How Do Dictatorships Survive in the 21st Century?

Early in the twenty-first century, the number of democracies surged past the tally of authoritarian states worldwide. By 2019, dictatorships outnumbered democracies. Why do they keep rising from the ashes?

By Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman December 6, 2022

Carnegie Reporter Winter 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellows

(Credit: filo via Getty Images)

Early in the twenty-first century, global politics hit a major milestone. For the first time, the number of democracies in the world surged past the tally of authoritarian states. As this seismic “third wave” crested, experts identified 98 countries with free government, compared to 80 still controlled by dictators. The optimism was infectious. New information technologies, globalization, and economic development seemed to be calling “time’s up” on strongman rule. As countries modernized, tyranny was becoming obsolete.

The celebrations did not last long. In fact, they hardly got started. Within a few years, the advance of freedom had petered out, yielding what some quickly termed a “democratic recession.” A dramatic financial crisis, born in the United States, sent the global economy crashing, undercutting faith in Western governance. By 2019, the number of democracies had fallen to 87 while that of dictatorships was back up to 92. In the West, liberalism was proving little match for populism, while in the East, all eyes were turned to China’s meteoric rise. The millennial exuberance gave way to a sense of gloom.

The question is: how can dictatorships survive at all — and even prosper — in an ultramodern world? Why, after all the brutal manias of the twentieth century — from fascism to communism — have been discredited, do we still see new autocracies rising from the ashes? And what to make of the strongmen who are embracing tools of modernity, using Western technologies to challenge Western ways of life?

In Spin Dictators, we attempt to explain the nature of current dictatorships. The book grew out of a mixture of research and personal experience. We both spent years tracking the rise of Vladimir Putin’s system in Russia, through academic analysis and firsthand observation. His regime came to seem to us not unique but rather an exemplar of trends that were reshaping authoritarian states worldwide — from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary to Mahathir Mohamad’s Malaysia and Nursultan Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan. Observers struggle with what to call these leaders. Some fall for their pantomime of democracy; others offer awkward analogies to historical strongmen, labeling Putin a “tsar” or President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a “sultan.” We see all these rulers as converging on a novel — though not unprecedented — approach that can preserve autocracy for a while in even modern, globalized settings. The key to this is deception: most dictators today conceal their true nature.

What Exactly Is a Dictatorship?

In the Roman Republic, where the term originated, “dictatorship” meant a temporary grant of absolute power to a leader to handle some emergency. These days, the word is used to refer to any nondemocratic government. It has become synonymous with authoritarianism and autocracy. A democracy, in turn, is a state whose political leaders are chosen in free and fair elections in which all — or almost all — adult citizens have the right to vote. A liberal democracy combines free elections with the rule of law, constitutionally protected civil liberties, and institutional checks and balances.

Before the twentieth century, no states were fully democratic. Even those that held free and fair elections denied most women the vote. Only five countries had universal male suffrage in 1900 — and not the United States, where African Americans were disenfranchised in the Jim Crow South. Besides a handful of restricted suffrage republics like the United States, most political systems fell into three baskets: monarchies, in which a king or queen ruled, sometimes constrained by a constitution and a partly representative parliament; oligarchies, in which factions of the rich governed; and colonies, administered by a foreign power.

That changed in the twentieth century as democracy spread in three great waves. The first peaked around 1920 as new states splintered from the European empires destroyed by World War I and Western governments liberalized their voting rules. The second occurred between the late 1940s and early 1960s as the winners of World War II imposed democracy on the losers and former colonies in Asia and Africa held elections. The third wave — a true tsunami — started with Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” in 1974, picked up speed as communism collapsed around 1990, and reached its apex in the mid-2000s. By 2015, more than half of all countries — containing 53 percent of the world’s population — were electoral democracies, and about one in four was a liberal democracy. Yet, even as democracy expanded, dictatorship did not disappear.

Twentieth-century dictatorships were diverse. Still, most shared certain features. In short, most dictators maintained power by repressing any opposition, controlling all communications, punishing critics, (often) imposing an ideology, attacking the ideal of pluralist democracy, and blocking most cross-border flows of people and information. The key principle behind all these practices was simple: intimidation. The typical twentieth-century autocrat was a dictator of fear.

