State Crimes and Autocracy

Roadmap: State crimes and autocracy

• Last time: publicized state violence as a research topic
  • Questions?
• Today:
  • Do autocracies commit more state crimes?
  • Why do autocrats face structural constraints?
  • What distinguishes authoritarian from totalitarian violence?
  • Group project work time

Fascist Italy vs. Nazi Germany

• Same era, both right-wing nationalist regimes
• Both took power through paramilitary violence
• Both anti-communist, both ruled until death, on the same side of WWII

Autocracy and democracy refresher

• Regime: set of rules and institutions that determine how power is acquired, used, transferred
  • Democracy: political power constrained by competitive elections, civil liberties, rule of law
  • Autocracy: political power concentrated and not accountable through free elections
• Types of autocracies:
  • Monarchical
  • Military
  • Civilian (a residual category)

Olson: the structural logic of autocratic extraction

• All regimes have an encompassing interest: they benefit when subjects are productive
  • …But autocracies also face no electoral constraint on extraction
• So they extract up to the revenue-maximizing rate: the grasping hand
• Democratic majorities, because they also earn market income, extract less

The dictator’s dilemma

• Dictatorships make a lot of people unhappy
• Excluding the wrong people from power can be risky
• Mechanisms of contestation and participation mitigate these problems in a democracy
• But dictators also face structural problems that constrain them
  • Problem of authoritarian control (threats from the masses)
  • Problem of authoritarian power sharing (threats from elites)

The dilemma and state crimes

• Information problem: no free speech means no reliable signal of where the regime is weak
  • Dictatorships encourage preference falsification: are you really loyal or just afraid?
  • Excessive monitoring and repression to help gain knowledge
  • Cults of personality force costly signals: you compromise yourself with public praise
• Recruitment and distribution problems: building and sharing power with your coalition
  • Can’t trust loyal deputies, so purge them before they defect

Authoritarian power in action

Authoritarian vs. totalitarian regimes

• Our typology from L3 classifies autocracies by who rules (monarchical, military, civilian)
• Linz classifies regimes by how they rule

Terror

• Linz’s caveat: terror alone does not define totalitarianism
  • Some authoritarian regimes are brutally violent (Trujillo’s Dominican Republic)
  • Some totalitarian regimes have stabilized with reduced arbitrary terror (post-Stalin USSR)
• But terror is far more probable under totalitarianism and takes a qualitatively different form

Moral self-righteousness in action

Before we break into groups…

• Totalitarianism is not the norm: most autocracies are authoritarian, not totalitarian
• All autocratic regimes face constraints: power-sharing (elite) and control (masses)
• Pure totalitarianism in Linz’s sense may be largely historical
  • Stalinist USSR, Nazi Germany, Maoist China
• Many contemporary regimes are hybrids of autocracy and democracy, it’s a spectrum
• But even “full” democracies are not innocent either
• Wednesday: does democracy actually constrain state violence?

Proposal: You all did great, but common feedback

• Theory: connect arguments, not just definitions
  • Several groups used readings to classify a situation rather than explain it
  • E.g., Valentino’s contribution is his strategic logic of mass killing, not just definition
  • E.g., Tilly: war and state-making are mutually constitutive not just “states use violence”
• Audience: pick one or two and build around it
  • The prompt asks you to speak to governments, NGOs, IOs, or other actors, not all of them
  • Identify who has realistic leverage over your case and build your recommendations around what that actor can actually do
  • For cases involving powerful states (US, China): think carefully about how the state might respond to pressure: that shapes which audience and which tools make sense
• Policy: specificity, not aspiration
  • Good recommendations address what your audience can concretely do, what obstacles they face, and what stakeholders need to be convinced
  • Think about what has already been tried and why it hasn’t worked, your proposals should respond to that

Final project work time

• Some ideas for guiding questions:
  • Is the regime in your case democratic or authoritarian? Somewhere in between?
    • Go back to L3 if needed
  • If democratic, does that make the state violence harder to explain?
  • Does the dictator’s dilemma help explain who is targeted: elites, masses, or both?
  • Which of Linz’s three dimensions (pluralism, ideology, mobilization) best explains the state violence in your case?
  • Based on the audience for your brief, does regime type shape what you say?
  • What does your case suggest about the relationship between regime type and state crime?
• Steven will walk around to help
• If there are group members that are always absent to these sessions during class, note that
  • Part of your grade will be based on peer-reviewed effort