Political repression in autocratic regimes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2016.11.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Autocrats rely on both vertical repression (against population) and horizontal repression (against counter-elites).

  • More natural resources increase vertical repression and reduce horizontal repression.

  • Empirical evidence on oil discoveries confirms the theoretical findings.

Abstract

Theoretical models on autocracies have long grappled with how to characterize and analyze state sponsorship of repression. Moreover, much of the existing formal literature sees dictators’ behavior as determined by one type of opposition actor alone and disregards the potential role played by other types of actors. We develop a contest model of political survival with a ruler, the elite and the opposition, and show how the ruler needs to respond to revolutionary pressures while securing the allegiance of his own supportive coalition. We find that the ruler’s reliance on vertical and horizontal repression is antithetically affected by the country’s wealth and the optimal bundle of vertical and horizontal repression has important consequences for the regime’s political vulnerability. Our hypothesis about the impact of wealth on repression is strongly borne out by the empirical results, which are robust to endogeneity concerns.

Introduction

Dictatorship has been the prevalent system of governance historically and about one third of the world’s countries are still ruled by autocrats. The lack of democratic accountability characterizing autocratic regimes does not equate to the polity descending into chaos; instead, by carefully balancing the degree of repression and co-optation, successful dictators manage to maintain peaceful polities that could abruptly plunge into violence when revolutions and military coups are attempted. Despite the volume of research on the strategies of autocratic regimes (Gehlbach et al., 2016), a number of questions are still debated. Why do some authoritarian governments favor widespread repression, while others seek to mollify popular dissent by permitting a range of civil rights? Why were some regimes betrayed by the institutions intended to protect them while in others the elite have so far remained loyal and have prevented a transition? To help addressing these important questions, we need to understand the rulers’ strategies to prevent and/or mitigate the threats of popular mobilization as well as those emerging from actors within the ruling coalition. In this article we explore dictators’ optimal strategies of political repression, by distinguishing vertical repression (i.e. against citizens) from horizontal repression (i.e. against elites) in settings where the ruler has the possibility of investing in productive public goods.

In the quest to understand the strategies rulers use to stay in power, scholars have identified divide-and-rule strategies (e.g., Verdier, Acemoglu, Robinson, 2004, De Luca, Sekeris, Vargas, 2014), power sharing and bargaining (e.g., Lizzeri, Persico, 2004, Morelli, Rohner), or even optimal succession rules (Konrad, Skaperdas, 2007, Konrad, Mui). The biggest emphasis in the literature, however, has been given to the cooptation-repression trade-off, whereby both elites and citizens benefit from favours and are subject to repression by the central regime. Indeed, to remain in power autocratic rulers ought to simultaneously contain two types of threats: one stemming from the citizenry at large and that can take the form of revolutions as exemplified by political upheavals in Tunisia (2011), Ukraine (2014), or Hong Kong (2014); and another coming from the elites who can stage military coups or provide the moral and financial support for successful revolutionary movements.

To contain the risk of popular revolutions, dictators invest in public goods and in means of coercion (Wintrobe, 1998, Gandhi, Przeworski, 2006, Desai, Olofsgård, Yousef, 2009, Besley, Persson, 2010, Boucekkine, Prieur, Puzon, 2016). The typical view is that dissatisfied citizens face coordination problems that may hamper their capacity to successfully stage revolutions. In such settings, the quality and quantity of information and communication enables citizens to better coordinate their actions (Acemoglu, Robinson, 2001, Ellis, Fender, 2010, Sharmehr, Bernhardt, 2011, Edmond, 2013). Seldom, however, have spontaneous revolutions been successful without the active support, or at least the consent of key ruling elites.

Elites control the fates of the dictator, and statistically most dictators were overthrown by members of their inner circle rather than popular uprisings; by one estimate (i.e., Svolik, 2009), out of 303 authoritarian rulers, 205 (68 percent) were deposed by a coup between 1945 and 2002. The elite can have incentives to depose the ruler1 for four main reasons. First, economic or political changes may make democracy more profitable for the elites.2 Second, elites may support democracy as a compromise to avoid costly revolutions (Robinson and Acemoglu, 2006). Third, in anticipation of pro-democracy social movements, elites may have incentives to depose the autocrat (Svolik, 2013, Gilli, Li, 2015). Fourth, elites may have incentives in contesting the dictator in the hope of occupying power themselves (Acemoglu, Ticchi, Vindigni, 2010, Konrad, Skaperdas, 2007; Konrad and Mui, forthcoming), or of obtaining more favours under another dictator (Sekeris, 2011).

From a political exchange perspective dictators usually try to buy-off the support of elites at large (North, Wallis, Weingast, 2009, Egorov, Sonin, 2011), or more specifically of economic (Montagnes and Wolton, 2016), religious (Auriol and Platteau, 2016), or military elites (Acemoglu et al., 2010), who all play a key role in the regime’s stability. Cooptation serves multiple purposes all eventually consolidating the ruler’s power: buying-off the support of elites may help the ruler screen the most ideological close supporters (Hollyer and Wantchekon, 2015), or the most productive elites (Montagnes and Wolton, 2016), it may incentivize coopted elites to convey less revolution-promoting information to the citizens (Guriev and Tresiman, 2015), or may reduce their willingness to openly confront the ruler via coups attempts (Acemoglu, Ticchi, Vindigni, 2010, Sekeris, 2011, Bove, Rivera, 2015). Since cooptation is costly, however, not all elites are included in the pool of beneficiaries, and a typical tool for the dictator to adjust the size of his clientele is to use purges. The literature on the optimal size of the ruling coalition (i.e. ruler and ruling elites) emphasizes the role of both static (Egorov, Sonin, 2011, Montagnes, Wolton) and dynamic considerations (Acemoglu, Egorov, Sonin, 2009, Acemoglu, Ticchi, Vindigni, 2010, Acemoglu, Egorov, Sonin, 2012, Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, 2015, Egorov, Sonin, 2015) in the purging process. In this article we consider a static framework.

