How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

  Capturing the referees provides the government with more than a shield. It also offers a powerful weapon, allowing the government to selectively enforce the law, punishing opponents while protecting allies. Tax authorities may be used to target rival politicians, businesses, and media outlets. The police can crack down on opposition protest while tolerating acts of violence by progovernment thugs. Intelligence agencies can be used to spy on critics and dig up material for blackmail.

  Most often, the capture of the referees is done by quietly firing civil servants and other nonpartisan officials and replacing them with loyalists. In Hungary, for example, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán packed the nominally independent Prosecution Service, State Audit Office, Ombudsman’s office, Central Statistical Office, and Constitutional Court with partisan allies after returning to power in 2010.

  Institutions that cannot be easily purged may be hijacked, subtly, by other means. Few did this better than Alberto Fujimori’s “intelligence advisor,” Vladimiro Montesinos. Under Montesinos’s direction, Peru’s National Intelligence Service videotaped hundreds of opposition politicians, judges, congressmen, businessmen, journalists, and editors paying or receiving bribes, entering brothels, or engaging in other illicit activity—and then used the videotapes to blackmail them. He also maintained three supreme court justices, two members of the Constitutional Tribunal, and a “staggering” number of judges and public prosecutors on his payroll, delivering monthly cash payments to their homes. All this was done in secret; on the surface, Peru’s justice system functioned like any other. But in the shadows, Montesinos was helping Fujimori consolidate power.

  Judges who cannot be bought off may be targeted for impeachment. When Perón assumed the presidency in 1946, four of Argentina’s five-member supreme court were conservative opponents, one of whom had called him a fascist. Concerned about the court’s history of striking down pro-labor legislation, Perón’s allies in congress impeached three of the justices on the grounds of malfeasance (a fourth resigned before he could be impeached). Perón then appointed four loyalists, and the court never opposed him again. Likewise, when Peru’s Constitutional Tribunal threatened to block President Fujimori’s bid for a third term in 1997, Fujimori’s allies in congress impeached three of the body’s seven justices—on the grounds that, in declaring Fujimori’s effort to evade constitutional term limits “unconstitutional,” they themselves had breached the constitution.

  Governments that cannot remove independent judges may bypass them through court packing. In Hungary, for instance, the Orbán government expanded the size of the Constitutional Court from eight to fifteen, changed the nomination rules so that the ruling Fidesz party could single-handedly appoint the new justices, and then filled the new positions with Fidesz loyalists. In Poland, the governing Law and Justice Party had several of its initiatives blocked by the Constitutional Tribunal—the country’s highest authority on constitutional matters—between 2005 and 2007. When the party returned to power in 2015, it took steps to avoid similar losses in the future. At the time, there were two openings in the fifteen-member Constitutional Tribunal and three justices who were approved by the outgoing parliament but had yet to be sworn in. In a dubiously constitutional move, the new Law and Justice government refused to swear in the three justices and instead imposed five new justices of its own. For good measure, it then passed a law requiring that all binding Constitutional Tribunal decisions have a two-thirds majority. This effectively gave government allies a veto power within the tribunal, limiting the body’s ability to serve as an independent check on governmental power.

  The most extreme way to capture the referees is to raze the courts altogether and create new ones. In 1999, the Chávez government called elections for a constituent assembly that, in violation of an earlier supreme court ruling, awarded itself the power to dissolve all other state institutions, including the court. Fearing for its survival, the supreme court acquiesced and ruled the move constitutional. Supreme court president Cecilia Sosa resigned, declaring that the court had “committed suicide to avoid being assassinated. But the result is the same. It is dead.” Two months later, the supreme court was dissolved and replaced by a new Supreme Tribunal of Justice. Even that wasn’t enough to ensure a pliant judiciary, however, so in 2004, the Chávez government expanded the size of the Supreme Tribunal from twenty to thirty-two and filled the new posts with “revolutionary” loyalists. That did the trick. Over the next nine years, not a single Supreme Tribunal ruling went against the government.

