Now, in light of all this, defenders of autocracy will sometimes concede that okay, yes, maybe democracy does allow for more political churn than autocracy, and maybe it is more difficult for people living under autocratic rule to reject their leaders’ decisions or oust them if they disapprove of the job they’re doing; but then they’ll argue that this is actually a point in autocracy’s favor – that the fact that autocrats can never be questioned prevents disruptive upheaval and creates social stability. (In fact, in many cases they’ll argue that this is the main benefit of autocracy.) And in certain short-term situations, this argument may even have some validity to it; after all, if there’s one thing autocracies excel at, it’s clamping down on any internal dissidence that might threaten to disrupt the status quo. But while these kinds of efforts to constrain political volatility can sometimes succeed in creating some measure of short-term stability, over the long term they tend to backfire and end up producing the opposite of stability; as Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Blyth explain:
When dealing with a system that is inherently unpredictable, what should be done? Differentiating between two types of countries is useful. In the first, changes in government do not lead to meaningful differences in political outcomes (since political tensions are out in the open). In the second type, changes in government lead to both drastic and deeply unpredictable changes.
Consider that Italy, with its much-maligned “cabinet instability,” is economically and politically stable despite having had more than 60 governments since World War II (indeed, one may say Italy’s stability is because of these switches of government).
[…]
In contrast, consider Iran and Iraq. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and Saddam Hussein both constrained volatility by any means necessary. In Iran, when the shah was toppled, the shift of power to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a huge, unforeseeable jump. After the fact, analysts could construct convincing accounts about how killing Iranian Communists, driving the left into exile, demobilizing the democratic opposition, and driving all dissent into the mosque had made Khomeini’s rise inevitable. In Iraq, the United States removed the lid and was actually surprised to find that the regime did not jump from hyperconstraint to something like France. But this was impossible to predict ahead of time due to the nature of the system itself. What can be said, however, is that the more constrained the volatility, the bigger the regime jump is likely to be. From the French Revolution to the triumph of the Bolsheviks, history is replete with such examples, and yet somehow humans remain unable to process what they mean.
[…]
Rather than subsidize and praise as a “force for stability” every tin-pot dictator on the planet, the U.S. government should encourage countries to let information flow upward through the transparency that comes with political agitation. It should not fear fluctuations per se, since allowing them to be out in the open, as Italy and [other democracies] show in different ways, creates the stability of small jumps.
Much of the Reactionary argument for traditional monarchy hinges on monarchs being secure. In non-monarchies, leaders must optimize for maintaining their position against challengers. In democracies, this means winning elections by pandering to the people; in dictatorships, it means avoiding revolutions and coups by oppressing the people. In monarchies, elections don’t happen and revolts are unthinkable. A monarch can ignore their own position and optimize for improving the country. See the entries on demotism and monarchy here for further Reactionary development of these arguments.
Such a formulation need not depend on the monarch’s altruism: witness the parable of Fnargl. A truly self-interested monarch, if sufficiently secure, would funnel off a small portion of taxes to himself, but otherwise do everything possible to make his country rich and peaceful.
As [Mencius] Moldbug puts it:
Hitler and Stalin are abortions of the democratic era – cases of what Jacob Talmon called totalitarian democracy. This is easily seen in their unprecedented efforts to control public opinion, through both propaganda and violence. Elizabeth’s legitimacy was a function of her identity – it could be removed only by killing her. Her regime was certainly not the stablest government in history, and nor was it entirely free from propaganda, but she had no need to terrorize her subjects into supporting her.
But some of my smarter readers may notice that “your power can only be removed by killing you” does not actually make you more secure. It just makes security a lot more important than if insecurity meant you’d be voted out and forced to retire to your country villa.
Let’s review how Elizabeth I came to the throne. Her grandfather, Henry VII, had won the 15th century Wars of the Roses, killing all other contenders and seizing the English throne. He survived several rebellions, including the Cornish Rebellion of 1497, and lived to pass the throne to Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII, who passed the throne to his son Edward VI, who after surviving the Prayer Book Rebellion and Kett’s Rebellion, named Elizabeth’s cousin Lady Jane Grey as heir to the throne. Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary, raised an army, captured Lady Jane, and eventually executed her, seizing the throne for herself. An influential nobleman, Thomas Wyatt, raised another army trying to depose Mary and put Elizabeth on the throne. He was defeated and executed, and Elizabeth was thrown in the Tower of London as a traitor. Eventually Mary changed her mind and restored Elizabeth’s place on the line of succession before dying, but Elizabeth’s somethingth cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, also made a bid for the throne, got the support of the French, but was executed before she could do further damage.
