Introduction

Much of the world still lives, today, as always, under dictatorship. Yet we know very little about the behavior of these regimes. One reason for our ignorance is simply that dictatorships tend to be closed societies, and information on them is hard to obtain. Another reason is that they are typically feared and disliked, so that most research on them has focused on how they arise (with the view that once this is understood we can prevent further instances) and comparatively little work has been done trying to understand how these regimes actually function. Finally, when their behavior has been researched, the point of view taken has often been that they operate by repression and command. Policies are decided at the top – by the dictator, with the help of a small group of advisers – and then imposed on a hapless population. The population acquiesces either as a result of fear, on the one hand, or brainwashing, indoctrination, and thought control, on the other. However, the explanatory power of these concepts – their capacity to explain changes in the level of repression, for example, or to explain why regimes rise and fall – is not very large. In this study I have tried to understand and explain the working of dictatorship from a different point of view – namely, that of an economist.