The most stable forms of government are democracies and monarchies; nothing else endures that long.
What’s the difference between a monarchy and a dictatorship? A monarchy has rules of succession but most monarchies foundered through contested successions. A dictator can also groom a successor (like Kim Jong-Un). And many monarchs who didn’t inherit their power could be called dictators.
Robespierre was deposed from within his own government—and so the Terror, for all its bloodshed, didn’t even last a full year. The worse excesses of Stalinism ended with Stalin. Gorbachev voluntarily opened up his regime (to a certain extent). Mao would excoriate the China of today.
All of these are examples of very stable dictatorships. As you point out, none of them were close to revolution (Gorbachev’s USSR had coup attempts, but not popular revolutions). In each case, when the successors attained power, they repudiated the previous dictator’s harsh policies and instituted reforms—something which is easiest to do during a generational change of power. This didn’t happen because the dictatorships weren’t stable.
What’s the difference between a monarchy and a dictatorship?
There are both ideological and practical differences. A monarch is head of state explicitly because of his ancestry; further, they tend to go with a hereditary aristocracy explicitly identified as such. (The Soviet nomenklatura was certainly hereditary, but it was not part of the public organisation of the USSR.) A dictator may inherit power from his father, but that’s not the basis of his legitimacy; he is dictator because he “safeguards the revolution” or “leads the Party” or whatever. In fact, monarchies generally speaking don’t have an explicit ideology, unless you count “family X shall retain the throne”; dictatorships have,a least publicly, some sort of theoretical underpinning, whether it’s marxist-leninism, lebensraum for the X race, or Ordnung Muss Sein.
Further, monarchs have, as a general rule, been less obvious about the mailed fist; secret police and censorship certainly occur, but they are not central, obvious features of the regime. They also tend to be less overtly militaristic; note for example that Britain has a Royal Navy and a Royal Air Force, but a British Army. That’s because it descends from the New Model Army, raised by Cromwell to fight for Parliament (against the King) in the Civil War.
Monarchies are also, perhaps, more long-term in their extraction of surplus; shearing the sheep rather than butchering it. A warlord or bandit who expects to be thrown out next year has no incentive to let the peasants keep their seed corn; a monarch who expects to pass his throne to his children will even let them keep enough of their stuff to do long-term improvements like, say, building roads and canals. A dictatorship, I suggest, is usually somewhere between these two extremes. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monarchies was unusual in a monarchy, but would not stand out in a dictatorship.
ETA: sorry, mixed you up with other commenters. Here’s what’s left of my response:
The original claim was that dictatorships are less stable than monarchies. Your definition of the difference between the two might say that this is because monarchies have stable inheritance rules, while in dictatorships, which don’t, a new dictator is often weak at first. This can topple or amend the dictatorship.
This claim (which you didn’t make) doesn’t convince me, to which I responded (after correcting my comments) in my reply here.
Yes, I was only responding to the question about the difference—I wasn’t making any claims about the stability. It is not really clear that monarchies last all that long; if you look at England, they tend to get a new dynasty every two hundred years, or whatever, usually after a civil war. It’s not obvious that you want to consider this a continuation of the monarchy; you might just as well consider it a new one.
The Roman Empire should probably be classified as a dictatorship, but it didn’t have 200 years without succession violence. The “Five Good Empires” period lasted 100 years, though.
Maybe the Vatican should count as a dictatorship. It has had succession violence, but probably less often than England. But maybe it is too decentralized to count.
These cases might have happened because the dictator in charge after the power transition was weak and sought public support. A dictator tends to deliberately build a state that will be highly unstable after he dies, by making sure no one person is politically stronger than everyone else. In that sense dictatorships are inherently unstable. Oligarchies, though, are different.
[Edited heavily because I mixed up my responses first, sorry.]
