What are the main tools used by nondemocratic regimes to control its population

All regimes possess a variety of means for staying in power. One common heuristic for thinking about these tools is through a simple “carrots versus sticks” breakdown of regime strategies. Carrots take the form of inducements or benefits that are doled out to gain the loyalty of constituents. Sticks are focused on meting out punishments as negative reinforcement of the rules.

One additional tool to add to the mix of carrots and sticks is propaganda. Governments may also expend resources to shore up their legitimacy in the minds of citizens, for example through sophisticated propaganda bureaucracies or control of information flows to the people. Here the term propaganda is used to refer to biased information communicated to convince audiences of a particular political view. Deploying propaganda is neither a carrot nor stick – or perhaps it is a bit of both – but rather a powerful means to control people’s perceptions and thoughts. Propaganda, as an ideational strategy, is in a category of its own, and especially powerful when it can draw on existing cultural foundations in a society.

All regimes utilize a mix of carrots, sticks, and ideas to stay in power. Many of the strategies reviewed in this section will have versions in democracies and non-democracies. For example, internal investigative bureaucracies, such as the Ministry of State Security in China, have counterparts in democracies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States. Similarly, virtually all countries in the world, regardless of regime type, have police for maintaining domestic order. It is not the case that non-democracies are repressive while democracies are not. But compared to democracies, non-democracies are relatively unconstrained in their ability to use force or manipulate information in order to ensure compliance with their rule. The lack of robust accountability mechanisms in non-democracies is a crucial difference in how public institutions are managed and the scope of their authority.

Regimes are most likely to endure when they build and maintain institutions. Institutions here refers to shared practices, norms, and organizations which exist beyond any single individual. One shorthand way for thinking about institutions is that they are the “rules of the game” for all social life. Institutions structure the way we do things and organize our interactions with others. They are the source of a great deal of social and political power. This is in part because resources follow from beliefs. Take the institution of the state. The state is one of the most powerful institutions in the modern world today. The beliefs and norms surrounding states, which are shared globally, confer great power on states. States manage nuclear arsenals, squeeze taxes from billions of citizens, and manage the global flow of trade and finance.

Because of the power of institutions, regimes have an interest in institutionalizing their rule. This highlights another feature of institutions. Institutions relate to each other in many ways: they can reinforce each other, be nested in one another, and one institution can beget another. Regimes are institutions unto themselves. Supporting regimes, in turn, are many additional institutions. Regimes invest in institutions that enable them to stay in power, which means that these institutions both absorb and disperse resources.

Let’s start with institutional carrots. Nondemocracies have in place a variety of institutions that provide positive inducements for supporting the regime. We will define and examine three of these: institutions for co-opting opposition, patronage networks, and clientelism. Each of these is distinct but can overlap with the others.

All non-democracies face the problem of an opposition which might oust them from power. To blunt the force of an opposition, or even vocal critics with a following, a regime might invest in institutions which have the appearance of democratic representation. These include rigged elections, legislatures, courts, and the like. These institutions are actually “window dressing” or façades for a tightly controlled political system. Judiciaries in these systems are not independent, nor do they provide a meaningful check on the authority of rulers. Many nondemocratic regimes have in place legislatures, but these legislatures lack authority to veto measures passed by those in power. Examples abound in the highly authoritarian Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea. North Korea has been ruled since the 1950s by a single Supreme Leader, yet formally it has a unicameral legislature. This Supreme People’s Assembly comprises nearly 700 deputies and in theory confers authority on the Supreme Leader. However, DPRK’s Supreme Leader makes all governance decisions for the country and does not face any threat of veto by this unicameral legislature.

Opposition parties or critics of the regime might agree to sit on such bodies as a means to have access to and possibly influence political leaders. They may also benefit materially from legislative or judicial seats, for example drawing a salary or receiving other perks of office such as a chauffeured car or swanky office. Note that co-opting opposition through such institutions can serve the ruling regime in multiple ways. They can boost the legitimacy of the rulers in the eyes of the public. They also allow rulers to more closely monitor the positions and ideas of opposition, which might then be countered or even adopted as appropriate.

All politics hinge on relationships and the flow of resources. Patronage networks are relationships within political systems in which one party with access to resources distributes those resources to those within their network. Within a patronage network are reciprocal bonds that unite members of the network. A leader might take a portion of oil revenues and distribute those monies to their deputies scattered throughout the provinces; those deputies make sure that the leader’s posters are prominently displayed in every local government office.

Patronage networks may be organized via many different kinds of organizations or social groups. Political parties are one way to distribute public resources in exchange for political obedience. Other major state organizations, such as the military or state-owned businesses are also sites for building patronage networks. Non-state organizations may be part of patronage networks, such as businesses or business associations. Identity groups, including those bound by ethnicity or tribe, may be the basis of patronage networks. The latter is evident in Syria, where major institutions of the state are controlled by the Alawite minority, a Shia Muslim group that is less than one-fifth of Sunni Muslim-dominated Syria. Alawite networks support the ruling al-Assad family.

Related to but separate from patronage networks are institutions that promote clientelism on a broad scale. Clients are those who rely on a patron for resources; clientelism is a strategy whereby rulers seek to buy off the loyalties of broad swaths of the population. To do so, rulers may invest in social programs in which they mark clearly their sponsorship of these programs to the masses. Such broad-based distribution of resources has the effect of turning significant parts of a country’s population into clients, or dependents, of the regime.