Actual monarchies are less like the Reactionaries’ idealized view in which revolt is unthinkable, and more like the Greek story of Damocles – in which a courtier remarks how nice it must be to be the king, and the king forces him to sit on the throne with a sword suspended above his head by a single thread. The king’s lesson – that monarchs are well aware of how tenuous their survival is – is one Reactionaries would do well to learn.
This is true not just of England and Greece, but of monarchies the world over. China’s monarchs claimed “the mandate of Heaven”, but Wikipedia’s List of Rebellions in China serves as instructional (albeit voluminous) reading. Not for nothing does the Romance of Three Kingdoms begin by saying:
An empire long united, must divide; an empire long divided, must unite. This has been so since antiquity.
Brewitt-Taylor’s translation is even more succinct:
Empires wax and wane; states cleave asunder and coalesce.
Alexander also adds that this instability isn’t just an issue for the autocratic leaders themselves; under these kinds of regimes, it’s typically the entire country that has to reckon with instability and insecurity:
Reactionaries often claim that traditional monarchies are stable and secure, compared to the chaos and constant danger of life in a democracy. Michael Anissimov quotes approvingly a passage by Stefan Zweig:
In his autobiography The World of Yesterday (1942), the writer Stefan Zweig described the Habsburg Empire in which he grew up as ‘a world of security’:
Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency, and the State itself was the chief guarantor of this stability . . . Our currency the Austrian crown, circulated in bright gold pieces, an assurance of its immutability. Everyone knew how much he possessed or what he was entitled to, what was permitted and what was forbidden . . . In this vast empire everything stood firmly and immovably in its appointed place, and at its head was the aged emperor; and were he to die, one knew (or believed) another would come to take his place, and nothing would change in the well-regulated order. No one thought of wars, of revolutions, or revolts. All that was radical, all violence, seemed impossible in an age of reason.
Michael’s comment: “[This] does a good job capturing the flavor and stability of the Austrian monarchy…it’s very interesting to read this in a world where America and Europe are characterized by political and economic instability and ethnic strife.”
I am glad Mr. Zweig (Professor Zweig? Baron Zweig?) found his life in Austria to be very secure. But we can’t just take him at his word.
Let’s consider the most recent period of Habsburg Austrian history – 1800 to 1918 – the period that Zweig and the elders he talked to in his youth might have experienced.
Habsburg Holy Roman Austria was conquered by Napoleon in 1805, forced to dissolve as a political entity in 1806, replaced with the Kingdom of Austria, itself conquered again by Napoleon in 1809, refounded in 1815 as a repressive police state under the gratifyingly evil-sounding Klemens von Metternich, suffered 11 simultaneous revolutions and was almost destroyed in 1848, had its constitution thrown out and replaced with a totally different version in 1860, dissolved entirely into the fledgling Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867, lost control of Italy and parts of Germany to revolts in the 1860s-1880s, started a World War in 1914, and was completely dissolved in 1918, by which period the reigning emperor’s wife, brother, son, and nephew/heir had all been assassinated.
Meanwhile, in Progressive Britain during the same period, people were mostly sitting around drinking tea.
This is not a historical accident. As discussed above, monarchies have traditionally been rife with dynastic disputes, succession squabbles, pretenders to the throne, popular rebellions, noble rebellions, impulsive reorganizations of the machinery of state, and bloody foreign wars of conquest.
[Q]: And democracies are more stable?
Yes, yes, oh God yes.
Imagine the US presidency as a dynasty, the Line of Washington. The Line of Washington has currently undergone forty-three dynastic successions without a single violent dispute. As far as I know, this is unprecedented among dynasties – unless it be the dynasty of Japanese Emperors, who managed the feat only after their power was made strictly ceremonial. The closest we’ve ever come to any kind of squabble over who should be President was Bush vs. Gore, which was decided within a month in a court case, which both sides accepted amicably.
To an observer from the medieval or Renaissance world of monarchies and empires, the stability of democracies would seem utterly supernatural. Imagine telling Queen Elizabeth I – whom as we saw above suffered six rebellions just in her family’s two generations of rule up to that point – that Britain has been three hundred years without a non-colonial-related civil war. She would think either that you were putting her on, or that God Himself had sent a host of angels to personally maintain order.
Democracies are vulnerable to one kind of conflict – the regional secession. This is responsible for the only (!) major rebellion in the United States’ 250 year (!) history, and might be a good category to place Britain’s various Irish troubles. But the long-time scourge of every single large nation up to about 1800, the power struggle? Totally gone. I don’t think moderns are sufficiently able to appreciate how big a deal this is. It would be like learning that in the year 2075, no one even remembers that politicians used to sometimes lie or make false promises.
