I notice that you cite Freedom House, and Richard Hanania goes into why that NGO in particular is pretty institutionally captured and a biased source. Citing Freedom house is akin to circular reasoning or is too close for comfort with regards to the question of “Democracy”. (link) Also, for better or worse every institution of the US is very liberal, including the government (link) so it’s hard to imagine how in any real sense the US could become an actual right wing dictatorship.
Furthermore,”The Dictator’s Handbook” actually researches this exact question, with an eye toward selectorate theory, on how stable democracies vs dictatorships are, and actually digs into the numbers on this. And the punchline is that if you actually look, once you get past a certain threshold of keys, needed to obtain or stay in power, Democracies become very, very, very stable. And that in the entire history of democracies, no democracy past that threshold has ever backslid into dictatorships, short of being conquered by a foreign power or going completely bankrupt. (It goes without saying the US is well past this point)
The relevant section of The Dictator’s Handbook is the following
Given the complexity of the trade-off between declining private rewards and increased societal rewards, it is useful to look at a simple graphical illustration, which, although based on specific numbers, reinforces the relationships highlighted throughout this book. Imagine a country of 100 people that initially has a government with two people in the winning coalition. With so few essentials and so many interchangeables, taxes will be high, people won’t work very hard, productivity will be low, and therefore the country’s total income will be small. Let’s suppose the country’s income is $100,000 and that half of it goes to the coalition and the other half is left to the people to feed, clothe, shelter themselves and to pay for everything else they can purchase. Ignoring the leader’s take, we assume the two coalition members get to split the $50,000 of government revenue, earning $25,000 a piece from the government plus their own untaxed income. We’ll assume they earn neither more nor less than anyone else based on whatever work they do outside the coalition.
Now we illustrate the consequences of enlarging the coalition. Figure 10.1 shows how the rewards directed towards those in the coalition (that is, private and public benefits) compare to the public rewards received by everyone as more people enter the coalition. Suppose that for each additional essential member of the winning coalition taxes decrease by half of 1 percent (so with three members the tax rate drops from 50 percent to 49.5 percent), and national income improves by 1 percent for each extra coalition member. Suppose also that spending on public goods increases by 2 percent for each added coalition member. As coalition size grows, tax rates drop, productivity increases, and the proportion of government revenue spent on public goods increases at the expense of private rewards. That is exactly the general pattern of change we explained in the previous chapters.
I can’t find a section of the book talking about how often empirically democracies backslide into dictatorships, but literally zero of them seems false. I don’t know much about the history of democracy or dictatorships, but Germany was a democracy before it became Nazi Germany, so the claim of literally zero backsliding seems false.
Short of “a foreign power or going bankrupt.” Germany was forced to pay for all damages that occurred during WW1. They were pretty bankrupt as countries go. And then the great depression happened. So I think Germany counts as democratic backsliding on account of “going bankrupt.” And it doesn’t claim all democracies. Just democracies that reach a large enough numbers of keys.
I don’t have a source for this claim off the top of my head, but I’ve previously read that Germany was actually a net beneficiary of international financial transactions in the 1920s. Essentially, the flow of funds went like this:
Germany paid war reparations to the UK and France.
The UK and France paid off their war debts to the United States.
The United States made loans to Germany, and Germany defaulted on a good fraction of them.
It would be nice if someone could check whether this is true or not, but the impression I got from reading the history here is that the role of war reparations in causing fiscal problems for Germany was inflated by propaganda, especially by German politicians who tried to blackmail the Allies into lowering the amount of reparations to be paid by raising the specter of economic collapse in Germany.
Oh yeah, good point about Germany. I’m still pretty skeptical about the claim. Even if the claim ended up being true, I’d be worried its just because democracy is a pretty new concept, so we just don’t have as much data as we’d like. But far less worried it’d be non predictive as I am now.
The particular argument why democracies are so stable does not seem robust to the population wrongly believing a dictatorship would be better in their interests than the current situation. Voters can be arbitrarily wrong when they aren’t able to see the effects of their actions and then re-vote.
Oh also, I’d expect this analysis breaks down once the size of the essentials becomes large enough that people start advocating policies for fashion rather than the policy will actually have a positive effect on their life if implemented. See The Myth of the Rational Voter, and I expect that for a bunch of pro-Trump people, this is exactly why they are pro-Trump (similarly with a bunch of the pro-Biden people).
France had a military coup in 1958 followed by 6 months of dictatorship. What threshold had France not passed in 1958 to not count as a full democracy? Does the Dictator’s Handbook actually say this?
I notice that you cite Freedom House, and Richard Hanania goes into why that NGO in particular is pretty institutionally captured and a biased source. Citing Freedom house is akin to circular reasoning or is too close for comfort with regards to the question of “Democracy”. (link) Also, for better or worse every institution of the US is very liberal, including the government (link) so it’s hard to imagine how in any real sense the US could become an actual right wing dictatorship.
Furthermore,”The Dictator’s Handbook” actually researches this exact question, with an eye toward selectorate theory, on how stable democracies vs dictatorships are, and actually digs into the numbers on this. And the punchline is that if you actually look, once you get past a certain threshold of keys, needed to obtain or stay in power, Democracies become very, very, very stable. And that in the entire history of democracies, no democracy past that threshold has ever backslid into dictatorships, short of being conquered by a foreign power or going completely bankrupt. (It goes without saying the US is well past this point)
The relevant section of The Dictator’s Handbook is the following
I can’t find a section of the book talking about how often empirically democracies backslide into dictatorships, but literally zero of them seems false. I don’t know much about the history of democracy or dictatorships, but Germany was a democracy before it became Nazi Germany, so the claim of literally zero backsliding seems false.
Short of “a foreign power or going bankrupt.” Germany was forced to pay for all damages that occurred during WW1. They were pretty bankrupt as countries go. And then the great depression happened. So I think Germany counts as democratic backsliding on account of “going bankrupt.” And it doesn’t claim all democracies. Just democracies that reach a large enough numbers of keys.
I don’t have a source for this claim off the top of my head, but I’ve previously read that Germany was actually a net beneficiary of international financial transactions in the 1920s. Essentially, the flow of funds went like this:
Germany paid war reparations to the UK and France.
The UK and France paid off their war debts to the United States.
The United States made loans to Germany, and Germany defaulted on a good fraction of them.
It would be nice if someone could check whether this is true or not, but the impression I got from reading the history here is that the role of war reparations in causing fiscal problems for Germany was inflated by propaganda, especially by German politicians who tried to blackmail the Allies into lowering the amount of reparations to be paid by raising the specter of economic collapse in Germany.
Oh yeah, good point about Germany. I’m still pretty skeptical about the claim. Even if the claim ended up being true, I’d be worried its just because democracy is a pretty new concept, so we just don’t have as much data as we’d like. But far less worried it’d be non predictive as I am now.
The particular argument why democracies are so stable does not seem robust to the population wrongly believing a dictatorship would be better in their interests than the current situation. Voters can be arbitrarily wrong when they aren’t able to see the effects of their actions and then re-vote.
Oh also, I’d expect this analysis breaks down once the size of the essentials becomes large enough that people start advocating policies for fashion rather than the policy will actually have a positive effect on their life if implemented. See The Myth of the Rational Voter, and I expect that for a bunch of pro-Trump people, this is exactly why they are pro-Trump (similarly with a bunch of the pro-Biden people).
France had a military coup in 1958 followed by 6 months of dictatorship. What threshold had France not passed in 1958 to not count as a full democracy? Does the Dictator’s Handbook actually say this?