One place where we see this kind of broad-based clientelism was in Mexico under the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (or Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) during much of the twentieth century. PRI was in power in Mexico from 1929 to 2000. Under the PRI presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994), social programs were consolidated under a new government organization called Pronasol. Pronasol distributed government funds to poor communities to build public works such as schools, health clinics, water treatment facilities, and electric grids. This organization reflected the national ambitions and reach of PRI: at its height, there were nearly 250,000 Pronasol committees at the grassroots level to carry out community projects in collaboration with community leaders. The results are impressive: renovations of 130,000 schools, creation of 1,000 rural medical units, and plumbing access for 16 million Mexican residents (Merrill and Miró eds. 1996). Looking back on this ambitious program, it represented a broad-based means to build support for PRI rule throughout the country and especially in the countryside.

Next, let’s turn to institutional sticks, or strategies of repression. There are a variety of repressive means by which nondemocratic regimes extract obedience from the population. These include the creation of domestic security bureaucracies and paramilitary groups.

Nondemocracies are the creators of the modern secret police, beginning with the creation of the Cheka under Lenin, which became the NKVD – internal secret police – under Stalin. It is now the KGB in today’s Russia. The Cheka was the model for many other secret police that were created in Italy and Germany, to name some familiar examples. These institutions can serve critical purposes, from collecting intelligence on potential dissent within a country to terrorizing citizens.

One nondemocracy which has developed sophisticated means for surveilling its population is China. Since 2010, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has spent more on domestic security than external defense. A vast network of surveillance programs exist throughout the country, including “Sharp Eyes” (xueliang) a project announced in 2015 that mandated video surveillance of all public spaces in the country by 2020. Sharp Eyes included nonstop video feed of public squares, intersections of major roads, public areas in residential neighborhoods, and transit stations, to name a few. It also included monitoring of buildings such as the entry points of radio, TV, and newspaper offices. This video capability is combined with additional technologies such as facial recognition.

Another powerful instrument of repression are paramilitaries. These refer to groups with access to military-grade weapons and training, yet they are not part of the national military. They are “irregular armed organizations that carry out acts of violence against civilians on behalf of a state,” (Üngör 2020). Paramilities have been deployed by governments around the world, and they are an additional institutional layer of terror over citizens. Death squads are one kind of paramilitary employed by governments to carry out extrajudicial murders, usually of political enemies of the state. One tragic example of mass killing carried out by death squads can be found in Indonesia. During the height of the Cold War in the mid-1960s, Indonesian death squads were responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians believed to have leftist sympathies.

Taken together, nondemocratic leaders possess a variety of means, both persuasive and coercive, to enforce their rule. These include positive inducements that can be narrow or broad in scope. Coercive institutions, such as secret police and paramilitaries, offer an institutionalized means for nondemocratic leaders to maintain their monopoly on the use of violence over their societies.

Another powerful way to maintain authority is to convince people to believe in the legitimacy of nondemocratic rule. This is in some ways the most efficient way to stay in power because it preempts resistance. Nondemocratic leaders thus invest in creating strong ideational foundations for their rule. These ideas may derive selectively from deeper cultural traditions in a society – including those linked to faith traditions – or from the dissemination of nondemocratic ideologies to the masses.

Undemocratic concepts such as hierarchy and unaccountable authority are embedded in many cultural traditions. Monarchies of Europe and empires of the Americas were supported by ideas focused on the divine right of rulers. Virtually all major religions of the world promote authoritarian and undemocratic systems of governance and social order, from the rigid patriarchy of the Roman Catholic church to the castes of Hinduism. Several East Asian societies – in China, Korea, and Japan, to name a few – have strong Confucian influences. Confucius, a scholar of antiquity, argued that the hierarchical relationship between ruler and ruled was one of several hierarchical relationships that constitute an orderly society. This supplemented the idea that Chinese emperors possessed the mandate to rule “all under heaven” (tian xia). To this day, Chinese leaders draw from Confucius’ writings to argue for a “harmonious society” in which dissent is culturally frowned upon.

One ongoing debate is whether “persistent authoritarianism” is an inevitable consequence of certain cultural traditions. The evidence on this count is that undemocratic cultural elements are not necessarily barriers to eventual democratization. Arguments were proffered for the incompatibility of democracy and Islam, or democracy and Confucianism, for example. Yet there are many examples of modern democracies that have emerged out of these anti-democratic cultural traditions. Turkey and Indonesia are examples of Muslim-majority democracies, while Korea and Japan demonstrate that societies with Confucian influences can become robust democracies.

Beyond cultural traditions, certain powerful political ideologies support nondemocratic rule. Two of these are communism and fascism. Countries organized according to these ideologies have been uniformly undemocratic and lack mechanisms of accountability between ruler and ruled in addition to basic freedoms for citizens. Communist countries have been led by a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the process of dismantling capitalism and building the socialist society that is meant to precede transition to communism. Fascist countries are characterized by extreme social hierarchies and control of all aspects of society by the ruling party.

A more narrow tool employed by nondemocratic leaders to remain in power is the creation of a cult of personality. Remember from Chapter Three, a cult of personality occurs when a state leverages all aspects of a leader’s real and exaggerated traits to solidify the leader’s power. Drawing upon institutions such as propaganda bureaus and state control of media channels, a cult of personality creates the illusion of mass support for – even adulation of – the ruler. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was famous for creating such a cult around his personal rule, and this was taken to new heights by other twentieth century rulers such as China’s Mao Zedong and Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu. Fanning a cult of personality is a powerful way to create emotional links between citizens and ruler. A cult of personality also creates the appearance of invincibility on the part of the ruler, which can serve to stave off challenges to their rule.