  In each of these cases, the referees of the democratic game were brought over to the government’s side, providing the incumbent with both a shield against constitutional challenges and a powerful—and “legal”—weapon with which to assault its opponents.

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  Once the referees are in tow, elected autocrats can turn to their opponents. Most contemporary autocracies do not wipe out all traces of dissent, as Mussolini did in fascist Italy or Fidel Castro did in communist Cuba. But many make an effort to ensure that key players—anyone capable of really hurting the government—are sidelined, hobbled, or bribed into throwing the game. Key players might include opposition politicians, business leaders who finance the opposition, major media outlets, and in some cases, religious or other cultural figures who enjoy a certain public moral standing.

  The easiest way to deal with potential opponents is to buy them off. Most elected autocrats begin by offering leading political, business, or media figures public positions, favors, perks, or outright bribes in exchange for their support or, at least, their quiet neutrality. Cooperative media outlets may gain privileged access to the president, while friendly business executives may receive profitable concessions or government contracts. The Fujimori government was masterful at buying off its critics, particularly those in the media. By the late 1990s, every major television network, several daily newspapers, and popular tabloid papers were on the government’s payroll. Vladimiro Montesinos paid the owners of Channel 4 about $12 million in exchange for signing a “contract” that gave Montesinos control over the channel’s news programming. The principal stockholder of Channel 5 received $9 million from Montesinos, and Channel 9’s principal stockholder was given $50,000 in exchange for firing two prominent investigative reporters. In a videotaped conversation in late 1999, Montesinos declared that the heads of the television networks were “all lined up now….We made them sign papers and everything….All of them, all lined up. Every day, I have a meeting at 12:30…and we plan the evening news.”

  Media figures received Montesinos’s largest bribes, but he also bought off politicians. In 1998, when opposition groups collected enough signatures to force a referendum on whether Fujimori could stand for reelection in 2000, the issue was thrown to congress, where, by law, it required the support of 40 percent of the legislature. In theory, the opposition had the forty-eight votes necessary to approve the referendum. But Montesinos bribed three legislators to skip the vote. One of them, Luis Chu, received a $130,000 payment on an apartment from an intelligence agency slush fund; another, Miguel Ciccia, received help in a legal case involving one of his businesses. The third, Susy Díaz, agreed to stay home for “personal reasons.” The vote fell just short, allowing Fujimori to run for, and win, an illegal third term in 2000. And when the electorate failed to deliver Fujimori a congressional majority, Montesinos bribed eighteen opposition legislators to switch sides.

  Players who cannot be bought must be weakened by other means. Whereas old-school dictators often jailed, exiled, or even killed their rivals, contemporary autocrats tend to hide their repression behind a veneer of legality. This is why capturing the referees is so important. Under Perón, opposition leader Ricardo Balbín was imprisoned for “disrespecting” the president during an election campaign. Balbín appealed to the supreme court, but since Perón had packed the court, he stood no chance. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad used a politically loyal police force and a packed judiciary to investigate,
arrest, and imprison his leading rival, Anwar Ibrahim, on sodomy charges in the late 1990s. In Venezuela, opposition leader Leopoldo López was arrested and charged with “inciting violence” during a wave of antigovernment protest in 2014. Government officials provided no evidence of incitement, alleging at one point that it had been “subliminal.”

  Governments may also use their control of referees to “legally” sideline the opposition media, often through libel or defamation suits. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa was masterful at this. In 2011, he won a massive $40 million libel suit against the owners and editor of a major newspaper, El Universo, for publishing an editorial that labeled him a “dictator.” Correa called the case a “great step forward for the liberation of our Americas from one of the largest and most unpunished powers: the corrupt media.” He later pardoned the owners, but the lawsuit had a powerful chilling effect on the press.