I think there’s a selection bias here. When we look at the worst recent dictators (Stalin, Mao) we see that their successors were less despotic. But that’s because we selected the most despotic outliers, so of course there was regression to the mean afterwards. We could as easily ask: when Stalin or Mao were rising to power and still weak, why did they turn out to be more despotic than their predecessors?
Also, the states that Stalin and Mao built were stable, even if successorship wasn’t clear. A weak successor can seek support from a court party, the army, the rich, the church, or other privileged groups. All these groups are often united against the broader population, no matter what faction they support in court politics.
Many monarchies have had weak or contested successors, or outright succession wars. And many dictatorships have had strong successors who were just as despotic once they established their rule. So I don’t think monarchies are more stable as a rule, not without seeing a quantitative analysis.
We could as easily ask: when Stalin or Mao were rising to power and still weak, why did they turn out to be more despotic than their predecessors?
Do we have many examples of relatively stable regimes that suddenly got a lot worse? Robespierre, Stalin, Mao—they all came to power in a type of revolution (and Hitler came to power in a very illegitimate democratic regime).
Maybe some of the monarchies, thinking about it… but the worse examples still seem to be just after regime changes.
Drastic change in most policies, and in either direction (good/bad), is most likely to happen after a regime change. This is just because in an autocracy, the most important policies are set by the ruler, and people don’t change their opinions much, and changing an important policy is a politically weak move.
Whereas when a new ruler acquires power, he will want to make at least some changes—what’s the chance that the existing policies suit him better than any alternative? And differentiating himself from the previous ruler can be politically beneficial.
But it doesn’t follow the changes he makes will be to improve or relax his rule.
This seems to need a formal analysis, rather than an exchange of anecdotes. But we should have some examples, to define what we’re talking about. Can you give examples of long-term regimes that got worse some time after their creation? I’m thinking Henry VIII, for instance, but I’m not sure what you have in mind.
I’m not sure why you’re asking this. That long regimes can (or tend to?) get progressively worse wasn’t part of my argument. I was saying that there tends to be more change at the start of a reign than later on. And therefore, absent data to the contrary, I see no reason to believe these changes trend towards relaxation after regime changes, rather than merely showing regression to the mean.
As for long-term regimes that got worse later on: Mao seems to qualify, since the worst of his tyranny (e.g. Cultural Revolution) happened later on. Hitler didn’t commit any world-scale atrocities until World War II started. Stalinism was worse in the Thirties than in the Twenties, and worse again in WW2.
What’s the difference between a monarchy and a dictatorship?
Incentives and time preferences. Ceteris Paribus a monarch with children he cares about has lower time preferences, since he has good reason to believe they will inherit ownership of the country. The second important difference is that dictators usually rule in the name of the people, deriving legitimacy from an abstracted will of the people. They are demotist.
Monarchies not so much. Kings derive legitimacy from the will of God(s), sometimes claiming to being such. An alternative basis for legitimacy that is often present is that this society sees the idea privately instead of publicly owned government as acceptable. As long as say a Queen doesn’t use the state to violate the property of her subjects too much, they have an incentive to maintain the respect for private property norm that legitimizes the monarch as well as their own wealth. The state as a family business is a de facto and rather stable reality in many nominal democracies as well.
The legitimacy issue is perhaps more important. As long as some people with influence accept the theory that gives legitimacy to the rightful heir, the monarch has a built-in advantage over any challenger. That may be quite small, but there is a multiplier effect, because those who value stability and peace will also support the monarch over a rival in order to preserve that stabilising factor. That is quite explicit in some writing from the period (nothing to hand, sorry) - “We must support the King because the existence of a rightful king is what saves us from perpetual civil war”
Monarchies tend to break down when that advantage is lost, either due to unclear succession, or an obviously incompetent heir. Civil war due to these situations was common enough that the stability argument was seen as realistic and concrete.
The second important difference is that dictators usually rule in the name of the people, deriving legitimacy from an abstracted will of the people. They are demotist.
What practical difference does that make with a strong, tyrannical dictator? Whatever the official theory, the people can’t depose him and choose a different ruler.