How do democracies manage this feat? It seems to involve three things:
First, there is a simple, unambiguous, and repeatable decision procedure for determining who the leader is – hold an election. This removes the possibility of competing claims of legitimacy.
Second, would-be rebels have an outlet for their dissatisfaction: organize a campaign and try to throw out the ruling party. This is both more likely to succeed and less likely to leave the country a smoking wasteland than the old-fashioned method of raising an army and trying to kill the king and everyone who supports him.
Third, it ensures that the leadership always has popular support, and so popular revolts would be superfluous.
If you remember nothing else about the superiority of democracies to other forms of government, remember the fact that in three years, we will have a change of leadership and almost no one is stocking up on canned goods to prepare for the inevitable civil war.
The benefits of democracy aren’t just limited to internal stability and security, either. One big advantage to being able to change political leaders every few years is that it can help make foreign relations more stable as well. It might not seem immediately obvious why this should be the case; after all, wouldn’t it seem like having the same person in charge for decades would make foreign relations more predictable (and therefore more stable) since other countries would always know exactly who they were dealing with? In reality, though, that kind of constancy can be a double-edged sword; if the autocrat in charge happens to be a belligerent jingoist, for example, and there’s no immediate prospect of them leaving office, other countries might feel compelled to take preemptive action against them in order to protect their own long-term interests – whereas if the same leader had been democratically elected, those rival countries might be content to just sit tight and wait for them to be ousted in the next election. Similarly, if there’s an autocratic political leader whom rival countries perceive to be weak or ineffectual, they might be tempted to seize the opportunity to try and expand their own power by making an aggressive move – whereas if they knew that the leader was going to be replaced in the next election, they might think better of pressing their luck in this way. Foreign policy analysts will often talk about the need for countries to “maintain credibility” in matters of national defense – meaning that if a country’s interests are threatened in some way, it has to be able to demonstrate its willingness to defend those interests, or else other countries will walk all over it. But a useful feature of democracy is that even if a particular country has seemingly lost some of its credibility in this sense, by (say) declining to respond to an act of aggression by some rival country, it might be able to re-establish it in short order simply by electing a new commander-in-chief who, as far as anyone knows, might have a more sensitive trigger (or conversely, reverse course from the reckless actions of an overly aggressive commander-in-chief by replacing them with someone more judicious). And because democratic countries do have this particular ace up their sleeve, it gives them more freedom to do things like (say) strategically decline certain foreign policy entanglements if they think that getting involved will result in some kind of Vietnam- or Afghanistan-style quagmire – whereas autocratic rulers will often feel more pressure to commit to ill-advised foreign policy actions and then never reverse course on them lest they lose some measure of their supposed credibility (see, for instance, Vladimir Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine).
The aforementioned Sword of Damocles analogy is a good one for illustrating how much pressure autocrats constantly feel to maintain their hold on power, both from challengers at home and abroad. Without the tool of elections to serve as a pressure-release valve for defusing adversity and resolving quandaries with a simple change of leadership, autocratic governments must instead rely entirely on a strategy of trying to heavy-handedly suppress any hint of adversity or defiance before it can ever begin to challenge their rule in the first place. This is why autocracies have earned such a reputation for paranoia and overreactivity; and it’s why they can be such stressful and unpleasant (and often dangerous) regimes for their citizens to live under. I probably don’t need to give a whole big historical overview here of the endless examples of autocracies perpetrating horrendous acts of aggression both against foreign rivals and against their own populations, because such behavior has become so well-known that it has become practically synonymous with the terms “autocracy” and “authoritarianism” (although I’ll once again recommend Alexander’s post if you’re looking for a comprehensive rundown). Suffice it to say, though, that the reputation for tyranny is well-deserved; autocracies are more prone to violence and oppression by practically every measure. As Pinker writes:
Are democracies less likely to get into militarized disputes, all else held constant? [A study by Bruce Russett and John Oneal found that] the answer was a clear yes. When the less democratic member of a pair [of rival countries] was a full autocracy, it doubled the chance that they would have a quarrel compared to an average pair of at-risk countries. When both countries were fully democratic, the chance of a dispute fell by more than half.
[In a similar vein,] the political scientist Bethany Lacina has found that civil wars in democracies have fewer than half the battle deaths of civil wars in nondemocracies, holding the usual variables constant.
