Why would people support authoritarianism?

What kind of convincing reasons could be given to explain why the citizens or people of a fictional setting may support authoritarianism and single-party politics and oppose democracy?

Not just talking about supporting a charismatic leader, but an entire system itself - the idea is that the people really do believe in centralized leadership that explicitly does not involve the masses. Any suggestion of reform or democracy is sneered at or looked down with contempt, to the point where they even support censorship and punishment of dissenters.

I felt it's worth asking since while I of course support democracy I don't want to write heroes that support it (despite growing up in said country and having no exposure to those concepts) and also convert everyone they meet into democrats too ala Easy Evangelism.

Various reasons I could think of:

- the country had a democratic system once, but it was hopelessly corrupt and dysfunctional, and authoritarian leaders that came later worked more effectively despite their brutality.

- negative sentiments toward a foreign power that may have colonized them before and/or is a present-day ideological rival. Basically, Hiter Ate Sugar - "we don't need their filthy foreign ideas here!".

Any help would be appreciated.

Another likely reason: "They never went away from the monarchy system."

No, seriously. Authoritarian governments and monarchies are very similar, on a structural level.

Even then, though: The easiest way for people to accept an authoritarian system is if they have a good leader. Not necessarily charismatic (it does help), but definitely an enlightened despot. Thinkers have talked about this form of government for ages, whether it's Voltaire with the benevolent dictator or Plato with the philosopher king.

The great thing about those systems, though, is that you can study real-world examples with varying success.

edited 26th May '15 7:57:05 AM by AwSamWeston

Award-winning screenwriter. Directed some movies. Trying to earn a Creator page. I do feedback here.

I would advise too that you study other dictatorships to see what they did right.

I thought that maybe the single leader/party rule has aided the country, like brought it out of an economic depression. Perhaps they helped bring industry or up to technological standard with the rest of the top countries. It's what (sort of) happened when Stalin ruled Russia. (Although he's not really a good example)

Perhaps people believe that the one leader is a 'god' and propaganda insinuates the claim, as well as working along with the majority's religious belief/traditions. Just think about Japan during WW 2.

But remember, every leader has opposition, no matter how favorable they may be.

Life is hard, that's why no one survives.

Philosopher Kings and the like have never, ever existed at any point in history, and have almost always been used as an excuse by plutocratic assholes looking to justify their power over the common folk.

Sure, good authoritarian leaders can exist, but you won't find them governing nations. They work best in situations were the group they're leading is small, and has a clear purpose and goals - two things which nations generally lack.

edited 26th May '15 8:25:32 AM by Tungsten74

Different autocrats are supported for different reasons. One common trend is that they might be seen as representing stability. This is one reason Putin's government holds a lot of support within Russia: when the most recent alternative that people remember are the Yeltsin years, it's not hard to sell yourself as the only choice—especially if you also harrass or close down opposing media outlets while exploiting the power of the state media outlets to promote your own views.

Aside from that, dictators can genuinely be popular and populist. One very common trend recently is the "illiberal democracy", also called the authoritarian democracy or the hybrid democracy: the president is voted into office and maintains a level of popular support, but once there uses the institutions of the state to cement his rule, rule by diktat, harass and discredit opponents, and ignore restraints on his power. Often the reason given is "I am the embodiment of the people's will, so I am more legitimate than those inconvenient paper rules".

If he plays his cards right, the authoritarian democrat can exploit elections and populist issues to provide a veneer of legitimacy, often bolstered by a degree of genuine support.

Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.

I don't know what you mean by "recent trend" - according to Wikipedia, Authoritarian Democracy is just a strain of Fascism, and there don't seem to be any examples of the theory put into practice more recently than Spain in the 1970s. So who exactly are you referring to here?

"Strain of fascism" is completely off. "Fascism" is notoriously ill-defined, but generally it's a totalitarian paramilitaristic strain of nationalism—qualities that do not necessarily apply to illiberal democracies. The first high-profile definition and analysis was the one given by Fareed Zakaria's 1997 article, The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.

As a trend, it's more associated with the 1990s and beyond, though there were probably some isolated cases before. That's when an increasing number of states adopted generally free elections as the trappings of democracy without necessarily adopting the rule of law that underpins it. Before that, most authoritarian governments just didn't bother.

Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.