What’s the difference between a monarchy and a dictatorship?
Mainly that transitions of power are more likely to be stable in a monarchy. The king’s more likely to be an idiot, but there’s less probability of a fight for the throne. However, it looks like real monarchies were more appropriate for a specific era.
I’d say that monarchies tend to have a greater emphasis on legitimacy (therefore one can contest legitimacy rather than just brutely fight for the throne), plus cultural ties.
What’s the difference between a monarchy and a dictatorship?
I am aware of a few potential differences, but the most significant one I can think of boils down to that there are a large number of well known ceremonial monarchies and not nearly as many ceremonial dictatorships.
This seems to go along with things like the concept of a Monarch having somewhat more limited powers seems well established ever since the Magna Carta, and that the original concept of Roman dictators seemed to be explicitly that they did not have to obey those kind of limits.
However, if you were to ask what is the difference between an Absolute Monarchy and a Dictatorship, I don’t have much of an answer. Those seem much closer together.
However, if you were to ask what is the difference between an Absolute Monarchy and a Dictatorship, I don’t have much of an answer. Those seem much closer together.
For purposes of the original claim that monarchies are more stable, I think we can ignore constitutional monarchies, because those are just vestigial and are completely different from the other kinds.
Non-absolute monarchies (where nobles or a non-popularly-elected assembly share power) do count. It would help at this point to see a quantitative review of monarchies (absolute and non-absolute) and compare their stability trends with dictatorships.
People sometimes use the term despotism to refer to a system of government where there is no expectation that the ruling group (often of one) will obey a rule of law. I think that’s a better way to demarcate the systems.
I’ve seen governments organized in a 2x2 categorization where the two factors are despotism (whether or not the ruling power is arbitrary) and penetration (how much capacity to interfere in the lives of its subjects does the ruling power have).
Possibly by accident of history (most monarchies are pre-modern and most dictatorships are modern) monarchies have generally been high despotism, low penetration, while dictatorships have been high despotism, high penetration.
(A functioning modern democracy would be an example of low despotism, high penetration—it can interfere in many ways in the lives of the citizenry, but doesn’t generally do so arbitrarily.)
What’s the difference between a monarchy and a dictatorship? A monarchy has rules of succession but most monarchies foundered through contested successions. A dictator can also groom a successor (like Kim Jong-Un). And many monarchs who didn’t inherit their power could be called dictators.
All of these are examples of very stable dictatorships. As you point out, none of them were close to revolution (Gorbachev’s USSR had coup attempts, but not popular revolutions). In each case, when the successors attained power, they repudiated the previous dictator’s harsh policies and instituted reforms—something which is easiest to do during a generational change of power. This didn’t happen because the dictatorships weren’t stable.
There are both ideological and practical differences. A monarch is head of state explicitly because of his ancestry; further, they tend to go with a hereditary aristocracy explicitly identified as such. (The Soviet nomenklatura was certainly hereditary, but it was not part of the public organisation of the USSR.) A dictator may inherit power from his father, but that’s not the basis of his legitimacy; he is dictator because he “safeguards the revolution” or “leads the Party” or whatever. In fact, monarchies generally speaking don’t have an explicit ideology, unless you count “family X shall retain the throne”; dictatorships have,a least publicly, some sort of theoretical underpinning, whether it’s marxist-leninism, lebensraum for the X race, or Ordnung Muss Sein.
Further, monarchs have, as a general rule, been less obvious about the mailed fist; secret police and censorship certainly occur, but they are not central, obvious features of the regime. They also tend to be less overtly militaristic; note for example that Britain has a Royal Navy and a Royal Air Force, but a British Army. That’s because it descends from the New Model Army, raised by Cromwell to fight for Parliament (against the King) in the Civil War.
