Empirical Claims Wiki > > Empirical Claims in Svolik - Samantha Davis
- There is a monumental variation in the institutions, leaders, and policies across dictatorships
- The manner by which dictators enter and leave office is linked to the length of their rule and the institutions that they employ.
- The data on leadership changes in dictatorships sharply contradict the conventional understanding that popular uprisings are the sole cause of authoritarian collapse. Svolik’s dataset of 316 authoritarian leaders between 1946 and 2008 who lost power by non-constitutional means shows only 32 removed by a popular uprising. Such means include any type of exit from office that did not follow a natural death or a constitutionally mandated process, such as an election, a vote by a ruling body, or a hereditary succession. More than two-thirds of dictator’s were removed through a coup d’état by regime elites such individuals from the dictator’s inner circle, the government, or the repressors. Coups are the leading cause of authoritarian collapse and more dictators lose power to elites rather than the masses.
- A dictator’s compliance with institutional constraints are self-enforcing only under a permissive balance of power within the ruling coalition. Institutions are ineffective or break down when not backed by a credible threat of force. This is why formal institutions successfully governed the regimes of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao but failed to constrain Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.
- Authoritarian parties serve as incentive structures that encourage sunk political investment by their members and serve to marginalize opposition. Party dictatorships with these organizational features survive under less survive more than dictatorships without them
- 3 institutional features turn authoritarian political parties into effective instruments of control:
- Hierarchical assignment of service and benefits
- Political control over appointments
- Selective recruitment and repression.
- A long-standing history of authoritarianism drastically affects a country’s prospects for democracy.
- Svolik claims that under dictatorship, nominally democratic institutions serve quintessentially authoritarian ends. I found this to be a very useful observation, especially as he compared the existence of political parties in authoritarian and democratic regimes. While he claims that democratic political parties exist to further the interests of like-minded individuals (and this is certainly true) I believe his claim that authoritarian parties exist to strengthen the regime can also be applied to democratic parties, as they actively recruit individuals to strengthen their standing in the regime.
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Your final analysis of the points from Svolik to be quite interesting. The claim that “under dictatorships, nominally democratic institutions serve quintessentially authoritarian ends,” demonstrates the egomaniacal and opportunistic measures that dictators undertake. This emphasizes the point you made on ‘secrecy’ between the dictators and elites that you mentioned in your concepts section. The active recruitment of individuals to join their party/cabinet seems to be a charade to ensure that their ruling coalition spell of power is maintained. But given all of your points and Svolik’s claims, it gives much credence to why a dictator’s removal is caused mainly by a coup d’état rather than an uprising as I initially suspected. I think you did a great job at highlighting some of the analyses from this book. There were many that Svolik featured, but I think you targeted some of the more crucial points.
Interesting discussion — I think that what dictators are doing in Svolik’s account highlights the ways that institutions help rulers capture and hold onto power. Samuel Huntington’s book Political Order in Changing Societies, written back in the 1960s, saw political parties first and foremost as a way of ordering society. To him, parties were essential tools for rulers in democratic and non-democratic regimes, but this way of seeing parties is less common with the emphasis on democratization in comparative politics over the last few decades.
Today in the discussion session someone asked about Svolik’s argument regarding inequality and military coups — why would the chance of military intervention to overthrow political leadership increase as income inequality increases up to a certain point, but then decrease as income inequality continues to increase after that? To understand his argument, we need to recall that Svolik sees the bargaining relationship between military and political leaders as ranging along a spectrum from full control by political elites, to “brinkmanship bargaining” between military and political elites, to full military oversight or “tutelage”. Svolik theorizes that “overt military interventions will occur only under brinkmanship bargaining,” when neither the military nor political elites exert full control. In short, coups are more likely to occur at medium threat levels from the have-nots, because at hte highest threat level the military will already have been given a high level of control and will thus not see a need to intervene to overthrow political elites.
I thought this post of yours on Svolik’s empirical claims was very thorough and detailed. You really hit all the finer points of Svolik’s claims that were essential to his argument. Countering the popular belief of populace uprisings taking out dictators, institutional features of autocracies, data on regime collapse that spans decades, and institutional restraints on dictator’s powers as well as how they are wielded are all very important claims that you explained perfectly with Svolik’s arguments.
Your empirical claims analysis is very detailed and it is clear that you understood Svolik’s main points. I liked that you added the three insitutional features that turn political parties into effective tools of authoritarian control. The only thing I would really add to this would to look further into the two problems of authoritarian control and power sharing Svolik mentions. While this is the main component of your theory sections, I also believe it plays a large role in his empirical claims, especially when looking at different types of repression and its effects on the autocracy. Overall, however, you demonstrated a very thorough and precise analysis of Svolik’s empirical claims.