Thinking about Autocracies

Beginning my quest to learn more about what explains the differences between dictatorships and democracies.

As my three regular readers will have noticed, I posted on this blog a couple of times after I started it, but I haven’t posted in a long time. When I came up with the goal of starting the blog I had dreams of building up a relatively detached body of academic-ish posts about state formation and legal realism and what not. But I have been overtaken by events! I’m now constantly distracted by the terrifying churn of American federal politics, so if I’m going to keep working on this blog, it is going to need at least a slight pivot.

I apologize to the two readers out of my regular three who really hate to hear Trump-induced hyperventilation, but for the next while at least, this blog is going to become a place where I try to give some structure to my spiraling thoughts. But, with that said, I don’t actually plan to leave behind everything about the old focus. Indeed, the thoughts one spirals on while doom-scrolling twitter these days are all about statecraft and public law; so, it might not really have to change much! In fact, the first book that I want to discuss during my extended Trump meltdown is one that I expected to write about all along: North, Wallis, and Weingast’s Violence and Social Orders.

I didn’t know what to expect from this book. Despite the very high status of at least two of its three authors, I don’t get the sense that very many people loved it, or even read it at all. I’ve only ever heard GMU people talk about it, and even there, the reception has ranged from raving fandom to afterthought dismissal. But I loved the EconTalk episodes where Weingast talked about it, and I’m a sucker for grand theories. And North, Wallis, and Weingast’s theories are quite grand! The book offers (to quote the subtitle) “a conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history.”

What’s this new conceptual framework? They want to say that there are three kinds of social orders that humanity has lived in. The first is hunter-gatherer groups. They tend to be egalitarian and have nothing that looks like a state. The second is a “natural state” or a “limited access order.” These are communities where there is some coalition of powerful people that limits internal and external threats and coerces rents from the rest of society by limiting their freedoms. These limitations range from holding people in bondage to less onerous impositions like merely limiting their ability to form organizations or access tools for social commitment, like courts. NWW say that every human who wasn’t a hunter-gatherer before roughly the year 1800 lived in some sort of limited access order. They say about 15% of humanity since 1800 has gotten to live in the third and final kind of social order, the “open access order.” These provide a lot of civil and political rights to citizens and generally allows people to form private organizations and use courts and what not. They also tend to be rich.

So far this doesn’t amount to a new conceptual framework, but what makes it interesting, as suggested by the book’s title, is the role of violence in the theory. NWW say that all of these types of orders exist because they are stable ways that societies overcome the problems of internal violence. Gesturing at Robin Dunbar’s famous ideas, they argue that nothing like a “state” emerges in hunter gatherer bands because kinship and direct interpersonal relationships are strong enough to maintain peace in such a group. Beyond that size though, societies can develop different internal groups with violent capabilities that might be wiling to fight each other. Because fighting is incredibly costly, these groups are willing to set up deals with each other where they get access to different privileges to extract rents from the weaker portions of society. The value of any group’s privileges should be proportional to their violent capacity within the society. If relative power levels change for some reason, privileges have to be renegotiated. If bargaining breaks down, civil wars happen.

This picture of the forces that produce the natural state has a couple of things going for it. The first is just the conceptual point that it has the capacity to explain more than those theories of the state that just posit a stable group of people in control of things. The simple Weberian concept of some entity that has a monopoly on violence in a society assumes away a lot. For instance, unitary actor theories like my beloved stationary bandit model don’t have a great way of integrating stories about conflicts between kings and lords. NWW’s slightly more complicated picture of violent factions constantly renegotiating a grand political bargain gives a more granular story of how various dictatorships and monarchies have actually worked throughout time (though of course, this just pushes the assumptions a little deeper down. E.g., where do these violent factions come from and how are they ever stable?).

The second interesting thing about this framework, as NWW are fond of pointing out, is that it gives a simple (though not wholly original) way of explaining why international development work has such a poor track record. The only way that we have known for countries to become really rich is for them to have strong property and contract rights, that is, for them to be some kind of open access order. The governments and NGOs of rich countries often earnestly attempt to promote transitions to open access orders by promoting democracy and institutional reforms in poor countries. But on NWW’s theory, one should assume that the privileges and rents one observes in a poor country represent payoffs to various groups to keep them from starting a civil war. You can’t just say “stop making the payments!” without having a good idea for how to keep a civil war from happening. If civil war really is a credible threat, then even the people getting absolutely hosed in the current political order are likely to support the status quo, because a civil war would leave them even worse off. After all, their low position in the current order reflects the low capacity for violence. War would not go well for them!

So this basic model gives us a lot to think about civil wars and the persistence of dictatorship. But apparently, NWW also plan to give some thoughts about how the transition from a closed access order to an open access order has actually happened and about the ways in which an open access order can be unstable. To circle back to the Trump panic that I started this post with, that is what I am here for at this point! NWW wrote the book at a significantly less pessimistic moment in American history, so their focus was decidedly more on the question of how a society becomes open access, but surely they’ll have to offer some thoughts on the 1930s along the way. Once I’ve digested those points, I will report back to the three of you.