![]() As violence reduces the rents, members of the dominant coalition have incentives to cooperate and to avoid fighting. For them, these individuals form a dominant coalition that grants each other privileges such as the access to resources. They describe the process of autocratic state formation as a bargaining process among individuals with access to violence. In contrast to Olson, these scholars understand the early state not as a single ruler, but as an organization formed by many actors. Weingast describe autocracies as limited access orders that arise from this need to monopolize violence. ĭouglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Svendsen have argued that the Viking expansion and settlements in the 9th-11th centuries may be interpreted as an example of roving bandits becoming stationary. Because violence threatens the creation of rents, the "stationary bandit" has incentives to monopolize violence and to create a peaceful order. Once an autocracy is developed, Olson theorizes that both the autocrat and the local population will be better off as the autocrat will have an "encompassing interest" in the maintenance and growth of wealth in the fiefdom. Olson theorizes autocrats as "stationary bandits" who solve this dilemma by establishing control over a small fiefdom and monopolize the extortion of wealth in the fiefdom in the form of taxes. As local populations lose the incentive to produce, there is little wealth for either the bandits to steal or the people to use. For Olson, anarchy is characterized by a number of "roving bandits" who travel around many different geographic areas extorting wealth from local populations leaving little incentive for populations to invest and produce. Mancur Olson theorizes the development of autocracies as the first transition from anarchy to state. Colonization also depended on factor endowments and settler mortality. Because of this settlement, these countries possibly experienced setting up of new institutions. Countries which were rich in natural resources had an extractive and indirect rule whereas other colonies saw European settlement. European colonization was varied and conditional on many factors. In all the cases, representative institutions were unable to get introduced in these countries and they sustained their autocratic rule. This may be because of the country's capacity to fight colonization, or the presence of state infrastructure that Europeans did not need for the creation of new institutions to rule. The reasons he gives are continuation of the original autocratic rule and absence of "institutional transplantation" or European settlement. According to Jacob Hariri, outside Europe, history shows that early statehood has led to autocracy. It can be headed by a supreme leader, making it autocratic, but it can also have a collective leadership such as a presidium, military junta, or a single political party as in the case of a one-party state.Įxamples from early modern Europe suggests early statehood was favorable for democracy. Totalitarianism is a system where the state strives to control every aspect of life and civil society. ![]() Some historical Slavic monarchs such as Russian tsars and emperors, due to Byzantine influence, included the title Autocrat as part of their official styles, distinguishing them from the constitutional monarchs elsewhere in Europe.Ĭomparison with other forms of government īoth totalitarian and military dictatorship are often identified with, but need not be, an autocracy. ![]() ![]() In the Middle Ages, the Byzantine Emperor was styled Autocrat of the Romans. The term was used in Ancient Greece and Rome with varying meanings. In Medieval Greek, the term Autocrates was used for anyone holding the title emperor, regardless of the actual power of the monarch. History and etymology Īutocracy comes from the Ancient Greek autos (Greek: αὐτός "self") and kratos (Greek: κράτος "power", "strength") from Kratos, the Greek personification of authority. In the 19th century, Eastern and Central Europe were under autocratic monarchies within the territories of which lived diverse peoples.Īutocracy is the most common and durable regime type since the emergence of the state. This use of the term continued into modern times, as the Russian emperor was styled "Autocrat of all the Russias" as late as the early 20th century. In earlier times, the term autocrat was coined as a favorable description of a ruler, having some connection to the concept of "lack of conflicts of interests" as well as an indication of grandeur and power. Nicholas II of Russia on the cover of Puck magazine, 1905 February 8Īutocracy is a system of government in which absolute power over a state is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are subject neither to external legal restraints nor to regularized mechanisms of popular control (except perhaps for the implicit threat of a coup d'état or other forms of rebellion). ![]()
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