While many political economy models of non-democracies consider two actors alone (ruler and opposition), a growing literature simultaneously considers the two types of opposition mentioned above: the elites and the citizens (Acemoglu, Ticchi, Vindigni, 2010, Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, 2015). The novelty of our paper lies in that we explicitly distinguish between the two types of repression, namely the vertical repression (i.e. against citizens), from the horizontal repression (i.e. against elites). Our model identifies the underlying forces explaining the optimal mix between citizens’ coercion, purges of elites, and public goods. On the one hand, the elites ought to be compensated by the dictator, thus making it costly to maintain a large body of inner supporters. On the other hand, elites are useful to the ruler since they increase the grip of the ruler on the population, and therefore enhance his coercive ability. The dictator is thus facing a trade-off between purging the elites and thereby reducing their co-optation costs by having a smaller group of supporters on the one hand, and enhancing his coercive capacity on the population by reducing people’s collective action capacity, on the other hand.

We demonstrate that in economies that are better shielded from the harm of conflict (i.e. more resilient), incentives to mount revolutions are heightened, and thus dictators are eager to coopt elites, which translates in lower purges, while also tempering revolutionary attempts by investing in public goods. This in turn enables us to explore the relation between economic wealth and state repression, and put forward a substantially different theoretical mechanism linking repression to wealth. Increasing the country’s wealth (e.g. natural resources, development aid) incentivizes the ruler to reduce horizontal repression, while also expanding vertical repression. As the country becomes wealthier, citizens have higher incentives to oust the rent-seeking dictator. This in turn pushes the ruler to develop a stronger military apparatus to remain in power, while also attempting to secure a wider support from the elites, so as to reduce the citizenry’s capacity to oppose the central power. This finding is consistent with recent empirical studies on repression (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2005), although the theoretical mechanism underpinning our result is substantially different from that typically mentioned in the literature. Whereas in the latter the ruler wants to contain the level of repression to avoid dissatisfying the population too much and to preserve the capacity to tax the population at large, in our model more wealth translates into increased incentives for the population to mount a revolution to appropriate the riches. By reducing the horizontal repression of the elites, the dictator improves his vertical coercive capacity, thus improving the odds of retaining the extra riches. Interestingly, in our model revolutions are the result of a deliberate choice of the dictator not to repress the population beyond some “deterrent threshold”. Revolutions do not therefore result from the regime’s inability to repress dissent, but rather from his unwillingness to do so. Dictators may indeed find it profitable to sustain a (possibly low) risk of successful revolution if this is achieved by downsizing the body of supporting elites, thus implying economies in terms of co-optation rents not paid to the elites.

We then use a global dataset on natural resources, human right violations and purges, and find empirical support for these hypotheses. We focus on the archetypal natural resource, oil, and use two measures of wealth from newly released datasets on oil discoveries, in addition to classical measures of oil production, to break the classical simultaneity between violence and natural resources which has often made it difficult to identify a causal effect of oil on human right violations. The remaining of the article is organized as follows: Section 2 explicitly models vertical and horizontal repression, while in Section 3 we conduct comparative statics on the amount of resources in the economy. Section 4 describes the data used to test our hypotheses, in particular our exogenous measures of natural resource boom, and our empirical strategy. Section 5 presents our results and Section 6 provides concluding remarks. An extension of the model that accommodates for public good provision is deferred to Appendix B.

Section snippets

The setting

We consider a setting featuring three actors, the ruler, the elites, and the masses. However, only the ruler and the masses are genuine actors who act strategically. In our setup, the ruler may face a revolutionary attempt by the masses. If a revolution is attempted, the people’s efficiency in opposing the government’s forces depends on their cooperation capacity, which is itself influenced by the support given by the elites to the rebellion.

The ruler who is in power manages the country’s

Modifying the wealth of the economy

We now explore the effect of modifying the country’s wealth on the game’s equilibrium in the specific case where the public goods are left exogenous.5

Changing the wealth level has no influence on the locus separating the opposition confrontation region from the opposition suppression region (bear in mind that l¯ is independent of Y). Indeed, if the prize at stake, Y(1p)wg, experiences an exogenous change, the incentives to deter or

Data and empirical model

Dependent variables

To empirically test our predictions regarding the effect of wealth on vertical and horizontal repression (i.e. Proposition 3), we first need to quantify two substantially different dependent variables. To measure vertical repression, one of our key dependent variables, we use the Political Terror Scale (PTS), the “most commonly used indicator of state violations of citizens’ physical integrity rights” (Wood and Gibney, 2010, p.32). The PTS uses a five level coding scheme,

Results

We show our results in Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4. In Tables 1 and 2 the dependent variable is vertical repression, i.e., political terror, while in Tables 3 and 4 we use horizontal repression, i.e., purges. Moreover, while Tables 1 and 3 include flow variables and oil reserves, models in Tables 2 and 4 only incorporate measures of oilfield discoveries. We use throughout the tables linear models (OLS), ordered probit with random effect (Oprobit) and ordered probit with random effect a la

Conclusions

The use of repression is widespread among authoritarian rulers around the world, as testified by recent events in the middle East, in Sub-Saharan Africa, or more recently in Turkey. To confront dissent, regimes strengthen their security (and repressive) apparatuses, making use of imprisonment, restricting freedom of expression and civil liberties. We argue that depending on their natural wealth, authoritarian regimes differ in their respective use of vertical and horizontal coercion and terror

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