Angry Planet - How spreading democracy keeps dictators in power

Episode Date: March 15, 2017

For his views on democracies and dictatorships, he’s been called a cynic. But NYU professor Alastair Smith doesn’t think that makes him wrong. This week on War College, Smith debunks popular ideas about dictators and how they stay in power. According to Smith, and his colleague Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the West too often trades cash for policy favors from dictators. International criminal courts for authoritarian leaders are bad ideas, Smith argues, because they create negative incentives for dictators to leave. And attempts to help the masses - as former Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi attempted - can be a dictator’s biggest mistake. Smith says that for dictators, it’s good policy to understand who keeps them in power and to keep those entities – which can sometimes include the West - happy. By Matthew Gault Produced and edited by Bethel HabteSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. Contrary to most of the opinion that we have of Qaddafi, his actual fatal mistake was he actually tried to do something very stupid, and that was he actually tried to do something very stupid, and that was he actually tried. try to improve the welfare of the people. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. Today we're talking to New York University Professor of Politics, Alistair Smith. So back in 2011, Smith and Bruce Buenos de Mesquita published a book titled The Dictator's Handbook,

why bad behavior is almost always good politics. The book is six years old, but it feels timeless and especially relevant today. Alistair, thank you so much for joining us. Happy to be here. So in the West, we often watch dictators in other parts of the world and say to ourselves, how is this guy still in power? So tell me, why is bad behavior almost always good politics? Well, in the West, we tend to think about politicians are being.

successful when they deliver effective public policy, things that enrich society and make us well off. And that's because we're very fortunate that we've grown up, or most of us have grown up in societies, where political leaders are responsible to millions of people. And therefore, they have to deliver, to make millions of people happy, they have to deliver effective public policy. And so those are the policies we see, and we see those policies as the ones are successful. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people around the world have grown up in under political institutions where the leader is responsive to a far smaller number of people. And it's those leaders, they survive in office by keeping the small number of supporters

they're beholden to happy. And so we see the policies they enact enrich the few at the expense of the many, which seems very contrary to those of us who've grown up in the West. Right. This goes to one of the core concepts of the book is the idea of essentials and interchangeables as parts of the political system, correct? Yeah, so most of the time we like to bandy around the word democracy. I like to think of political institutions as being on a continuum. So we could think about how many people does a political leader need to stay in power? What's the support do they need? So in a democracy, you might want to think you need half the voters. Turns out you always need much less than half the voters because of things like electoral colleges

and gerrymandered districts, but you need many, many people. Autocrats, they survive by having support of relatively few people. But we can actually think of all of these things on a continuum. So we can think about different political rules, simple things like gerrymandering reduce the number of voters that a politician needs the support of in order. to stay in power. So we could think of democracies and autocracies all on one continuum from only needing several hundred or several thousand supporters. That might be the case in North Korea or in Syria, all the way up to the United States where you need tens of millions of voters

to support you to stay in power. And of course, the ways you make tens or hundreds or thousands of people happy as opposed to tens of millions of people happy are very different. Right. And this speaks to how someone like, say, Duffy stayed in power for so long because he was good at keeping the small coalition happy. Yeah, in fact, I would actually say that contrary to most of the opinion that we have of Gaddafi, his actual fatal mistake was he actually tried to do something very stupid, and that was he actually tried to improve the welfare of the people. So relative to other North African countries, in particular oil-rich countries,

He promoted a much higher level of literacy and education than neighboring states. And he also allowed there to be more opposition media. He allowed more protests. So in comparative terms to where he was, he let people get educated and he allowed free media. And these were things he didn't need to do. The source of Gaddafi's wealth was oil flowing out of the ground for which he did not need an educated population. He didn't need an informed population. He didn't need the people to work so that they would be productive so that he would raise tax revenue.

He just needed the oil companies to write him a check. So the seats for his downfall were actually that he tried to help the people rather than stifle the people and just help the supporters. Why did he make that change? I always like to think of this is the classic failing that we see with Julius Caesar. So, you know, if we read our Shakespeare, Julia Caesar was deposed. because he tried to be king. Well, he was de facto, he was already the king. We can all see that he was the king.

