Dictators, revisited

 Four years ago this week, I had a debate with John Quiggin over at Crooked Timber. Briefly, he said that dictatorship was on the way out as a form of government. I sharply disagreed. Four years seems like a reasonable amount of time to circle back and ground-truth.

Here is the original post. Take a moment to click through, so that we’re all agreed on definitions. Good? Okay, then: Who are the world’s remaining dictators, and have their numbers changed since 2011? The 2011 list is below, with original comments in italics and 2015 updates in parentheses.

Angola: Dos Santos has been the President nonstop since 1979. There are significant limits on his power, but IMO he qualifies. (Dos Santos celebrated 35 years in power last year. NO CHANGE.)

Azerbaijan (NO CHANGE)

Belarus (NO CHANGE)

Cambodia: Hun Sen, a bland and retiring little man, has ruled unchallenged since the middle 1980s. (He rules still. NO CHANGE.)

Cameroon: Paul Biya since 1982. The country has kept the trappings of a democratic republic, including opposition parties, but Biya is in charge and he’s not going anywhere. (He hasn’t gone anywhere. NO CHANGE.)

Chad (It’s still Idriss Déby. NO CHANGE.)

Congo Republic (NO CHANGE)

Congo, Democratic Republic: President Kabila, son of the late President Kabila, is likely to stay in power for the foreseeable future. He’s in a tie with Aliyev of Azerbaijan for youngest dictator — they’re both just 40. (And now they’re both 44. But otherwise, NO CHANGE.)

Cuba: Raúl, not Fidel. It’s surprising how many people think it’s still Fidel. (NO CHANGE.)

Djibouti (NO CHANGE.)

Equatorial Guinea: This is a nasty one. Doesn’t get much attention, of course. (It’s still nasty. NO CHANGE.)

Eritrea: Afewerki is another nasty one. A shame, since his rule started with really high hopes. (NO CHANGE.)

Ethiopia (Ethiopia’s long-term dictator Meles Zenawa died in 2012. However, his successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, has been governing in much the same manner — centralized one-party rule with no public opposition or criticism. In May 2015 Ethiopia held parliamentary “elections”; the ruling party won 90% of the seats and its allies took the rest.  Ethiopia’s human rights record continues to be dire, and it looks like Desalegn has settled in for the long run. NO CHANGE.) 

Kazakhstan (NO CHANGE.)

North Korea (Supreme Leader Kim died in late 2011, and was replaced by his son, Supreme Leader Kim. NO CHANGE.)

Rwanda (NO CHANGE.)

South Sudan: I’m jumping the gun here, because the country of South Sudan is just a few months old. But President Kiir has already made it pretty clear that he’s not going anywhere. (And he hasn’t. Four years later, Kiir is a post-colonial African dictator in the classic style. But the country is in the middle of a civil war, and therefore by definition not stable. So ... CHANGE.)

Sudan (NO CHANGE.)

Syria: At least for the nonce — I think Assad has a decent chance of sticking around. (And four years later he is still around. You can argue whether he’s a proper dictator, though, as he has now lost control of about half his country’s population and ¾ of its territory. I’ll give this CHANGE.)

Tajikistan (NO CHANGE.)

Turkmenistan (NO CHANGE.)

Uganda: To nobody’s surprise, President Museveni won a fourth term a few months ago. (And he’ll likely win a fifth next year. NO CHANGE.)

Uzbekistan (NO CHANGE.)

Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe, still hanging in there at age 87, has been the world’s oldest dictator for a while now. (And, good grief, he’s STILL hanging in there at age 91. NO CHANGE.)

So, of 24 clear dictatorships in 2011, two have perhaps slipped out of that category — South Sudan is in the middle of a civil war, and Syria’s Assad has lost control over much of his country.

Did we overlook anything in our original list? Gambia has a good case: Yahya Jammeh came to power in a 1994 and shows no sign of leaving soon. So did Burkina Faso, but Blaise Compaoré fled at the end of 2014. Acting retroactively, that would make Burkina the third country to have left dictatorship since the original post. 

Have any new dictatorships been added? We would say yes, three. Two of these are pretty minor and one is not minor at all. The minor ones are Fiji and Togo, both of which I listed as borderline cases back in 2011. In Fiji, the Prime Minister operates within what looks like a British-style constitutional framework, but a permanent legislative supermajority, a hand-picked judiciary and an unfree press means he can basically rule at will. In Togo, President Gnassingbe has just won another “election” and looks good to stay in power indefinitely.

The not so minor one is Russia. Back in 2011 I said that Russia was authoritarian, but not a dictatorship. But in the last four years, Russia has become dramatically more illiberal, power has been ever more centralized, multiple critics and opponents of the regime have been prosecuted, imprisoned, or murdered outright, and the cult of personality around Putin has grown extreme. All of these things were just getting started in 2011, but they’ve moved very rapidly since. At this point we think it’s reasonable to call Russia a dictatorship.