  The Erdoğan and Putin governments also wielded the law with devastating effectiveness. In Turkey, a major victim was the powerful Doğan Yayin media conglomerate, which controlled about 50 percent of the Turkish media market, including the country’s most widely read newspaper, Hurriyat, and several television stations. Many Doğan group media outlets were secular and liberal, which put them at odds with the AKP government. In 2009, the government struck back, fining Doğan nearly $2.5 billion—an amount that nearly exceeded the company’s total net worth—for tax evasion. Crippled, Doğan was forced to sell off much of its empire, including two large newspapers and a TV station. They were purchased by progovernment businessmen. In Russia, after Vladimir Gusinsky’s independent NTV television network earned a reputation as a “pain in the neck,” the Putin government unleashed the tax authorities on Gusinsky, arresting him for “financial misappropriation.” Gusinsky was offered “a deal straight out of a bad Mafia movie: give up NTV in exchange for freedom.” He took the deal, turned NTV over to the giant government-controlled energy company, Gazprom, and fled the country. In Venezuela, the Chávez government launched an investigation into financial irregularities committed by Globovisión television owner Guillermo Zuloaga, forcing him to flee the country to avoid arrest. Under intense financial pressure, Zuloaga eventually sold Globovisión to a government-friendly businessman.

  As key media outlets are assaulted, others grow wary and begin to practice self-censorship. When the Chávez government stepped up its attacks in the mid-2000s, one of the country’s largest television networks, Venevisión, decided to stop covering politics. Morning talk shows were replaced with astrology programs, and soap operas took precedence over evening news programs. Once considered a pro-opposition network, Venevisión barely covered the opposition during the 2006 election, giving President Chávez more than five times as much coverage as it did his rivals.

  Elected autocrats also seek to weaken business leaders with the means to finance opposition. This was one of the keys to Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia. In July 2000, less than three months into his presidency, Putin summoned twenty-one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen to the Kremlin, where he told them that they would be free to make money under his watch—but only if they stayed out of politics. Most of the so-called oligarchs heeded his warning. Billionaire Boris Berezovsky, the controlling shareholder of ORT television station, did not. When ORT coverage turned critical, the government revived a long-dormant fraud case and ordered Berezovsky’s arrest. Berezovsky fled into exile, leaving his media assets in the hands of his junior partner, who “graciously put them at Putin’s disposal.” Another oligarch who ignored Putin’s warning was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of the giant Yukos oil company. Russia’s wealthiest man (worth $15 billion, according to Forbes), Khodorkovsky was believed to be untouchable. But he overplayed his hand. A liberal who disliked Putin, Khodorkovsky began to generously finance opposition parties, including the pro-Western Yabloko. At one point, as many as one hundred Duma (parliament) members were doing his bidding. There were rumors that he planned to seek the presidency. Threatened, Putin had Khodorkovsky arrested in 2003 for tax evasion, embezzlement, and fraud. He was imprisoned for nearly a decade. The message to the oligarchs was clear: Stay out of politics. Nearly all of them did. Starved of resources, opposition parties weakened, many to the point of extinction.

  The Erdoğan government also pushed businessmen to the political margins. When the Young Party (GP), created and funded by wealthy tycoon Cem Uzan, emerged as a serious rival in 2004, financial authorities seized Uzan’s business empire and charged Uzan with racketeering. Uzan fled to France, and the GP soon collapsed. A few years later, the Koc group, Turkey’s largest industrial conglomerate, was accused of assisting the massive 2013 Gezi Park protests (a Koc-owned hotel near the park was used as a shelter and makeshift hospital amid police repression). That year, tax officials audited several Koc companies and canceled a massive defense ministry contract with a subsidiary. The Koc family learned its lesson. After 2013, it kept its distance from the opposition.

  Finally, elected autocrats often try to silence cultural figures—artists, intellectuals, pop stars, athletes—whose popularity or moral standing makes them potential threats. When Argentine literary icon Jorge Luis Borges emerged as a high-profile critic of Perón (one fellow writer described Borges as a “sort of Anti-Perón”), government officials had him transferred from his municipal library post to what Borges described as an “inspectorship of poultry and rabbits.” Borges resigned and was unable to find employment for months.

