarily responsible for organizing or collating private information on individuals. However, the willingness of citizens to watch and report on each other is also very important.
Citizens are encouraged as part of their civic duty to spy on their neighbors and to denounce those they consider guilty of deviant behavior.
Punishment
Enforced hard labor, humiliation, corporal punishment, torture, and more - death is a possibility
In communist authoritarian states, criminal activity is not the fault of the individual, rather instead a failure in how the individual has socialized and been educated. Naturally, punishment for these criminals would be based around re-education and reforming the character.
Depends on fear
Charisma
Cult of personality of leader
The charismatic leader embodies the state; the regime and the leader are fused into one.
It makes the political process intelligible for the masses. The will and actions of a leader can be made to appear more decisive and dynamic than the complex, competing sources of democratic power.
The leader can be placed above the political fray, the representative of the common man against the elites. When things do go wrong, when obvious injustices are committed, it is the fault of underlings and local officials, not the leader.
The leader becomes a familial source of loyalty and genuine affection; a big brother or father figure who over time becomes a source of consistency and comfort in a rapidly changing world.
The personal qualities of the leader matter more than any policy and therefore the propaganda image of the leader, exaggerated and embellished in paternal, regal or even divine terms, takes on a life of its own.
Dead heroes
Propaganda
Censorship
Direct censorship
The state can decide to withhold information or prevent the expression of a particular viewpoint because its publication and dissemination might otherwise damage the ‘national interest’.
Media management
Governments employ press officers to provide the media with official versions of events. The media dutifully reproduces this version in return for valuable, exclusive information which is denied to media outlets that are less loyal.
A free and independent press is denounced as the enemy of the people
Indirect censorship
The state has no need to be involved in the process at all. With self-censorship, the media understands the ‘unwritten rule’ of what is and is not acceptable to publish and avoids publishing anything that might upset authority. Self-censorship produces a tendency towards conservative content; second guessing what authority might think and the avoidance of risk.
Propagandists usually work for those in positions of political or economic power. Therefore, they seek to influence the opinions and actions of the audience so as to align them with those in power.
The conscious attempt to influence the opinions and actions of an audience in a way that is designed to serve the interests of those who create and spread the propaganda.
Totalitarian mobilization.
Scapegoats for country's problems, specifically a minority group or enemies abroad. Use of propaganda to symbolize and dehumanize groups who are to become victims of the state
Encourage social solidarity through the promotion of a shared past and common myths
Methods
Adapts to modern technologies to convince more people
Authoritarian evasion and social depoliticisation
Can be used to distract the people with entertainment.
Consent to be governed can be manufactured by keeping the masses entertained.
Sporting events can be used to promote own country's superiority
Sporting events and cinema, amongst other things, can help dull the masses.
Handling Opposition
Extent of opposition
Retreatism
Limited but serious expression of opposition in which the individual ‘retreats’ from civil society.
They ‘keep their head down’ and out of trouble. In private among family and friends they trust, they will be confident enough to voice their opposition; to tell jokes about leaders or complain about policies.
Choosing not to volunteer or attend meetings, or join party activities, amongst other ways of silent protest.
Open dissidence
A form of civil disobedience. It is not usually a direct political attack on the regime but is a public form of opposition and therefore can have serious consequences for the dissidents involved.
Civil disobedience
Active refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government. It is sometimes defined as being a nonviolent form of protest.
Typically involves intellectuals protesting censorship or the state’s denial of human rights.
Can also involve opponents of the regime engaging in activities that are on the borders of legality.
Covert resistance
Political opposition that is often dependent on support from outside the regime. It is too important to be accepted by any authoritarian state. Those involved provide a political case against the authoritarian regime, seeking to weaken the regime from within, planning for its replacement. They may sometimes be working with exiled leaders or foreign powers. Their actions are clandestine and treated as terrorism by the state. Accordingly, such opposition is often organized in an independent ‘cell structure’ so that detection does not jeopardize the integrity of the whole resistance movement.