[And when it comes to incidents of governments deliberately killing their own people – so-called “democides” – it’s the same story. Rudolph] Rummel was one of the first advocates of the Democratic Peace theory, which he argues applied to democides even more than to wars. “At the extremes of Power,” Rummel writes, “totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions; in contrast, many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.” Democracies commit fewer democides because their form of governance, by definition, is committed to inclusive and nonviolent means of resolving conflicts. More important, the power of a democratic government is restricted by a tangle of institutional restraints, so a leader can’t just mobilize armies and militias on a whim to fan out over the country and start killing massive numbers of citizens. By performing a set of regressions on his dataset of 20th-century regimes, Rummel showed that the occurrence of democide correlates with a lack of democracy, even holding constant the countries’ ethnic diversity, wealth, level of development, population density, and culture (African, Asian, Latin American, Muslim, Anglo, and so on). The lessons, he writes, are clear: “The problem is Power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.”
[Research from Barbara] Harff vindicated Rummel’s insistence that democracy is a key factor in preventing genocides. From 1955 to 2008 autocracies were three and a half times more likely to commit genocides than were full or partial democracies, holding everything else constant. This represents a hat trick for democracy: democracies are less likely to wage interstate wars, to have large-scale civil wars, and to commit genocides.
Here’s one great thing about democracy: […] democracies don’t engage in widespread slaughter of their own voting citizens. Government-led massacres are exceptionally rare within democracies. Economist William Easterly of New York University oversaw the creation of a new database on this topic with data from around the world, spanning 1820 to 1998. A key finding was that “in general, high democracy appears to be the single most important factor in avoiding large magnitudes of mass killings, as the highest quartile of the sample in democracy accounts for only 0.1% percent of all the killings.”
That’s a strong argument for democracy, and it’s one that I believe in. It has a twin argument, also based on over a century of real evidence: […] democracies don’t let their citizens die in famines. Every country in the twentieth century that you can think of that experienced massive, rapid increases in death from hunger and starvation was something other than a functioning democracy. Maybe it was a dictatorship, or quite likely it was colonized by some other country—and in a few cases, it may have had a democratic government on paper, but it lacked a capable government, one up to the task of providing rapid services for its citizens. But for more than a century, widespread, rapid death from hunger has never happened in a country with a functioning government where the citizens had the right to choose their government’s leaders.
It was the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen who made this bold claim, most famously and quite sweepingly in his excellent 1999 book, Development as Freedom: “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” Other researchers have tried to beat up on Sen’s finding, but they have failed. Of course, one wonders whether this is just a correlation, a repeated pattern that might be caused by some other factor like prosperity or low corruption. Here’s one test, one that Sen himself used: compare what happens in a nation just before versus just after that nation becomes a democracy. India’s last famine—the Bengal famine—occurred in 1943. India became an independent nation in 1947. After the end of British rule that year, India was still poor and its government was riddled with corruption. But Indians never again experienced widespread death from famine. Holding the country constant and changing the type of government from a colonial outpost to a new democracy was, it appears, all it took to save lives.
[…]
Of course, [with both of these claims], there are caveats and provisos in the underlying research. In the case of famines, here’s one recurring question: How many deaths from hunger in how short a time does it take to count as a famine? But the overall message is strong: democracies substantially reduce the risk of widespread, short-run death of a nation’s citizens and overwhelmingly reduce the risk of government-backed massacres compared to other forms of real-world government.
Does making the trains run on time matter more to the economic growth of poor countries than niceties like freedom of expression and political representation? No; the opposite is true. Democracy is a check against the most egregious economic policies, such as outright expropriation of wealth and property. Amartya Sen, a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 for several strands of work related to poverty and welfare, one of which is his study of famines. Mr. Sen’s major finding is striking: The world’s worst famines are not caused by crop failure; they are caused by faulty political systems that prevent the market from correcting itself. Relatively minor agricultural disturbances become catastrophes because imports are not allowed, or prices are not allowed to rise, or farmers are not allowed to grow alternative crops, or politics in some other way interferes with the market’s normal ability to correct itself. He writes, “[Famines] have never materialized in any country that is independent, that goes to elections regularly, that has opposition parties to voice criticisms and that permits newspapers to report freely and question the wisdom of government policies without extensive censorship.” China had the largest recorded famine in history; thirty million people died as the result of the failed Great Leap Forward in 1958–1961. India has not had a famine since independence in 1947.
As Alexander concludes, it’s simply undeniable that as a general rule, the quality of life for citizens in democracies is much better than for those in autocracies:
If you want to know why countries are becoming more democratic and less monarchist, it’s hard to get a more direct answer than this graph (although its attempt at a linear fit was a bad idea):
[…]
The most progressive countries today tend to be very wealthy, very peaceful, and comparatively urbanized. The least progressive countries tend to be poor, insecure, and comparatively rural.
If our goal is to “do what works,” then, we have to acknowledge that all the best empirical evidence points in the same direction – and that that direction is toward liberal democracy.
N.W. Rains 