Most Dictators Self Destruct. Why?
Most Dictators Self Destruct. Why?
In most cases, democratization has followed an authoritarian ruler’s mistake.
Bloomberg
Leonid Bershidsky
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/most-dictators-self-destruct-why
Ceausescu was overconfident. Photo by Spiegl / Ullstein Bild via Getty Images.
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According to Treisman, deliberate liberalization — whether to forestall a revolution, motivate people to fight a foreign invader, defeat competing elite groups or make a pact with them — only occurred in up to a third of the cases. In the rest, democratization was an accident: As they set off a chain of events, rulers didn't intend to relinquish power. Some of them — such as Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president — have admitted as much.
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These are all very human errors of judgment. Dictators are people, too, and sometimes they'll act on imperfect information or erroneous gut feeling. But Treisman makes the point that they may be prone to such errors precisely because they are dictators. They'll be fooled by polls which people don't answer sincerely, taken in by their own propaganda (like Malawi ruler Hastings Banda, who called and lost a referendum in 1993 because he'd been impressed by the high turnout at rallies in his support even though people had been forced to attend them). And sometimes they'll rule for so long that their mental faculties will be less sharp than at the outset.
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But even Putin, after 17 years in power, is in danger of making a miscalculation one day, perhaps finally misreading the mood of the increasingly cynical Russian public that keeps registering support for him in largely worthless polls. It's easy to imagine the choleric Erdogan getting into an armed conflict Turkey cannot sustain or using disproportional violence as Turks' patience with his reprisals wear thin. It's a possibility, although a remote one, that, after Xi's power consolidation, the Chinese Communist Party will opt for a more liberal successor and he won't be able to hold the reins as tightly.
Treisman notes that in 85 percent of the episodes he studied, democratization was preceded by mass unrest. Sooner or later, people tend to get tired of regimes in which they have little say. Then, it only takes a misstep from the one person at the center of such a regime. Dictators often overestimate the external danger to their power, the plots of foreign or exiled enemies. In the final analysis, they are the biggest threat to themselves.
Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. For more columns from Bloomberg Opinion, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/opinion.
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...and Stalin and Mao, after comparable body counts, died in bed. So I'm not too sanguine. And Dolt45 isn't thru yet...
