Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP18078
Authors: Georgy Egorov; Konstantin Sonin
Abstract: Many, if not most, personalistic dictatorships end up with a disastrous decision such as Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, Hirohito's government launching a war against the United States, or Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Even if the decision is not ultimately fatal for the regime, such as Mao's Big Leap Forward or the Pol Pot's collectivization drive, they typically involve both a monumental miscalculation and an institutional environment in which better-informed subordinates have no chance to prevent the decision from being implemented. We offer a dynamic model of non-democratic politics, in which repression and bad decision-making are self-reinforcing. Repressions reduce the threat, yet raise the stakes for the incumbent; with higher stakes, the incumbent puts more emphasis on loyalty than competence. Our theory sheds light on the mechanism of disastrous individual decisions in highly institutionalized authoritarian regimes.
Keywords: nondemocratic politics; authoritarian dynamics; repression; information
JEL Codes: P16; C73; D72; D83
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Repression (D70) | Threat to the incumbent leader (D79) |
| Repression (D70) | Stakes of governance (G38) |
| Stakes of governance (G38) | Preference for loyalty over competence (L15) |
| Preference for loyalty over competence (L15) | Quality of advisors (G24) |
| Quality of advisors (G24) | Policy choices (D78) |
| Repression (D70) | Policy choices (D78) |
| Repression (D70) | Governance quality (H11) |
| Governance quality (H11) | Probability of disastrous policy choices (D79) |