State power and staying power: infrastructural mechanisms and authoritarian durability.

AuthorSlater, Dan
PositionInside the Authoritarian State

The contemporary literature on authoritarian durability focuses more on democratic-looking institutions such as parties, elections and parliaments than the institution in which authoritarian regimes are most importantly embedded: the state itself. This article argues that state power is the most powerful weapon in the authoritarian arsenal After clarifying the regime-state distinction and explaining why regime durability involves more than just duration, we discuss four "infrastructural mechanisms" through which authoritarian regimes stabilize and sustain their rule: (1) coercing rivals, (2) extracting revenues, (3) registering citizens and (4) cultivating dependence. Since state apparatuses are the institutions best geared for performing these tasks, their effectiveness underpins authoritarian durability in a way that no other institution can duplicate. And since state power is shaped by long-term historical forces, future studies should adopt the kind of historical perspective more often seen in leading studies of postcolonial economic development than of authoritarian durability.

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"You should no more confuse the state with its government than you would confuse a fine Jaguar automobile with the person who drives it."

Professor Robert Frykenberg (1)

States and regimes are perennial yet largely parallel obsessions in political science. (2) When scholars study the state, they commit to exploring the extent rather than the form of government. (3) Specialists on regimes undertake the inverse commitment, asking how and why the state's power is constrained rather than extended and expanded. One conversation centers on whether and why regimes are democratic or authoritarian, while the other asks whether and why states are capable or incapable of effective governance. In this article we aim to bridge these parallel conversations by arguing that state power is the strongest institutional foundation for authoritarian regimes' staying power. (4)

The intellectual division of labor between studies of regimes and states is both essential and unfortunate. Professor Frykenberg's pithy formulation distinguishing states from the governments that run them (or in authoritarian settings, the regimes that run them) proves useful for understanding why. (5) The separation is essential because states and regimes are analytically distinct, but unfortunate because states and regimes are empirically intertwined. Though all metaphors have their limits, we find the notion of the state as a kind of machinery that is linked but not reducible to the actors who operate it helpful in three respects.

First, states are apparatuses that vary considerably in their power to undertake political tasks and accomplish political ends. Where states exhibit substantial "infrastructural power," or the capacity "to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm," the regimes that run them are the most immediate beneficiaries. (6) Where states look more like jalopies than Jaguars, the regimes that command them find themselves in an entirely different world when trying to assert control and establish domination.

Second, regime leaders are not usually the original architects of the states they operate. Drivers may customize, repair or "soup up" their cars, but they rarely build them from scratch or convert them into something that dramatically outperforms the original model. State apparatuses are typically inherited rather than originally constructed by the regimes that run them, particularly in the postcolonial world. A strong state is the best historical foundation for a durable authoritarian regime, not vice versa.

Third, even the strongest state apparatus cannot entirely protect a regime from catastrophic "operator error." Though states are institutions with considerable historical momentum, they must still be led by fallible human agents. Ironically, highly capable state apparatuses may be especially vulnerable to regime incompetence, since bad leadership is more damaging when the machinery responds readily to unwise top-down commands. (7) Authoritarian rulers who control strong states are not so much prisoners of a Weberian "iron cage" as they are commanders of what Weber called "a power instrument of the first order--for the one who controls the bureaucratic apparatus." (8)

We largely set aside the leader-contingent character of state power in this essay, however, and focus instead on establishing that states are the ultimate institutional weapons in the authoritarian arsenal. After defining regime durability and state power more explicitly, we elaborate four infrastructural mechanisms through which strong states make for durable authoritarian regimes. These mechanisms illuminate why strong states are even better institutional backstops for authoritarian durability than ruling parties, despite the far greater attention paid to parties (and, relatedly, elections and parliaments) in the literature on authoritarianism. (9) Since state power is shaped over the longue durde and not just by the regimes currently running the state, scholars of authoritarian durability should adopt the sort of historical perspective more often seen in leading studies of economic development than of political regimes. (10)

WHAT IS DURABILITY?

By durability we do not simply mean duration. Rather, we follow Anna Grzymala-Busse in arguing that durability is "the vector of duration (temporal length) and stability (constant outcome)." (11) This suggests that "duration alone is not the best measure of regime durability since it tells us little about the stability of the regime, or its ability to meet and overcome potential crises." (12) What is lost in a simple tally of the number of years a regime has endured is any sense of how that regime has endured, or how likely it is to continue enduring in the face of future strain. Authoritarian regimes in Myanmar and Singapore have exhibited similar endurance, for example, but assessing their durability requires that we also ask whether they have been similarly stable.

The answer is not as straightforward as it may appear. From one perspective, exemplified in field-defining recent work on "competitive authoritarianism," we see stability whenever a regime survives a monumental challenge. (13) We know that regimes in Myanmar and Zimbabwe are durable because they have repeatedly traversed the fires of political and economic crises and lived to tell the tale. This conceptualization seems consistent with the Grzymala-Busse notion of stability--that is, the ability to meet and overcome crises.

We propose a different perspective on stability (and hence durability), however. The ultimate form of stability does not entail meeting and overcoming crises, but avoiding and, when they cannot be totally avoided, resolving crises decisively in the regime's favor. When a regime survives a crisis but fails to eliminate or at least mitigate the underlying factors that precipitated it, that regime should be considered less stable than one in which similar crises are fully resolved or never even occur. What we see in cases like Myanmar and Zimbabwe is not the resolution of political crises but their perpetuation through implacable regime-opposition dead-lock. Such regimes may be battle-tested, but they are not particularly stable. The endurance of unstable regimes almost inevitably dooms societies to chronic crises, institutional flux and policy failures, as seen in the utter economic collapse of Myanmar and Zimbabwe under military and party rule, respectively.

By contrast, the most durable regimes are those that either stay out of trouble or have a proven track record of putting troubles behind them. Along with duration, they exhibit the "constant outcome" of institutional continuity. For instance, Malaysia's and Singapore's regimes are exceptionally durable not just because of their half-century lifespans, but because they have stably managed massive socioeconomic transformations without altering their most important institutional structures. Crises--whether political, economic or otherwise--have been few and far between. On the rare occasions when crises have emerged, they have been ably contained and effectively resolved. More unstable regimes like those in Myanmar and Zimbabwe get buffeted by recurrent crises of a much larger magnitude that require more drastic measures to manage. Yet even these drastic measures do not place the regime on solid, predictable footing. (14)

What kinds of institutions are responsible for the stability we see to a much greater extent in Malaysia and Singapore than in Myanmar and Zimbabwe? While most studies focus on ruling parties--and with good reason--we stress the stabilizing and strengthening role of what social scientists have long recognized as the consummate institution of political order, but which scholars of authoritarian durability tend not to give similar consideration: the state.

WHAT IS STATE POWER?

Though recent literature on regimes has incorporated the state as an influence on authoritarian durability, there is no consensus on what constitutes "the state." Recent work has...

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