Conspiracies and plots
The plotting of and carrying out of usually violent acts, that seek to bring down the authoritarian regime. These conspiracies are most common and effective in military dictatorships and personalist dictatorships but can be attempted in any authoritarian regime.
Examples include political assassinations, elite coup d'états and invasions by exiles supported by foreign powers.
Nature of oppositon
Individual
Cause suspicion and lead to accusations of antisocial behavior.
Ultimate act of individual opposition is giving own life for the cause of opposition, possibly inspiring others.
Group
Mass opposition
A large and well organized mass movement can be dangerous and deadly for all authoritarian regimes, as a revolutionary momentum can soon lead to calls for regime change and democratization.
Elite opposition
The army, or those close to the person in power move against the person.
Party dictatorships are more likely to withstand successfully an elite opposition.
Internal
All opposition from within the state.
External
Exiled opposition parties
Providing clandestine newspapers and pamphlets or helping the passage of political refugees.
States sympathetic to the opposition
Provide from cultural aid to outright attempts to regime change attempts.
Treatment of opposition
Group co-optation
Perspective of the state
Helps divide and conquer the opposition
Perspective of the co-opted opposition
Dealing with the devil to achieve identifiable group goals
Selective targeting
Treatment of opposition can be both a factor of coercion but also help generate supportive consent. Targeting minorities can be enormously common. Authoritarian states can benefit from an ideological ‘negative cohesion’ that draws disparate social groups together through a shared fear or hatred of an enemy that is more often imagined rather than real.
General repression
Coercion as retribution and deterring would-be opponents. Authoritarian states will use the legal system, the secret police, state surveillance, and punishment systems to coerce opponents into conforming to authoritarian state norms.
Institutional manipulation
Authoritarian state manipulates the institutions of the state to prevent opposition groups from accessing positions of influence or power.
Methods such as nepotistic control of such appointments, or control over electoral processes so that outcomes are rigged in favor of defenders of the authoritarian state.
Very powerful way to treat the opponents because the opposition appears to be excluded on legitimate legal grounds.
Not all opposition is excluded, as a semblance of institutional independence must be maintained. However, opponents can never be in a position to threaten the integrity of the authoritarian state.
Foreign Policy
Successes
Use of war as an extension of diplomacy
Allows authoritarian regime to act with impunity and without regards to how the international community views it
If wars are long enough, democracies will defeat authoritarian regimes
Failures
Ideology
The more ideological the regime, the more ideological the foreign policy; therefore the more likely the policy and regime are to fail lest ideology is beaten by other policies.
Power retention
Militarism and war
Consolidation
Authoritarian states can emerge with a revolution,
but it takes much longer to neutralize the influence of broader civil society, such as rival political parties, trade unions and religious groups as well as to weaken their ability to mobilize and engage the loyalty of the public.
Consolidation of the authoritarian state might require a new constitution, which formally removes fundamental rights and liberties, a new political system and new mechanisms of formal social control, which include concentration camps, secret police forces and new laws.
Consolidation also involves a realignment of the new authoritarian state: former allies are purged and new useful alliances are forged.
Maintenance
Maintenance of authoritarian state requires a combination of coercion, force, and consent.
Rely more on coercion. The military and the police will play a more prominent role in society and laws will be more restrictive of the liberty of the individual.
Persuasion, or informal social control, takes time to be fully effective. Propaganda campaigns and an educational reform take time to shift public attitudes and opinions.
It is essential that public consent must be maintained through policies which are genuinely popular with enough members of the public.
Nature of extent and control
The authoritarian state, in its extreme ‘totalitarian’ form, requires a much greater involvement in the lives of people. In a totalitarian state, maintenance can appear as a process of continual consolidation: state control is never complete, the people never fully transformed and the final victory is always retreating over the horizon.
Aims and Results of Policies
Domestic Policies
Effects on Women and Minorities
Extent of Authoritarian Control Achieved
Political corruption