1) Authoritarian systems tend to be heavily rooted in cults of personality, religions, and/or other tribal identities. People don't support authoritarianism because they have a well-thought out, rational reason for supporting authoritarianism itself. Rather, they support some person or institution to the point where they refuse to acknowledge the oppression it causes.

2) Authoritarian systems are heavily maintained by extreme levels of propaganda. People under an authoritarian government usually have little context in which to place what they genuinely know about their government in and have been taught to demonize other nations.

Also, authoritarianism means that whatever happens to the country isn't the common masses' problem. Or rather, it's a problem for them if things get problematic, but making sure that things do not get problematic is not their responsibility and cannot be their responsibility.

And it's far more common than some people would think to give power to people because they are willing to accept responsibility that you do not want. It's part of the reason why actually being able to lead people and neither botch it nor have a nervous breakdown takes talent; because being responsible for many things is a lot of stress, way too much for some people, and it's natural for people not to want to have anything to do with that stress.

Also, democracy via representatives who are chosen not because they know how to rule and are proven to be honourable enough to do it well, but rather because they simply were capable of doling out enough money to get onto voting lists, is nothing more than a mere facsimile of what democracy actually is, as far as the masses are concerned. So why limit yourself to a facsimile, if there happens to be someone who actually knows how to lead and can lead? Of course it is a gamble either way because power does corrupt and there's always the chance that the newly-appointed (or whatever) absolute leader will happen to be the same sort of prat as the standard-issue politicians are, but in case it happens to be otherwise and the leader actually is capable and willing to improve the lives under their rule, we do have to remember that it's easier to find one honest politician than it is to find a whole parliament's worth of those.

Also also, remind yourself of all the time you'd worked on some project and chose someone to be the team leader and have the power to order others around, even though, strictly speaking, the position is not really necessary for as long as people do their job properly. Yup, any time that'd happened, you chose someone to have authority over you, and outside of people possibly getting fed up and overthrowing the leader if they happened to be an arse, there weren't really any rules about what they could and could not do; so in a way, it was authoritarianism, only on a much smaller scale and with people actually unaware that that it was. Still, it worked so the practice continued ...

What you do is instill fear in the people and slowly chip away at their freedoms until you've tricked them into believing it's acceptable to subject people to "random" cavity searches, or to let crooked politicians and their cronies get away with treason because they're supposedly "patriotic", or to spy on civilians. You have to convince them that the people disappearing in the dead of night somehow must have done something to deserve it. You have to paint the victims of oppression as witches intent on destroying the community from the inside out. And you have to throw them a few bones while you're at it, so they'll think you really have their best interests at heart.

edited 26th May '15 7:06:40 PM by nekomoon14

Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.

Okay, I appreciate the discussion on political philosophy, but I think many of the arguments are oversimplified, or lack nuance when they're applied in the real world. There's no shortage of authoritarian states today and in history, and many of them have genuinely had a lot of popular support.

As should be fairly evident, "authoritarianism" encompasses a very wide range. The classic, Orwellian totalitarian dictatorship is one extreme, but it's only an extreme. And as political scientists have pointed out, modern authoritarian states are usually resigned to giving their citizens plenty of latitude in running their own lives, as long as they stay away from areas like speech criticizing the government, or political action, or the like.

This is actually a far cry from the classic totalitarian state, which aimed to govern as much of their citizens' lives as possible. Norms of what's accepted and what's not evolve—and so do authoritarian rulers. Far from being static, modern authoritarian states are often in a dynamic, give-and-take dance with their own citizens; if you stay static, you die, politically speaking.

All that said, let's take a look at some of the elements brought up in this thread.

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Propaganda is one element being brought up a lot, and broadly speaking, it's true. A truly free press is an effective check on governmental power, no matter what kind of state, illiberal/authoritarian or liberal/democratic. Free presses also mean that the state's talking points are much less effective, since anyone can fact-check them, and a healthy journalistic atmosphere is one that is skeptical of the state.

So, you might think that a state with close control over the "organs of information" so that they'll only parrot the government's lines would have a lot of control—and this is true, but only to a degree. As the Communist Bloc learned, you can only parrot patently absurd lies for so long before people catch on. Unless a state is willing to close its borders like North Korea does, information leaks. People have always been hungry for information: they'll smuggle samizdat, listen to illegal radio, evade censor-bots online with sly allusions and memes. The "force-feed people Five-Year Plan stories" is quite outdated; people will simply stop believing the state media. (Say it with me, Soviet Union scholars: there's no truth in Pravda, and no news in Isvestia.) Modern authoritarian states are very much on the defensive in the information war because they can't control the public information flow like the classical totalitarian states do; they must settle for censorship of news and microblogs and hoping that it will be enough.

