Why do dictators exist

The type of dictatorship a country is ruled by typically comes down to the methods the dictator used to obtain power and how they go about maintaining it. Ezrow and Erica Frantz lay out five types of dictatorships:. Power is obtained and maintained through military might. The military takes control of the country usually through a direct coup , installs the dictator of its choosing typically the highest-ranking military officer , and uses force of arms to preserve its power.

Power is obtained and passed on through family connections. An autocracy, monarchy, and dictatorship. The leader may be supported by a party or military, but still retains the overwhelming majority of power, especially regarding whom to place in which governmental roles, and relies heavily upon their own charisma to maintain control. Leaders of these dictatorships often place those loyal to them in positions of power qualified or not , and foster cults of personality to sway public opinion to their side.

Like most dictators, they also often employ secret police and violence to silence critics. Also called a dominant party dictatorship or one-party state. Multiple political parties may exist, but one dominates the government, makes all the rules, is free to disseminate propaganda, and controls every aspect of every election which may offer voters only a single candidate , thereby ensuring they win every time.

After authoritarian monarchies, these tend to be the longest-lasting dictatorships, as they can more easily install a new dictator if the existing one leaves office rare or dies. Hybrid dictatorships blend elements of the other four types. Dictatorships suffer from an obvious and significant imbalance of power. One person holds all of the country's power. Therefore, the entire country operates on the whims of that one person.

A dictator may have a team of officials who advise him or her and help keep the government running, but these officials ultimately have very little control or influence. On a similar note, a dictatorship's regular citizens have no voice in most matters. Other regimes in Latin America continue to hold free and fair elections, but struggle to uphold the rule of law. In Asia, meanwhile, a few less-than-democratic countries have made strides towards reform, but most authoritarian regimes have stayed the same.

Still, some reforms and resignations are noteworthy. In South-East Asia, most of the attention since has been on surprising events in Myanmar, when the military regime that ran the country for decades allowed open elections for the first time since But the democratic transformation was short-lived.

The regime has continued to violate the human rights of its minority groups, most notably the Rohingya minority , and civil liberties and press freedoms are in serious jeopardy. One place where things are looking up for democracy is Sub-Saharan Africa.

The last decade has seen the overall standing of democracy in Africa improve. In the early s, only five countries in Africa could be considered democratic: Botswana, Gambia, Mauritius, Senegal and Zimbabwe. Given this set up of power, a dictator who wants to remain at the top of the heap doesn't work on behalf of the larger population, but for the benefit of the handful of people he — historically, it always is a he — depends on for maintaining control.

In Africa, some leaders persist because of their nation's wealth in resources Credit: Getty Images. Having genuinely good intentions for society does not automatically translate into having actual good ideas for implementing those intentions, as some have so disastrously demonstrated. Researchers identify another common problem associated with dictatorships.

Dictators are not evil by definition, but many do share a particular set of unfortunate personality traits. They might harbour fantasies of unlimited power, beauty, glory, honour and domination, paired with a lack of empathy. Life under a dictatorship would appear to have many drawbacks, then — but more countries than you might think could be legitimately labelled as dictatorships according to the academic definition. The causative factors that give rise to dictatorships in the first place have not changed much over the centuries.

Some of the first were established in Classical Rome in times of emergencies. But just as violence on a whole has declined across history, so, too, has the number of dictatorships, especially since the s, as regimes across Latin America and Eastern Europe fell.

There are slight undulations; the crumbling of the Soviet Union was accompanied by a steep decline in dictatorships, but now many of those countries are creeping back toward that former mode of governance.

Overall, though, dictatorships are scarcer now than they were in the past. In , the Nazis were elected to become the leading party of the German parliament, campaigning on the promise to restore German greatness by taking revenge on Britain and France for the Treaty of Versailles.

The next year, an arsonist attempted to burn the German parliament building the Reichstag , which Hitler and his Nazi Party used as a pretext to seize full dictatorial control of Germany. Over the next twelve years, they entirely dismantled the democratic political establishment; instituted the worst genocide in human history, the Holocaust; and started the bloodiest war humankind has ever experienced, World War II.

As a result, they may seek non-democratic alternatives that will protect their wealth, status, or political influence from being taken away by rival elites, or even average voters. These non-democratic alternatives may then take power through a variety of methods. One means is to use democracy against itself. In this situation, a specific party wins an election and then uses its position as the leader of the government to curtail democratic rights, such as cancelling future elections.

At other times, a democracy may collapse in a significantly more violent fashion, such as through a coup or revolution. In the case of a revolution, a significant portion of the population mobilizes itself against the current reigning government and then overthrows that government, promptly instating an alternative government which is not necessarily democratic in nature.

What is more often the case, however, is that democracy can be ended through a hostile coup against the democratically-elected government, where a relatively small but powerful political faction such as the military or an intelligence service overthrows the elected officials.

The newly established post-coup regime, usually claiming the excuse of a national emergency, then curtails democratic rights, governing instead through dictatorial means.

Prior to , Chile had been a successful and long-standing democracy in South America. However, starting in the mids, Chilean politics became increasingly more fractious between capitalist conservatives backed by the United States, and the supporters of socialism and communism backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba.

In , the socialist candidate Salvador Allende won the Chilean presidency by an incredibly slim margin. Over the next three years, Allende used his presidency to institute socialistic political and economic measures while ostensibly claiming to be democratic.

Then, in , General Augusto Pinochet and other conservatives in high-ranking positions within the Chilean military launched a coup to forcefully eject Allende from power. For the next seventeen years, Pinochet and his military junta ruled with an iron fist, ending all elections while disappearing and killing thousands of suspected political opponents to the regime. In response to the apparent danger FDR and his New Deal posed for their financial interests, a circle of businessmen and financiers devised a plan to forcefully overthrow the president of the United States with the help of the military.

Fortunately for American democracy, the Marine general refused to participate in the plot and informed Congress about the conspiracy, halting the coup before it could ever begin. Democracies can also fall into dictatorships when voters become politically apathetic, thereby withdrawing themselves from participation in the political process.

This is a growing problem in many democracies, as indicated by falling voter turnouts across much of the democratic world.