The problem came was what he actually tried to do was help the people. He tried to relieve debt. And the trouble was many, many of the Romans were becoming indebted because of all the civil wars. And they couldn't work their farms because they had to do military service. And they came back to find themselves in them and their families in debt and being sold into slavery. And he tried to relinquish these debts. He tried to help the people at the expense of his coalition. And of course, they stabbed him to death.

You've got to remember the people that were influential and his key political supporters were a member of the Senate. And his policies were helping the Roman people at the expense of core supporters. And they turned around and staffed it. It sounds like the more benevolent dictators then are able to achieve a balance between keeping those influencers happy, basically the rich. I'll use shorthand, if you don't mind, and keeping the people happy. But are there ever instances where the people finally enact a kind of political change from your perspective, or does it only happen if the people are able to entreat the rich to help them? No. So we've got to think about political development under different circumstances. So one of the ways that the

masses, the people manage to empower themselves, is that they can demand political change because they can coordinate and rise up. We might think of this as revolution. It doesn't actually, it can just be the threat of revolution, is enough to push leaders into reforming. And the successful transitions tend to take place when the political leaders need the people to actually work to raise revenue. So a great case of this would be Ghana. J.J. Rawlings came to power. He was there twice, but he comes to power the second time, and the basic problem, the country has been so run into the dirt that there's just no way he can raise any revenue to pay the army anymore. And he goes to, first of all, he goes to the Soviet, says, I'll be as effectively says, I'll be a Soviet satellite. If you give me the money, and they say no, he goes to the World Bank, and it's the end of the Cold War at this point.

And so they no longer have an interest in helping him out so much. And so they say, well, you can only get these monies if you enact these political reforms and economic reforms first. So he's forced to undertake policies that empower the people. He's forced to have free media, allow free assembly, get rid of a lot of the corruption that used to be the sort of bugbearer of the economy. And it's precisely because he needs to raise revenue. So poor countries that don't have natural resources have a much higher chance. of reforming than oil-rich countries, because at some point, if you don't have someone willing to give you cash, you're going to actually have to take reforms that allow the people to organize.

And so Ghana is a great success story. Rawlings comes to power as a dictator. And then over the years, he implements these economic reforms and political reforms follow because in the process of letting the people work, they talk to each other, they show up, they can talk, they're free, the protests become common. And a certain point, it becomes, well, how's he going to stop the people organizing politically? And the only way is to sort of send the military in, but that's going to stop them actually working. And so he's stuck. Dictators get stuck when they need the people to talk and able to raise revenue.

So that's successful political reform happens in those ways. You touched also on two other points I wanted to get to that were really fascinating in your book. And the first is the military and keeping the military happy. And I wanted you to talk a little bit more about that and about how it seems to me reading your book and looking at history that the dictators that were unable to keep funding the military often found themselves losing. Yeah, that's key because in many autocratic institutions, the army is not so much a means of national defense, but is actually a way of suppressing domestic opposition. So in the United States, we tend to think of the army is primarily there to help us prevent outside forces from attacking the United States. But in most autocratic countries, that is not the purpose of the army. The army is there to stamp out dissent.

And given that role, they're core insiders. And therefore, what we need, you have to be able to pay them to do this job. It's dirty work to go around and suppress and potentially kill your fellow citizens. And people don't want to do that. And therefore, you have to pay them well. And they have to have this expectation that you're going to be. going to keep paying them for the long period of time. So thinking about the military and using it to suppress dissent, I think there's a really interesting example here in Egypt, right, in the past

few years during the Arab Spring, because a lot of people don't realize that Egypt's military, more than just being, you know, the military in Egypt, is also one of the biggest businesses in Egypt. It employs lots of people. Absolutely. So the Egyptian government, functional. to keep the ore, particularly before the Arab Spring, so we've had a bit of mixing up with the Muslim Brotherhood coming in, but the army was integrated heavily into the economy. And so they ran businesses, they ran bakeries, they ran all kinds of different industries. And we weren't thinking about running the economy to enrich the average Egyptian citizen. We were thinking about this is a way in which the army can be vested in maintaining the political status quo.

