Twentieth-century dictators like Hitler and Mao ruled with violence, fear, repression, and ideology. They engaged in mass slaughter of groups perceived as enemies, publicized their attacks on dissidents to deter others, and kept their citizens from contact with the outside world through censorship and travel restrictions. And they justified all of this with appeals to a grand political vision.
Economist Sergei Guriev and political scientist Daniel Treisman argue that this century’s non-democratic regimes—like those of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán—tend to follow a different model, which they term “informational autocracy.”
Guriev and Treisman suggest that increasing educational levels among citizens, worldwide communications technology, and the rise of the global human rights movement have all made this a more viable path than heavy-handed autocracy. Modern autocrats let their citizens keep in contact with the outside world, maintain elections—albeit often rigged ones—and avoid large-scale violence.
The authors point to Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore as an early adopter of informational autocracy. Speaking with Chinese leaders in the wake of the globally televised 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Lee described his alternative methods when dealing with a student sit-in.
“I cordoned off the whole area around the schools,” he claimed, “shut off the water and electricity, and just waited. I told their parents that health conditions were deteriorating, dysentery was going to spread. And they broke it up without any difficulty.”
Similarly, modern autocrats avoid attacking dissidents in ways likely to turn them into martyrs. Instead, they often have them arrested on embarrassing charges such as embezzlement, corruption, or adultery.
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“Rather than jailing thousands, they target opposition activists, harassing and humiliating them, accusing them of fabricated crimes, and encouraging them to emigrate,” Guriev and Treisman write. “When these autocrats kill, they seek to conceal their responsibility.”
And, where dictators of the past tried to impose a national ideology, today’s autocrats focus on projecting a sense of competence. In these countries, there tends to be a divide between the majority of the public and a highly educated and informed subgroup, who often view the autocrats as bumbling and find their censorship and repression of dissent offensive. Guriev and Treisman suggest that autocracy tends to prevail over democracy when the informed elite is relatively small and when the state can effectively control the flow of information.
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“From this perspective, the key goal of informational autocrats is to prevent elite members from revealing the regime’s flaws to the general public,” they write.
Unlike in dictatorships, this tends to involve not overt methods like book burning but quieter techniques such as co-opting media company shareholders to slant their coverage or using limited censorship supposedly designed to fight extremism or child pornography. When these methods are successful, the general public both perceives the country as having strong freedom of speech and believes the subtle propaganda it disseminates.
“At least some dictators in power today survive not by preventing the masses from rebelling but by removing their desire to do so,” Guriev and Treisman write.
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