We also have two new borderline cases. The small one is Burundi, where President Pierre Nkurunziza plunged his country into unrest after what looks to have been a power grab. He hasn’t established full control, however, so it’s not a dictatorship and looks unlikely to become one. The big one is Venezuela. A while back, we argued that the Polity IV database had jumped the gun by classifying the country a dictatorship. It still isn’t there yet — President Maduro does not rule by decree and he is facing contested legislative elections in December. But the trend since Chavez’s death has been sharply authoritarian. The government has banned opposition candidates, refused to permit foreign observers, and arrested opposition leaders. We hesitate to call it a dictatorship yet, however — partly because this trend is fairly recent, and partly because it is not clear how much power is really consolidated in President Maduro’s hands. The December elections should provide strong evidence one way or another.

In summary: two medium-size countries have fallen out thanks to ongoing civil wars. One small one has ousted its dictator. Meanwhile two small countries and one large important country have joined the club.

In other words, dictatorship does not seem to be on its way out as a form of government.

Comments

[shah8]

Man, I wrote a bunch of wrong stuff, saw this is obvious, and had to read that original post to see what you meant as dictator. The exclusion of GCC leadership is somewhat suspect. For example, some of the kings operate with substantially less legitimacy than others. Bahrain and Jordan are distinctly different situations from Oman or Morocco.

That being said, hey...Thailand?! That junta doesn't seem to be going away, and it's doubtful that the structure will change when the "constitutional monarch" is due and the succession happens. I know junta isn't supposed to be considered a dictatorship, but it doesn't feel as power is as dispersed as the Myanmar junta was. Egypt the same as Thailand...

I'd also include pull out Bangladesh from the oligarchy pool, since it's something of a dual power structure sort of place.

[Doug M.]

I was sincerely wondering whether people would click through to the original post!

I agree that the exclusion of monarchies is slightly arbitrary. That said, I do see at least one key difference: monarchies generally have a fixed set of rules for succession, and they operate regardless of whether the successor wants power or is good at wielding it. Jordan's current King has his points, but one has the strong impression he'd have been happier as a minor Hollywood actor with a specialty in genre films.

Also, monarchies tend to have heirs apparent. That's true even in appointive monarchies where the incumbent chooses from a pool of eligible male relatives. And this is in contrast to most dictatorships; dictators generally do not anoint successors before they die.

Juntas and oligarchies are their own interesting thing. Thailand seems to be locked in a cycle of elite -> populist -> elite/military rule that's faintly reminiscent of Latin America a generation or two back. (Or of Pakistan, if you want to get depressed.) Egypt, there's a common pattern where one guy starts out as _primus inter pares_ and consolidates power over time; I don't know if Egypt will go that way but I won't be at all surprised.

I don't think Myanmar was actually that dispersed -- more like the top guy was shy, and happy to run things from behind the scenes. It's in a state of flux at the moment, sure.

Doug M.

[birdboy2000]

What got worse in Fiji from 2011 to 2015 to move it out of the borderline column? I was of the understanding it had moved from being openly a military dictatorship to having (not entirely free or fair) elections. Then again, the international press being no more willing to treat Bainimarama like a dictator than the domestic press might have thrown me off.

Also, something seriously depressing about two of the three incidents of change being the result of civil wars where many of the rebel factions seem no more enthused about democracy than the incumbent.

[Doug M.]

In the case of Fiji, the obviousness of the theft of the last election. "Not entirely free or fair" is a bit of an understatement.

That said, I do still think Fiji is an edge case. It's just an edge case that in the last few years has (IMO) moved from "not quite" to "just barely". But if I had to lose one off the list, yeah, I'd probably pick Fiji.

Doug M.

[shah8]

Myanmar's military got rid of a couple of insolent politicals yesterday, so feeling the burning relevance in this post.

[Bernard Guerrero]

If we're using "does not anoint successor" as a factor it works against some otherwise clear cases like NK and Cuba. That doesn't sound right.

[Noel Maurer]

Hmm -- I don't think Doug proposed that a succession mechanism was a separating characteristic. He merely observed that "most dictatorships" don't pick the successor dictator, which is true.

Moreover, the succession in dictatorships is almost never institutionalized. Even in Assad's case, there was an ad hockery to the succession, with his son needing to take a long time to build support within the regime.

What makes the Cuban and North Korean examples closer to the monarchies than to the other remaining dictatorships is that they possess an ideology that legitimizes unelected rule. I'm not sure how important it is to have a legitimizing ideology -- neither Marxism-Leninism nor monarchism is a particularly powerful meme these days --- but it is ironically a similarity between the Communists and the monarchists.