And effectively, it was a way of transferring money from poor people to the army. And, you know, we didn't have free competition for baking bread. We had the bread that subsidized flour and stuff going to the army. They bake bread. They make profits. They stay loyal to the regime. And this was working very well up until the point that there was the potential that, We see illness coming into the regime.

We see economic decline coming over. And then people rise up. And at the point, the army is seeing that they expect political change and they're no longer willing to suppress the people. So this is a sort of very common story is that you stay loyal. But it's not just you're loyal because you're being paid a lot today. It's loyal in the expectation that you're going to continue to be paid. And I think that Tunisia and Egypt, we saw both. Both of the political leaders were old and sickly.

We're seeing declining revenues, particularly oil revenues, were well down in Egypt. And so the government was having trouble paying its bills. And the army is seeing maybe it's time for a change. We don't want to be the ones out shooting people on the street, given that we're going to have political change. And potentially some of the people we're shooting at might be the next people we're accountable to. All right. We're going to break for just a minute. You're listening to War College, and we're talking with Alistair Smith about his book, The Dictator's Handbook,

why bad behavior is so often good politics. Thank you for joining us today on War College. Again, we were talking with Alistair Smith about the dictator's handbook. The other point I wanted to get to from your previous statements about Ghana was aid money, Western aid money specifically. I'd never thought about it this way, and perhaps that's naive of me. But your book really lays out the ways that Western aid money helps keep authoritarian power. Yeah, absolutely. So as we were sort of discussing here, leaders have to make political reforms

when they need the people to earn revenue. So the classic way to, you know, we can think of oil-rich states is a great way to cut the people out of the loop. You don't need the people when the money just flows out of an oil well. You just cash the check and you can keep the people ill-informed and lacking in information. You can keep the people ignorant of it. poor. That's a fine way. Aid is another way you can avoid having to empower the people is if a foreign government is willing to put money in the government's accounts, the government doesn't have to make the kinds of reforms that lead to the people being involved and being a vital part of the economy. So I think aid is being counterproductive. And let me give you some evidence that you

might not immediately jump to. So it turns out, as you probably know, the UN Security Council, have 10 temporary members. They're elected for two-year terms. And one of the things scholars have noticed is that whenever someone's elected to that Security Council, their amount of aid they get goes up greatly. They also get access to the World Bank and the IMF and all kinds of regional banks and the terms on the money they get are better. So basically getting elected, you can now do policy favors for rich Western nations. And in exchange, you're going to get a ton of, like, I'm going to call it free money. It's just money because you can potentially do a favor,

be called upon to help make unanimous decision in the Security Council. So we would sit there and think if aid was a good thing, we would expect the countries in the Security Council to actually grow at a faster rate than those that aren't. But it actually turns out it's exactly the opposite. Countries elected to the Security Council grow at about half the rate that countries that aren't elected to the Security Council. They also have contractions in their political freedoms,

and they also tend to see a decline in democracy over the period in which they're a member of the Security Council and shortly afterwards. So it's exactly the opposite to what you would think. We also see that the average person in a country that gets a lot of aid is actually also really turned off. So if you, for example, there's a survey called the World Value Survey that gets conducted around the world every sort of five years in different countries, countries that receive tons of American aid, if you ask the people what their average view of Americans, this is extremely negative compared to the average around the world. If American aid was helping provide development and assistance,

you would actually think these people would be very positively disposed to the United States. But it's actually exactly the opposite. Places like Egypt that get tons of USAID actually have a miserable opinion of the United States. And it's basically because we are paying off, or America is paying off dictators to get policy changes that they want, right? You know, famously Jimmy Carter started aid to Egypt to get them to recognize Israel. Yeah, so that's right. And so Mubarak was getting billions of dollars of USAID to enact a policy that the average Egyptian didn't like, the recognition of the state, state of Israel. The government of Egypt did nothing to actually, you know, let's say teach kids in