Monarchies are also, perhaps, more long-term in their extraction of surplus; shearing the sheep rather than butchering it. A warlord or bandit who expects to be thrown out next year has no incentive to let the peasants keep their seed corn; a monarch who expects to pass his throne to his children will even let them keep enough of their stuff to do long-term improvements like, say, building roads and canals. A dictatorship, I suggest, is usually somewhere between these two extremes. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monarchies was unusual in a monarchy, but would not stand out in a dictatorship.
ETA: sorry, mixed you up with other commenters. Here’s what’s left of my response:
The original claim was that dictatorships are less stable than monarchies. Your definition of the difference between the two might say that this is because monarchies have stable inheritance rules, while in dictatorships, which don’t, a new dictator is often weak at first. This can topple or amend the dictatorship.
This claim (which you didn’t make) doesn’t convince me, to which I responded (after correcting my comments) in my reply here.
Yes, I was only responding to the question about the difference—I wasn’t making any claims about the stability. It is not really clear that monarchies last all that long; if you look at England, they tend to get a new dynasty every two hundred years, or whatever, usually after a civil war. It’s not obvious that you want to consider this a continuation of the monarchy; you might just as well consider it a new one.
Few dictatorships last that long.
Could you please name some that did?
The Roman Empire should probably be classified as a dictatorship, but it didn’t have 200 years without succession violence. The “Five Good Empires” period lasted 100 years, though.
Maybe the Vatican should count as a dictatorship. It has had succession violence, but probably less often than England. But maybe it is too decentralized to count.
Can’t think of any, in fact (which is my point). However, there may be one or two that don’t spring to mind.
These cases might have happened because the dictator in charge after the power transition was weak and sought public support. A dictator tends to deliberately build a state that will be highly unstable after he dies, by making sure no one person is politically stronger than everyone else. In that sense dictatorships are inherently unstable. Oligarchies, though, are different.
[Edited heavily because I mixed up my responses first, sorry.]
I think there’s a selection bias here. When we look at the worst recent dictators (Stalin, Mao) we see that their successors were less despotic. But that’s because we selected the most despotic outliers, so of course there was regression to the mean afterwards. We could as easily ask: when Stalin or Mao were rising to power and still weak, why did they turn out to be more despotic than their predecessors?
Also, the states that Stalin and Mao built were stable, even if successorship wasn’t clear. A weak successor can seek support from a court party, the army, the rich, the church, or other privileged groups. All these groups are often united against the broader population, no matter what faction they support in court politics.
Many monarchies have had weak or contested successors, or outright succession wars. And many dictatorships have had strong successors who were just as despotic once they established their rule. So I don’t think monarchies are more stable as a rule, not without seeing a quantitative analysis.
Do we have many examples of relatively stable regimes that suddenly got a lot worse? Robespierre, Stalin, Mao—they all came to power in a type of revolution (and Hitler came to power in a very illegitimate democratic regime).
Maybe some of the monarchies, thinking about it… but the worse examples still seem to be just after regime changes.
Drastic change in most policies, and in either direction (good/bad), is most likely to happen after a regime change. This is just because in an autocracy, the most important policies are set by the ruler, and people don’t change their opinions much, and changing an important policy is a politically weak move.
Whereas when a new ruler acquires power, he will want to make at least some changes—what’s the chance that the existing policies suit him better than any alternative? And differentiating himself from the previous ruler can be politically beneficial.
But it doesn’t follow the changes he makes will be to improve or relax his rule.
This seems to need a formal analysis, rather than an exchange of anecdotes. But we should have some examples, to define what we’re talking about. Can you give examples of long-term regimes that got worse some time after their creation? I’m thinking Henry VIII, for instance, but I’m not sure what you have in mind.
Stalin’s regime got significantly worse some 10-20 years after the Bolshevik revolution, once he got rid of the last of his comrades.
Point taken.
I’m not sure why you’re asking this. That long regimes can (or tend to?) get progressively worse wasn’t part of my argument. I was saying that there tends to be more change at the start of a reign than later on. And therefore, absent data to the contrary, I see no reason to believe these changes trend towards relaxation after regime changes, rather than merely showing regression to the mean.
