Authoritarian Rule Essay

“Three Strategies to Sustain the Authoritarian Rule”

The aim of the essay is to observe the impacts and the three strategies exercised to sustain the authoritarian rule.

It is understandable that the route to dictatorship is high risk with many challenges and thus it requires precision to prevent death. Therefore, dictators and their launching organisation usually come into power through force or slick strategies.

However, after ascending the throne, to prevent power struggle and a potential coup from the launching party, dictators will usually resort to three different strategies, namely terrorisation on the leadership of launching party, co-optation and organisation proliferation. Nevertheless, the three different strategies might lead

These scenarios will lead to the reduction of the tax base which in return could encourage dictator to expropriate private assets to run the administration of government. For example, banking system under authoritarian rule is usually underdeveloped, since banking industry has liquid assets and tend to be expropriated easily by dictator due to being less complicated compare to oil extraction industry which might require in depth knowledge of the operation. (Haber, 2006) Therefore, authoritarian regime has lower economic growth due to the underdeveloped banking

(Haber, 2006) For instance, in Singapore, nominally democratic institutions are established, namely legislature, regular elections and opposition parties. The establishment of the institutions mentioned could assist authoritarian ends by providing channels to encourage pluralism through feedback on government and opposition views. (Svolik, 2012) Therefore, organisation proliferation could lead to political stability due to resolution of dictator’s control and power sharing