school toleration for the Jewish state. That was not the policy. The policy was sort of the exact opposite, which was hatred of Israel, and then they take money, pay off their supporters to sponsor this policy. So the people are left with this double whammy that now the government has money to pay supporters so it doesn't need to empower them through liberal economic policies or free media or freedom of association, things that lead to a productive society. And they have to live with this policy of recognizing the state of Israel, which they don't like. So for them, it's doubly bad. They stay mired under a dictatorial regime.

And at the same time, they have to have a country that's recognizing the state of Israel that they hate. So for them, you could understand why foreign aid is really bad. This book also explained to me in a very clear and cogent way, why does that the U.S. has an easier time establishing relationships and getting what it wants from authoritarian countries, basically fewer people are making political decisions, correct? So, yeah, so let's suppose, just think of a very simple trade here of policy for money. The autocratic state wants money, and they have something they can sell, which is policy favors. So let's suppose the policy being asked for by a foreign power to you as a citizen of the recipient

country is worth $1,000. Let's say this is basing rights for U.S. troops or adopting an anti-communist policy or opening your markets to allow U.S. to take over the market, whatever the policy, just so it's $1,000. And now let's think, just do the simple maths about whether the leader would go along with such a policy. Well, if suppose you're the political leader and you need a thousand supporters to support you, Well, so long as the aid is in excess of a million dollars, you can give each of your

supporters $1,000, as a thousand supporters, a million dollars is all it would take, and you would be indifferent politically between enacting the policy that was demanded if you or not. And so if you've got several million dollars, you can keep a million for yourself, pay the supporters to take this policy they don't like, and that's all well. Now, if we would think about changing the policy, so now you need a million, political supporters, i.e. it's a very democratic place. Well, now we're talking a thousand million dollars, a billion dollars to pay all the leaders' supporters to adopt the policy that the US want.

Obviously, that aid doesn't take place. We never see such an aid flow because the policy being, there's no way the US, the policy could be worth so much to the US voters that they pay a billion dollars for this aid. Very few aid for policy deals would be worth that much for the US voters. But you see the magnitude of dictators are easy to buy because you doesn't take much to compensate the supporters for adopting the policies they didn't like. So we like in the US and most democracies, they go around the world claiming that they want to promote democracy. But at the end of the day, you want to think how many democracies has the West really created? And is it really in their incentives to do so? Setting up elections and having the sort of trimmings of democracy is very well. But

keeping leaders beholden to a small number of groups means that you can buy favors from them very cheaply. Something that caught my eye as I was researching this book and reading some of the reviews of it that came out a few years ago is that the main critique I saw over and over again of your ideas is that they're cynical. I'm wondering how you answer that charge. Sinical does. Sinical does not necessarily mean wrong. I'm totally willing to take that this, our book is cynical. We believe that political leaders at the end of the day are motivated by self-interest and the self-interest of most leaders is to stay in power. And therefore they carry out the policies that best keep them in power. They do what their supporters want and they try and

keep that number of supporters to be as small as they possibly can. And that's sort of at the end of the day, the working basis we start from. The conclusions we draw, we believe, explain how the world works, both with respect to which leaders stay in power, the kinds of policies leaders pursue, the foreign policies they have, aid policy, how people fight wars, which nations win wars. All those policies follow as a logical consequence of the framework. set up. Now, you can call it cynical because we don't put a lot of stock in the good nature of political leaders. But when I look at the empirical evidence, I think being able to predict 99% of the action because thinking about the incentives that leaders have and forgetting about