As for long-term regimes that got worse later on: Mao seems to qualify, since the worst of his tyranny (e.g. Cultural Revolution) happened later on. Hitler didn’t commit any world-scale atrocities until World War II started. Stalinism was worse in the Thirties than in the Twenties, and worse again in WW2.
Points taken. A dangerous individual at the beginning of a regime can make that regime go much worse over time.
Incentives and time preferences. Ceteris Paribus a monarch with children he cares about has lower time preferences, since he has good reason to believe they will inherit ownership of the country. The second important difference is that dictators usually rule in the name of the people, deriving legitimacy from an abstracted will of the people. They are demotist.
Monarchies not so much. Kings derive legitimacy from the will of God(s), sometimes claiming to being such. An alternative basis for legitimacy that is often present is that this society sees the idea privately instead of publicly owned government as acceptable. As long as say a Queen doesn’t use the state to violate the property of her subjects too much, they have an incentive to maintain the respect for private property norm that legitimizes the monarch as well as their own wealth. The state as a family business is a de facto and rather stable reality in many nominal democracies as well.
Edit: RolfAndreassen’s comment is quite good too.
The legitimacy issue is perhaps more important. As long as some people with influence accept the theory that gives legitimacy to the rightful heir, the monarch has a built-in advantage over any challenger. That may be quite small, but there is a multiplier effect, because those who value stability and peace will also support the monarch over a rival in order to preserve that stabilising factor. That is quite explicit in some writing from the period (nothing to hand, sorry) - “We must support the King because the existence of a rightful king is what saves us from perpetual civil war”
Monarchies tend to break down when that advantage is lost, either due to unclear succession, or an obviously incompetent heir. Civil war due to these situations was common enough that the stability argument was seen as realistic and concrete.
What practical difference does that make with a strong, tyrannical dictator? Whatever the official theory, the people can’t depose him and choose a different ruler.
The difference it makes is with non-strong dictators.
Mainly that transitions of power are more likely to be stable in a monarchy. The king’s more likely to be an idiot, but there’s less probability of a fight for the throne. However, it looks like real monarchies were more appropriate for a specific era.
I’d say that monarchies tend to have a greater emphasis on legitimacy (therefore one can contest legitimacy rather than just brutely fight for the throne), plus cultural ties.
I am aware of a few potential differences, but the most significant one I can think of boils down to that there are a large number of well known ceremonial monarchies and not nearly as many ceremonial dictatorships.
This seems to go along with things like the concept of a Monarch having somewhat more limited powers seems well established ever since the Magna Carta, and that the original concept of Roman dictators seemed to be explicitly that they did not have to obey those kind of limits.
However, if you were to ask what is the difference between an Absolute Monarchy and a Dictatorship, I don’t have much of an answer. Those seem much closer together.
For purposes of the original claim that monarchies are more stable, I think we can ignore constitutional monarchies, because those are just vestigial and are completely different from the other kinds.
Non-absolute monarchies (where nobles or a non-popularly-elected assembly share power) do count. It would help at this point to see a quantitative review of monarchies (absolute and non-absolute) and compare their stability trends with dictatorships.
People sometimes use the term despotism to refer to a system of government where there is no expectation that the ruling group (often of one) will obey a rule of law. I think that’s a better way to demarcate the systems.
I’ve seen governments organized in a 2x2 categorization where the two factors are despotism (whether or not the ruling power is arbitrary) and penetration (how much capacity to interfere in the lives of its subjects does the ruling power have).
Possibly by accident of history (most monarchies are pre-modern and most dictatorships are modern) monarchies have generally been high despotism, low penetration, while dictatorships have been high despotism, high penetration.
(A functioning modern democracy would be an example of low despotism, high penetration—it can interfere in many ways in the lives of the citizenry, but doesn’t generally do so arbitrarily.)