Abstract
I showed in Chap. 2 that changes of authoritarian institutions can arise endogenously owing to their effects on the underlying balance of power between the dictator and the elite. While this explains the “why” question, in this chapter, I proceed to offer an explanation for “how” such a change can take place. This chapter shows that, despite the presence of the authoritarian institutions, the dictator is still able to change them by disrupting the elite coordination with a discriminative power-sharing scheme. Moreover, this chapter also develops a complete framework where the dictator’s commitment problem is included. The divide-and-conquer strategy might not be able to work effectively when the dictator has no commitment power. All the predictions made in this chapter provide a good foundation for us to do empirical analysis in the following chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
Alternatively, Tung (2018) offers another analysis based on a global games approach.
- 2.
More details about this will be provided in the chapters in Part II of the book.
- 3.
In some cases, these differences can arise from either a long-standing feud among different groups or certain primordial features that hamper communications and undermine trust among them. For example, Padró-i-Miquel (2007) argues that, in an ethnically divided society, even a weak leader can prey on the group of his or her own kin by exploiting their fear of being further abused by a new leader coming from another ethnic group. The trust among different ethnic groups in a society is so low that a challenger from an ethnic group is unable to make a credible commitment to people of other groups that they won’t be hurt by a change in leadership.
- 4.
In contrast to the general literature on implicit contract (Baker et al. 1994; Levin 2003), the model developed here does not introduce the information asymmetry in the effort level between Dictator and Elite. The rationale is based on the fact that the issue at stake here is whether Elite accepts the power-sharing scheme and does not engage in contentious actions. Both choices are observable. Even though a loyalty effort, \( \eta \), allows richer interpretations to include other unobservable activities, their welfare implications are far lower than those caused by fluctuations of regime stability.
- 5.
The popular political sociological approach to China’s factional politics often draws heavily on political elites’ social backgrounds such as where they were born and their career paths. While social backgrounds can be critical to the formation of factions within China’s political system, the political–sociological perspective tends to ignore the strategic nature of politics, and makes the factional structure deterministic. That is, a bureaucrat born in Shanxi province is predetermined to be excluded from a faction mainly composed of people from, say, Anhui province. This chapter takes a probabilistic view on this issue, and uses \( \theta \) to capture the political distance between the bureaucrat and the leader in probabilistic terms. In other words, while a member of the faction close to Dictator is more likely to be rewarded, the probability for someone from another faction to enjoy the same treatment won’t be zero.
- 6.
I avoid using terms too suggestive of overall social general welfare. After all, this model is geared toward a positivist explanation for strategic interactions between Dictator and Elite, and it does not try to make any assumptions about the welfare implications of a stable autocracy.
- 7.
Since we only focus on the effect of economic growth, I limit the range of values \( \varDelta \) can take to be positive.
- 8.
The more rigorous definition for special interests will be provided in the next chapter.
- 9.
Again, I will wait until Part III to provide the empirical import of the dictator’s commitment ability.
- 10.
It should be remembered that in the analysis above, the dictator’s commitment ability is a continuous variable, instead of a dichotomous one between having and not having it. Focusing on the two extreme outcomes will make it easier to highlight the effect exercised by the dictator’s commitment ability.
- 11.
In other words, the kind of endogenous effect Gehlbach and Keefer (2011) talk about essentially has no role to play in the static analysis.
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Tung, H.H. (2019). How? The Dictator’s Divide-and-Rule Strategy. In: Economic Growth and Endogenous Authoritarian Institutions in Post-Reform China. Politics and Development of Contemporary China. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04828-0_3
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