(Let's not mention Baathism; that ship sailed a while ago.)

[JohnQuiggin (@JohnQuiggin)]

Tried to post this before, but it didn't work.

Putin is the important case here. He's the kind of Bonapartist leader I had in mind in my original post, and Russia is big and important enough that a return to dictatorship there would be much more significant than changes to the rest of the list.

I'm still not convinced he has reached dictator status. In particular, he hasn't needed to, since AFAICT he has always had enough genuine popular support to win elections. This might change if the economy sours badly and people get sick of distractions like Ukraine.

As regards the other countries on the list, my reading (which may be disproved by Putin) would be that personal dictatorship is now just a variety of failed state.

[Doug Muir]

"Could win an election" is not really a relevant indicator-- which is why it's not on our original list. Many dictators could win fair elections.

I really don't know what you mean by "failed state"; could you explain? Many dictatorships are in poor countries, but that's something else again. Ethiopia, Cuba, Belarus and Kazakhstan have a lot of problems, but nobody could plausibly call them "failed states".

Doug M.

[Noel Maurer]

John might mean that none of the countries on the list look to making the jump to high-income status anytime soon. The problem with that, of course, is that very few countries of any political stripe have made that leap. Portugal and Spain, of course, closed most of their gap with the high-income core under personal dictatorships, as did South Korea.

[Doug Muir]

On the other hand, several of the world's fastest-growing countries are on that list.

Doug M.

[Noel Maurer]

True that. I was just responding on behalf of Professor Quiggin, considering that I suspect he himself has gone AWOL from this thread.

But to continuing channeling what I think he would say, until he shows up, the response would be that few observers think that the rapidly-growing countries in the above list are going to make it to high-income status. Some are riding oil booms, while others are still enjoying the easy stage of early economic growth, where all the government needs to do is stop doing silly things and allow the population to take advantage of technologies long-invented elsewhere.

It's not a terrible rebuttal, but here's hoping that he comes back to explain what he meant himself. Y'know, I'm still a little weirded out by how he ignored me on the original thread. But then again, I'm a weak and sensitive soul.

[Doug M.]

Well, four years ago he pointed out that most of these are relatively poor and unimportant countries. True-ish, but that's a long way from "failed state".

Doug M.

[JohnQuiggin (@JohnQuiggin)]

I'm considering indicators like hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, state-induced famine in North Korea, collapse into civil war in several countries on the list, and general absence of any positive prospects.

Perhaps you want to define "failed state" more narrowly. But (module Russia) there is still a huge difference between this list and the one you could have drawn up in, say, the 1970s, when dictatorship was common in middle income countries in Western Europe, Asia and Latin America.

[JohnQuiggin (@JohnQuiggin)]

"modulo" not "module"

[Doug M.]

I would agree that most of these countries are poor, and many of them are deeply troubled. I would further agree that there are a lot fewer middle income countries on the list than there were 40 years ago. However, the original question was whether dictatorship was disappearing. The available evidence is that, no, it isn't. As we discussed back when, there was a downward crash in the number of dictatorships in the 1990s, but after that jolt it has stayed roughly stable since the turn of the century.

I would also note that while most of the list is indeed poor, there are several middle-income dictatorships: Kazakhstan, Belarus, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan all have per capita GDPs (PPP adjusted) in excess of $10,000 per year. Kazakhstan in particular is an upper-middle income country that is richer than half a dozen EU members.

I must sharply disagree about positive prospects. As noted above, the list includes some of the fastest growing GDPs in the world. Ethiopia, for instance, has been showing Asian-tiger levels of hothouse growth -- over 10% pa, sustained for about a decade now. Per capita income has nearly tripled. Yes, that just means they've moved from "desperately poor" to "very poor". But OTOH that's actually a huge difference, and the Ethiopians themselves are very aware of it.

More generally, if you look at that list's growth rates over the last four years -- weighting for population if you really want to be diligent about it -- I'm pretty sure it would be higher than the world's average growth rate over the same period, even with disaster cases like Syria and South Sudan weighing it down. I'm doing a project cost-benefit analysis this week, but if anyone else wants to check this, have at it.

Doug M.

[John Quiggin]

" However, the original question was whether dictatorship was disappearing."

Not really. My original post began and ended with the observation that this form of government had declined sharply since the 1960s, a point on which we agree, I think. The secondary point of disagreement is whether the trend is still downwards.

[Doug M.]

...your original post began by saying the the fall of Qaddafi was "pretty close to being the end of tyranny, in the historical sense of absolute rule by an individual who has seized power". That's the very first sentence. If you want to call it a secondary point, okay, that's fine.

Back in the comments thread, I predicted that the number of dictators in the world would be pretty much the same in 2020 as it was in 2011. That's looking pretty good, unfortunately.

Doug M.