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A Critical Review of Milan Svolik ’ s The Politics of Authoritarian Rule

The reader of this essay has already been misled: despite the above title, there will be little that is critical of Svolik's masterful The Politics of Authoritarian Rule in this review. The only critique will be relegated for last and will be largely tangential, leaving the overall theoretical framework unscathed. For Svolik's theory is nuanced yet parsimonious, his approach multi-methodological and sophisticated, and his conclusions clear and compelling. As a brief sketch, Svolik argues that authoritarian politics arise out of a uniquely caustic and violent " state of nature. " This state of nature is a product of 1) a lack of an independent authority capable of enforcing credible commitments amongst political actors, and 2) the pervasiveness of gruesome violence (pg. 14). As a result, authoritarian politics center on two political conflicts: first, between the ruler(s) and the ruled (the problem of authoritarian control), and second, between the dictator and his ruling coalition (the problem of authoritarian power-sharing) (pg. 2). This essay will begin by expanding and explicating the foregoing distillation of Svolik's theory, and will conclude with a few remarks that suggest the importance of one variable – namely the personality of dictators – that Svolik overlooks. undertheorized or misinterpreted by political scientists. He defines dictatorship as an independent country that " fails to satisfy at least one of the following two criteria for democracy: (1) free and competitive legislative elections and (2) an executive that is elected either directly in free and competitive presidential elections or indirectly by a legislature in parliamentary systems " (pg. 22). Admittedly, this tells us more about what a dictatorship is not than what it is, and indeed Svolik notes that the challenge in studying authoritarian politics lies in making sense of the " extraordinary political diversity across dictatorships " (pg. 19). Past attempts, argues Svolik, have missed the mark. In particular, Svolik sets his approach in contradistinction to that of Barbara Geddes, a scholar who, despite being the recipient of Svolik's gratitude for her " seminal contribution " to the study of dictatorships (pg. 29), is equally the target of a blitzkrieg of