  Usually, however, governments prefer to co-opt popular cultural figures or reach a mutual accommodation with them, allowing them to continue their work as long as they stay out of politics. Venezuela’s Gustavo Dudamel, the internationally renowned conductor of the Bolivarian Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is an example. Dudamel was a prominent champion of El Sistema, Venezuela’s world-famous music education program, which benefits hundreds of thousands of low-income Venezuelan youth. Due to El Sistema’s dependence on government funding, its founders maintained strict political neutrality. Dudamel continued this practice, refusing to criticize the Chávez government even as it grew increasingly authoritarian. Dudamel conducted the Bolivarian Symphony Orchestra at Chávez’s funeral in 2012, and as late as 2015, when major opposition figures were in prison, he penned a Los Angeles Times op-ed defending his neutrality and declaring his “respect” for the Maduro government. In return, El Sistema received increased government funding, which allowed it to reach 700,000 children by 2015, up from 500,000 three years earlier. Things changed, however, in May 2017, with the killing by security forces of a young violinist—and El Sistema alumnus—during an antigovernment protest. Dudamel then broke his political silence, publishing a New York Times op-ed condemning government repression and Venezuela’s slide into dictatorship. He paid a price: The following month, the government canceled his planned National Youth Orchestra tour to the United States.

  The quiet silencing of influential voices—by co-optation or, if necessary, bullying—can have potent consequences for regime opposition. When powerful businesspeople are jailed or ruined economically, as in the case of Khodorkovsky in Russia, other businesspeople conclude that it is wisest to withdraw from politics entirely. And when opposition politicians are arrested or exiled, as in Venezuela, other politicians decide to give up and retire. Many dissenters decide to stay home rather than enter politics, and those who remain active grow demoralized. This is what the government aims for. Once key opposition, media, and business players are bought off or sidelined, the opposition deflates. The government “wins” without necessarily breaking the rules.

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  To entrench themselves in power, however, governments must do more—they must also change the rules of the game. Authoritarians seeking to consolidate their power often reform the constitution, the electoral system, and other institutions in ways that disadvantage or weaken the opposition, in effect tilting the playing field against their rivals. These reforms are often carried out under t
he guise of some public good, while in reality they are stacking the deck in favor of incumbents. And because they involve legal and even constitutional changes, they may allow autocrats to lock in these advantages for years and even decades.

  Consider Malaysia, where the electoral system was historically tailored to suit the ruling UMNO, a predominantly Malay-based party. Although Malays constituted just over half the overall population, parliamentary districts were gerrymandered so that 70 percent of districts were Malay-majority, which allowed UMNO and its allies to win overwhelming parliamentary majorities. The situation changed, however, when the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) emerged as the country’s leading opposition party in the late 1990s. The PAS was also an overwhelmingly Malay party. So in 2002, the UMNO-dominated electoral authorities reversed course and carried out a redistricting process that—in defiance of demographic trends—reduced the number of parliamentary seats in the rural areas that were considered PAS strongholds. The gerrymandering helped the UMNO-led coalition win a stunning 91 percent of parliamentary seats in the 2004 election.

  The Orbán government in Hungary did something similar. After winning a two-thirds parliamentary majority in 2010, the ruling Fidesz party used its supermajority to rewrite the constitution and electoral laws to lock in its advantage. It adopted new majoritarian electoral rules that favored the largest party (Fidesz) and gerrymandered the country’s electoral districts to maximize the number of seats it would win. Finally, it banned campaign advertising in private media, limiting television campaigning to the public broadcast station, which was run by Fidesz loyalists. The effect of these new institutional advantages was evident in the 2014 parliamentary election: Despite the fact that Fidesz’s share of the vote fell markedly, from 53 percent in 2010 to 44.5 percent in 2014, the ruling party managed to preserve its two-thirds majority.