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Also, I notice a trend to dismiss supporters of authoritarianism as being deluded, lied to, or irrational. This is a very dangerous assumption to make! In additional to being patronizing, this is a line of argument that makes no effort to understand why smart, rational people would willingly vote for patently undemocratic rulers, when in fact a little bit of digging will tell you a lot. The answer will differ from country to country, but there are common themes.

One theme is the country in question having a bad experience with democracy. Russia is the go-to case here; the 1990s were terrible years to live through. After that, the stability of the Putin years seem a godsend. Venezuela is another: the democratic government in place before Huge Chavez was perceived as so corrupt and so out of touch with the ordinary people that Chavez's demogogue blame-it-all-on-the-fat-cats style, coupled with populist social reforms, gave him a wide degree of genuine popular support. In these cases, the rulers could successfully argue "it's me or the bad old days", and a rational, clear-thinking voter could well agree with them.

This is especially true if the rulers are perceived to have brought around economic good times as well. This is the case with the P.R.C., the most populous authoritarian state in the world. Here it's a simple implicit bargain: "stay out of politics, stay out of our way, don't complain about political rights or free speech; in return we will deliver economic growth to you, and you can live a comfortable life". That's the bargain the Chinese Communist Party keeps with the Chinese citizenry; right now its single greatest concern is to wind down the miraculous growth of the economy while keeping social stability.

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There's also the "makes the trains run on time" aspect Kazeto brought up. This is a topic for another time (I'd have to dig up the four-way typology of states), but I will observe that authoritarian states consistently tend to have greater problems with administration and corruption.

Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.

Authoritarian behavior subordinates the behavior of the state to the whims of its leaders. This allows them to accomplish certain things well, but it introduces inefficiencies. The state can reorganize and restructure incredibly quickly if needed. The Soviet Union under Stalin in the thirties is a good example. However because authority is vested in persons rather than apolitical norms, it is easily corrupted; modern Venezuela is instructive. A man is more easily assured of his safety when he need only appease his superiors to break the law rather than face never-ending risk. He is more easily rewarded as well when good governance means appeasing his superiors rather than behavior related directly to his job.

Most authoritarian systems rely heavily on ideological or personal loyalty. Persons and even organizations inside the system are judged by the system not on their effectiveness or value to the state as much as the purity of their ideology or loyalty. Mao exiled Deng over whether the color of the cat mattered because it was semi-veiled ideological heresy. North Korea at the moment is very much about personal loyalty over any other possible measures by which to judge the value of its officials. It is offers room to rise for those who get in on the ground floor; there was social upward mobility in Hitler's Germany during the early years like few places have ever had. All it needed was a Nazi party membership and a willingness to serve. And it promotes the grasping, who see the power of the system and desire it, by giving them a way to denigrate and combat the effective, who deal with the world as it is and not as the system wishes it to be.

Because of its appeal, in some ways, to emotion rather than to reason, authoritarian organizations often deal with their adherents on an emotional level, providing something to unite around, a cause and sense of progress, a sensation of being more than you are, part of something vast and powerful. These are tools of all organizations of course, but success in authoritarianism usually requires exploiting them more effectively than most. Hitler and Stalin both improved the lot of the common citizen, built up the infrastructure of their countries, spread new technologies to the masses, and generally gave them a sense things were getting better. The Soviet Union collapsed when any idiot among its citizens could see it was lagging behind substantially and wasn't going to catch up. North Korea cultivates an extreme us vs. them mentality and then tries to cast everything it does from weapons testing to getting out of bed in the morning as the equivalent of great battlefield victories against "them" as part of an attempt to convince people of great progress that is demonstrably not occurring internally; as long as they claim to be cowing their enemies and none inside the country can prove otherwise they avoid the fate of the Soviets. (The same lies behind boondoggle projects like the ski resort a few years back; people see it being done and assume that the infrastructure exists to support it and that somebody, not them but somebody, can use it. In reality it was built to give the impression of bread and circuses that no one is actually getting. The Big Lie is alive and well.)

edited 27th May '15 2:13:57 AM by Night

Nous restons ici.