that some leaders might be benevolent, that 1% that's left over is the way to go. So, you know, I often hear people tell me about, well, what about recent growth in China, for example, that that's sort of enlightened autocratic behavior, for which I would say 150 years ago, China was probably the largest economy in the world. And how was it that China became so poor? It's because they had autocratic leaders in power. Mao took China and drove its economy into the ground and people say, well, only through autocracy can we get decisive action to strengthen the economy. We can also take a relatively productive economy and drive it down into the ground and lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. What is the safest way for a dictator to

leave power, for them to survive? Oh, if you mean if they actually decide they want to go into retirement? The best way to get to retire is pack a large amount of gold onto a helicopter and fly away. Living in exile seems a good way to go. Very few dictators, many, many dictators die in office or they die fleeing. Many of them don't get deposed until such time as their health becomes a real problem. So only when they're sick and the coalition can see that the sort of gravy train they've been living on is coming to an end anyway. Do they turn on the dictator? Nearly all dictators try and last it out. Fleeing overseas is a good way to go. This is an interesting area because this is one of those places where a country and a people's

sense of justice can actually get in the way of a peaceful transition of power and actually act as a negative incentive for a dictator to leave, correct? Yeah, I actually have real issues with the idea of these international criminal courts and trying to get justice. Unambiguously, dictators break rules of what we might think in the West of being fair and treating the citizens with respect and which often leads to breaking of many, many human rights laws and international conventions. I always sit there and think we have the situation that we would like a leader to flee into exile, but if they do, they're likely to be prosecuted. And so we force this leader

into this situation is, let's say I have a 20% chance of retaining power if I try and send my security forces onto the street to murder people, or I could go live in exile, but if I try and go to exile, I'm going to end up in a jail cell. The leader's going to be far more likely to take the risk of his security forces hanging on to power. And a lot of people, yeah, these are bad guys, but is it worth seeing tens of thousands of people killed or many more people being suppressed in the meantime because there's no easy exit for one bad guy. The reality of small coalition systems, the most autocratic systems, is leaders do bad things because that's how you come to power and that's how you stay in power. So they're already guilty. And if we're going to punish them,

then it just means that they're going to continue to do that rather than provide them with a soft It's extremely unjust, but the fact that you can't commit to letting these guys off the hook when they step down often means that we're sentencing potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of other people to continued suppression of the potential of death. So that's always a tricky answer with respect to post-transition justice. All right. From my last question, I want to ask you about the West's favorite dictator, Vladimir Putin. How do you see him ending?

How does that dictator leave power? Do you think he'll pull a switcheroo like he did before and become prime minister and make Mediev president? I think Medev's approval ratings are pretty low at the moment. What do you see happening and playing out in Russia in the next few years? Putin. Well, the Russian economy is in a big decline. I think that one thing we might want to think about is quite simply what oil prices. If the oil price goes up, he has more money. It's easier to stay in power. If the oil price stays low, then he's going to find it harder to continue to pay his supporters. I don't see any likelihood of an immediate change in Russia. He clearly has enough resources at the moment. He's healthy and well. We see these pictures of him riding around on horses bare chest. I think if this more as a more, as a lot, he's healthy and well. I think if this more as a lot, he's healthy and well, he's healthy and we see these pictures of him riding around on horses, he's bare chested. I think if this more, I think if this more is a more,

an advert to his supporters. It's he saying, I'm robust and healthy and I'm here for the long term rather than sort of macho thing. I think it's an important signaling device that he's healthy and is going to be around for a while. And institutionally, we may have, as you call it, switcheroo. He, you know, he'll go to be prime minister for a term and then come back for president. Or he may change the constitution so he can run as president again. but I don't see any immediate short-term prospects for reform in Russia. Alistair Smith of New York University, thank you so much for joining us. The book is The Dictator's Handbook, Why Bad Behavior is Such Good Policy.

And it's very cynical, but as Smith said, cynical does not necessarily mean wrong. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Hedick. hosts and Wrangles the Guests, and it's produced by me, Bethelhab Day. Please keep your iTunes reviews coming. If you say something nice and clever, I just might read it on air. Please post any ideas for future shows or feedback you have to our Twitter page. We're at War underscore College. Thanks.