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Institutions and Power-Sharing in Dictatorships∗

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Institutions and Power-Sharing in Dictatorships∗ The Foundations of Limited Authoritarian Government: Institutions and Power-sharing in Dictatorships∗ Carles Boix† and Milan W. Svolik‡ Word count: 11,921 Abstract Why do dictatorships establish institutions that may constrain their leaders? We propose a new theory of institutions and power-sharing in dictatorships. We argue that by facilitating power-sharing, political institutions promote the survival of dictatorships. However, authoritarian power-sharing succeeds only when it is backed by a credible threat of a rebellion by the dictator’s allies. Whereas the allies’ political opportunities determine the credibility of the threat of a rebellion, institutions alleviate the commitment and moni- toring problems caused by the secrecy in authoritarian governance. We use both historical and large-N data to assess new empirical predictions about the relationship between po- litical institutions, dictator tenures, and the concentration of power in dictatorships. ∗We would like to thank Al´ıcia Adser`a, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Barbara Geddes, Bonnie Weir, the participants at seminars and conferences at Princeton, Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the APSA, IPES, ISA and MPSA annual conventions for helpful comments and Aya Kachi for research assistance. †Department of Politics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton Univer- sity. Email: [email protected]. ‡Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Email: [email protected]. 1 Introduction In the vast majority of authoritarian regimes, dictators govern with the help of political institutions such as parties, legislatures, advisory councils, or committees of notables. With the exception of the 1970s, over 70 percent of dictatorships between 1950 and 1999 have had either a legislature or at least one political party (Figure 1). The proportion of dictatorships with at least one political party was even larger and fluctuated between 70 and 90 percent from 1950 to 1999. In fact, even in dictatorships without legislatures or parties, the leadership often maintains some smaller institutional body, such as a ruling council, that may restrain the tyrannical tendencies of any single ruler. Figure 1 about here. Why do most dictatorships establish institutions that may constrain their leaders? We develop a new theory of institutions and power-sharing in dictatorships that identifies the conditions under which dictatorships govern with institutions such as parties, ruling councils, and even parliaments. We argue that by alleviating commitment and monitoring problems caused by the secrecy that pervades authoritarian governance, these institutions enhance the stability of power-sharing among the ruling elites. However, our theory also clarifies the limits to this benefit: institutions contribute to authoritarian power-sharing only when backed by a credible threat of a rebellion by the dictator’s allies. Thus we identify the circumstances under which institutions contribute to the survival of dictatorships and those under which these institutions will be ineffective or break down. Most dictators do not directly control enough resources to govern alone. Dictators therefore seek the support of a set of notables and agree to share power with them. However, a fundamental commitment problem complicates power-sharing in dictatorships: no independent authority exists that can guarantee that the spoils of joint rule will be divided as the dictator and his allies agreed, since the existence of such an authority would imply a check on the very powers that they wish to monopolize. In other words, the power-sharing 1 agreement between the dictator and his allies constitutes the only source of political authority within this polity. Hence the central dilemma of any dictatorship is to establish a mechanism that allows the dictator and his allies to credibly commit to joint rule. Power-sharing in authoritarian regimes is ultimately sustained by the ability of the ruler’s allies to credibly threaten a rebellion that would replace the dictator should he violate the power-sharing agreement. The dictator violates the agreement when he refuses to share the spoils of joint rule as agreed or when he exploits his privileged access to information about the government and misrepresents the amount of benefits that can be shared. A rebellion is the only deterrent to such violations available to the dictator’s allies. We argue that institutionalized interaction between the ruler and his allies reduces the asymmetries of information that may exist between them and thus facilitates authoritarian power-sharing. The secrecy that pervades authoritarian politics limits the allies’ ability to monitor the dictator: the former may suspect that the dictator is reneging on the power-sharing agreement – even when in fact he is not – and may therefore resort to unnecessary rebellions. Because a rebellion is such a crude deterrent, the dictator and his allies benefit from establishing political institutions that would alleviate commitment and monitoring problems caused by authoritarian secrecy. Regular interaction between the ruler and his allies in bodies with respected participation and decision rules – such as politburos, governing councils, and legislatures – results in greater transparency among those in power and thus prevents unnecessary rebellions. Hence political institutions facilitate power-sharing and thus enhance the survival of authoritarian regimes. Once such institutions are in place, the ruler and his allies can maintain a more stable ruling coalition under less favorable circumstances than would be possible without those institutions. However, we also show that institutions are ineffective or break down when the threat of an allies’ rebellion against the dictator loses credibility. The positive effect of institutions on authoritarian power-sharing is thus contingent on an adequate balance of power within the ruling coalition. 2 Several scholars have recently examined the role of legislatures (Ramseyer and Rosenbluth 1995; Gandhi and Przeworski 2007; Wright 2008; Malesky 2009), parties (Smith 2005; Magaloni 2006; Brownlee 2007; Geddes 2008; Gehlbach and Keefer 2008; Greene 2007), and elections (Levitsky and Way 2003; Lust-Okar 2006; Blaydes 2007; Malesky and Schuler 2010) in authoritarian politics. Although this body of work has made important contributions to the study of dictatorships, it remains incomplete in two ways. First, with some exceptions, existing research focuses narrowly on the analysis of particular cases rather than general mechanisms that work across dictatorships. More importantly, although this literature generally concludes that institutions in dictatorships facilitate authoritarian governance, few authors clearly identify how institutions do so, why the same results could not be accomplished without them, and why they are adopted in some cases but not others. Our theory of institutions in dictatorships provides a unified answer to these questions. We depart from two predominant explanations of the role of political institutions in dictatorships. The first is that autocrats adopt institutions in order to broaden their basis of support by co-opting opposition to the regime (Gandhi and Przeworski 2006; Gandhi 2008). This argument does not explain, however, why co-optation could not occur without institutions. By contrast, we argue that political institutions in dictatorships reduce commitment and monitoring problems in authoritarian power-sharing. Although power-sharing may occur both with and without institutions, institutionalized power-sharing results in more durable ruling coalitions and succeeds under less favorable circumstances than power-sharing without institutions. The second view holds that institutions facilitate the maintenance of norms of collective action within the dictator’s ruling coalition and thus constrain the dictator (North and Weingast 1989; Myerson 2008). Although such a norm-driven coordination of beliefs is possible in principle, it is unclear why institutions would be necessary for the maintenance of such norms or why the balance of power between the dictator and his allies would not affect allies’ adherence to those norms. Instead, we argue that the key determinants of successful 3 collective action in dictatorships are political facts and opportunities, such as the distribution of power between the dictator and his allies or the benefits from supporting the dictator, rather than a focal coordination of beliefs. Our model of an allies’ rebellion builds on the global games methodology (Carlsson and van Damme 1993; Morris and Shin 2003) and we obtain an equilibrium with intuitive implications by assuming that allies lack common knowledge of the regime’s strength. Bueno de Mesquita (2009) and Edmond (2007) have recently applied the global games methodology to collective action problems in regime and leadership change, whereas Chwe (2001) and Medina (2007) develop alternative approaches to collective action with a motivation similar to ours. Meanwhile, Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003), Besley and Kudamatsu (2007), Dal Bo and Powell (2009), Debs (2009), Gehlbach and Keefer (2008), and Myerson (2008) share our focus on institutions, power-sharing, and commitment problems in authoritarian politics. An important advantage of our theoretical model of institutions and power-sharing is that it yields testable empirical predictions about the relationship between political institutions in dictatorships, leader
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