I totally agree that “autocracy is always and everywhere an expectation phenomenon”. My favorite piece of evidence is how quickly regimes collapse when the leader is terminally ill. Nothing has changed but you found out the Shah has cancer so you immediately throw down your arms. Because “Hello prince, i killed people for your dad now rob the people to pay me” doesn’t work. Clearly, repression is motivated by the expectation the incumbent will win and pay you back in the future.
Yes, if people expect democracy to fail it probably will. But the inverse is not true. People expecting democracy to succeed is not nearly a sufficient condition for its success, and such expectations are more common than successful democratizations. The Russians really expected to democratize in 1992, and their experiment failed. The French really expected to democratize in 1789 and didn’t. The Ethiopians I talk to today really expect Ethiopia to stay democratic and it obviously won’t.
The US didn’t just believe in themselves and win the gun game. They denied coercive capacity to the president and distributed it among state governors. They then constrained the governors with the threat of tariffs to prevent secession or shirking. The governors are specialized leader-restraining elites with coordination capacity, the ability to punish each other for shirking, and they are competitively selected.
The Chilean regime had strong expectations of democratic continuity but a terrible constitution that gave Allende the presidency with 35% of the popular vote, leading to collapse into autocracy.
On the other hand, society wide expectation flips are surprsingly common. I agree that it’s weird, but it’s true. Autocratic regimes (not leaders) are very shot lived. The oldest autocratic regime today is Saudi Arabia, which became a state around 1920. Even Saudi is currently in a massive consolidation crisis. The CCP is ancient at ~80 years old, and also in a consolidation crisis. Consolidation means the leader is systematically removing competent elites to cement control. When a consolidated leader dies regimes often collapse. Most autocratic states have not had a regime last 30 years. So it seems like the autocats expectation equilibrium would be very stable, but empirically it is quite unstable.
One could argue that the expectation that any regime will keep power is weaker than the expectation that “democracy will backslide into autocracy”. I think that’s a stretch, but this post is already too long.
I totally agree that “autocracy is always and everywhere an expectation phenomenon”. My favorite piece of evidence is how quickly regimes collapse when the leader is terminally ill. Nothing has changed but you found out the Shah has cancer so you immediately throw down your arms. Because “Hello prince, i killed people for your dad now rob the people to pay me” doesn’t work. Clearly, repression is motivated by the expectation the incumbent will win and pay you back in the future.
Yes, if people expect democracy to fail it probably will. But the inverse is not true. People expecting democracy to succeed is not nearly a sufficient condition for its success, and such expectations are more common than successful democratizations. The Russians really expected to democratize in 1992, and their experiment failed. The French really expected to democratize in 1789 and didn’t. The Ethiopians I talk to today really expect Ethiopia to stay democratic and it obviously won’t.
The US didn’t just believe in themselves and win the gun game. They denied coercive capacity to the president and distributed it among state governors. They then constrained the governors with the threat of tariffs to prevent secession or shirking. The governors are specialized leader-restraining elites with coordination capacity, the ability to punish each other for shirking, and they are competitively selected.
The Chilean regime had strong expectations of democratic continuity but a terrible constitution that gave Allende the presidency with 35% of the popular vote, leading to collapse into autocracy.
On the other hand, society wide expectation flips are surprsingly common. I agree that it’s weird, but it’s true. Autocratic regimes (not leaders) are very shot lived. The oldest autocratic regime today is Saudi Arabia, which became a state around 1920. Even Saudi is currently in a massive consolidation crisis. The CCP is ancient at ~80 years old, and also in a consolidation crisis. Consolidation means the leader is systematically removing competent elites to cement control. When a consolidated leader dies regimes often collapse. Most autocratic states have not had a regime last 30 years. So it seems like the autocats expectation equilibrium would be very stable, but empirically it is quite unstable.
One could argue that the expectation that any regime will keep power is weaker than the expectation that “democracy will backslide into autocracy”. I think that’s a stretch, but this post is already too long.