Fear and Spin

Dictators have been changing. The classic tyrants of the twentieth century — Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong — were larger-than-life figures responsible for the deaths of millions. They set out to build new civilizations within their tightly guarded — and sometimes expanding — borders. That meant controlling not just people’s public behavior but also their private lives. To do that, each created a disciplined party and a brutal secret police. Not every old-school dictator was a genocidal killer or the prophet of some utopian creed. But even the less bloodthirsty ones were expert at projecting fear. Terror was their all-purpose tool.

However, toward the end of the century something changed. Strongmen around the world started turning up to meetings in conservative suits instead of military uniforms. Most stopped executing their opponents in front of packed football stadiums. Many flew to the annual business conference in the Swiss resort of Davos to schmooze with the global elite. These new dictators hired pollsters and political consultants, staged citizen call-in shows, and sent their children to study at universities in the West. They did not loosen their grip over the population — far from it, they worked to design more effective instruments of control. But they did so while acting the part of democrats.

Not all autocrats have made this leap. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad would fit well into a scrapbook of twentieth-century despots. In China and Saudi Arabia, rulers have digitized the old fear-based model instead of replacing it. But the global balance has shifted. Among leaders of nondemocracies today, the representative figure is no longer a totalitarian tyrant like Josef Stalin, a sadistic butcher like Idi Amin, or even a reactionary general like Augusto Pinochet. He is a suave manipulator like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong — a ruler who pretends to be a humble servant of the people.

This new model is based on a brilliant insight. The central goal remains the same: to monopolize political power. But today’s strongmen realize that in current conditions violence is not always necessary or even helpful. Instead of terrorizing citizens, a skillful ruler can control them by reshaping their beliefs about the world. He can fool people into compliance and even enthusiastic approval. In place of harsh repression, the new dictators manipulate information. Like spin doctors in a democracy, they spin the news to engineer support. They are spin dictators.

A Powerful Idea

The West today faces a complicated challenge. In the world wars of the twentieth century and the Cold War, the enemies of freedom wore no disguise. Their military tunics, impassioned speeches, and public executions left little doubt about their true nature. The geopolitical dividing lines were drawn in black and white.

These days, the map is mainly shaded in gray. Except for a few strongmen like Kim Jong-un and Bashar al-Assad who oblige by playing the villain, most are harder to place. They blend in and erode international society from within.

Many today fear Western states will become more like spin dictator regimes — that our democracies will sink into spin. Some opportunistic politicians try for exactly that. They forge television and social media links to the unsophisticated and unhappy, while co-opting elite helpers. Such politicians have destabilized some fragile third-wave democracies and even some more established ones — like Venezuela’s — where the educated class was narrow and compromised.

In more developed, highly educated societies, what holds back aspiring spin dictators, we argue, is the resistance of networks of lawyers, judges, civil servants, journalists, activists, and opposition politicians. Such leaders survive for a while, lowering the tone and eroding their country’s reputation. But, so far, they have all been voted out of office to face possible corruption prosecutions. That was the outcome for Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump. No one can be sure this will always be the case. But if it is, the credit will go less to institutions per se than to those who defend them.

Internationally, Western societies are now linked to the dictatorships of the world by multiple capillaries. There is no safe way to opt out of the global system. A better goal is to make that system healthier and ensure it works in the West’s interest. This is a contest that can be won. Spin dictators would like their citizens to trust them and distrust the West. They thrive in a world of cynicism and relativism. But the West has something they do not: a powerful idea around which it can unite, the idea of liberal democracy.

This idea — although some today see it as tarnished — is, in fact, the West’s strongest weapon. Reinforcing the commitment to it is good policy both at home and abroad, which is why autocrats are so eager to stand in the way. Indeed, concern that the West may reinvigorate its democracy and set a strong example animates today’s fear and spin dictators alike. Both will throw up obstacles. But the only way to defeat an idea is with a better idea, and they do not have one. That spin dictators pretend to be democrats proves they have no vision to offer. They can only delay and discourage us for a while — if we let them.

Daniel Treisman is a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His Corporation-funded fellowship aims to assess threats to today’s democracies — and devise strategies to strengthen them — by exploring the historical processes through which they emerged. Sergey Guriev is professor of economics and director of graduate studies in economics at Sciences Po in Paris and former chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

This article is an edited excerpt from Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman. Copyright © 2022. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.