There's a video on You Tube that discusses exactly the question you're asking, using the example of a (fairly) well known dictator in fiction: https://youtu.be/3k3SRbxR2SI?t=2m23s

People, in my observation, support authoritarianism because their "democratic" process only gives them the "choice" of two parties, both with authoritarian policies.

Sure, you can "blame" party A for introducing a particular measure but then party B gets in and they don't repeal it. They merely add their own control measures - for which they are later blamed and which party A does not repeal when they next get in.

The authoritarian aspects are frequently pitched as matters of "National Security" and "for your safety".

I think the "national security" measure is a little overdone, but it is a reason why people would support authoritarian rule. I suggest that if you do go that route, you should make the dictator an anti-villain well-intentioned extremist who simply wants to make his people safer. Having him be a Straw Hypocrite (or worse, a mastermind of attacks against his people) to me leads to Debate and Switch territory.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

To be fair, though, politicians nowadays seem to be trying to master the (dubious) art of Debate and Switch—alongside the (also dubious) art of making a stink from nothing—so people simply expect that from anyone who would appear power-hungry enough to actually make themselves into some sort of dictator, regardless of what the motives that person has actually are.

edited 31st May '15 1:42:27 PM by Kazeto

Why be a dictator? Dictators get despised. Under New Zealand's system alone, just being a Member of Parliament (MP) is enough to set you on the Gravy Train for life, actually serving as Prime Minister even more so.

I don't know if it's the same in the USA, but I hardly think George W. is currently wallowing in poverty.

You can be an authoritarian self-serving prick amongst a pack of fellow authoritarian self-serving pricks and you all work together to enact laws to help yourselves and your fellows and con the public into thinking it's democracy - when in fact it's just your party and the other party taking turn about at driving up MP and Prime Ministerial wages, perks and post-service parachutes.

Because it depends on the institutions of the country in question.

In many liberal democracies, being a member of Parliament or the House of Representatives or what-have-you means you have genuine access to influence and power. This is not the case in many illiberal democracies, where the Parliament/Congress/what-have-you is a rubber-stamp for the dictator's policies.

Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.

The point I'm making is that a political system does not have to have a dictator in order to be "Authoritarian" - authoritarianism can be entrenched across the board in so-called democracies in which "it doesn't matter who you vote for, the government wins", where - aside from a few minor points of domestic or foreign policy - the actual policies of the main parties don't differ a hell of a lot so far as enforcing their collective will on the lives of the citizens and desiring ever more control over minute aspects of the citizens' lives are concerned: who you can/can't marry, what discipline you can dish out to your children, whether or not you have the right to self defense in your own home (and what form it may take), what forms of sex/sexuality are permissable and so on.

An authoritarian government can just as easily be multiple parties that all support one another's prestigious positions, keep other parties from getting a chance at power (unless those parties play ball) and all enact various laws to micromanage the population, just as easily as it can be one where a dictator has got into power, secured his/her personal status as permanent head honcho and started dictating his own personal whims.

The people "support" them, because really there's no real choice - whichever party you vote for doesn't matter - all of them want "job security" (even if that means a fat "pension" on top of being paid to be an "Opposition MP" for a while), all of them want to control more and more aspects of the citizens' lives.

An Authoritarian (possibly even totalitarian) democracy is possible. If there aren't any limits to a democratic government (IE, a bill of rights) then a democracy is basically a tyranny of the majority.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

The whole key to dictating is to make people think that you are right to lead, and people who oppose you are and should be treated as such. Which means you have to offer something to the world. Usually this is economic stability.

Because the dictator or party has convinced the people that they, and they alone, are their salvation.

inb4 drawing false equivalencies with elections.

A simple glance at modern Russia or Venezuela would cast doubt on whether that's a false equivalency.

edited 2nd Jun '15 4:08:19 PM by Night

Nous restons ici.

For the modern dictator, questionably-fair elections are a vital tool in the kit.

You don't need the blatantly unfair "me or nothing" ballots to tilt the field in your direction using a variety of less obviously unfair practices.

Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.

One of the upsides to authoritarian rule is that people know their place and purpose. Your part of a system bigger than yourself, and you know exactly how to serve it. None of the uncertainty that freedom brings.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"