Why Strongmen Win in Weak States

Abstract:Explanations for the rise of illiberal political movements in the West have focused upon the respective roles of economic grievances and “cultural backlash.” However, many “authoritarian populist” leaders outside the West—from Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines to Vladimir Putin in Russia to Narendra Modi in India—derive their legitimacy neither from economic promises nor from social conservativism alone, but also from a third commitment: to restore public order and state authority. If we are to understand why this platform has been and continues to be appealing to voters, we must examine the ways in which state capacity has eroded in many developing democracies, resulting in a profound crisis of democratic confidence and a willingness to embrace populist alternatives.

the supporters of establishment parties-such as the rural backers of India's Congress party or the heartland northeastern electorate of the Workers' Party in Brazil-who offer the best examples of "traditional" beliefs or lifestyles, in contrast to the generally urban and socially "modernizing" supporters of the new antisystem challengers. 3 If we are to understand why authoritarian strongmen have won elections in so many developing democracies, we also need to acknowledge the void that such leaders claim to fill-namely, the erosion of political authority. In many such societies, corruption, criminality, and violence not only are pervasive, but have worsened over time, granting the "law and order" pitch of leaders such as Duterte in the Philippines, Modi in India, or Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro a reach that goes well beyond mere cultural conservatives. In particular, their platforms typically resonate with a section of the new urban middle class that is self-made and upwardly mobile, situated outside the existing network of patronage politics, and frustrated at the persistence of urban crime, inefficient public services, and widespread clientelism and graft.
It is this coalition of supporters that has secured these leaders an electoral majority. 4 In developing democracies it is not so much the losers but the "winners" of globalization who are most likely to support such forms of conservative populism-and ironically, perhaps, they do so precisely because rising expectations regarding probity in office, public order, and public-sector clientelism and graft have pushed voters away from establishment politics and toward antisystem parties and movements.

Democratization and State-Building
To understand the rise of authoritarian strongmen in developing democracies, then, it is important to recognize the divergence of state-building trajectories and democratization trajectories over recent decades. In the early twenty-first century, democratic reform and building state capacity were generally seen as complementary processes, with international policy makers advocating competitive multiparty elections as a solution for countries facing problems ranging from endemic corruption to state fragility to gaps in infrastructure or welfare provision. Yet the reality is that elections by themselves cannot guarantee progress on the road to building an effective bureaucracy, clamping down on organized crime, or ensuring the efficient and equitable provision of schools, roads, and hospitals. Across the world there is wide variation in the degree to which new democracies have succeeded in building effective institutions and strengthening public accountability (Figure 1), and this divergence may help to explain when and where authoritarian challengers emerge triumphant.
Since the "third wave" of democratization that occurred across the world from the 1970s to the late 1990s, there have undoubtedly been success stories, in which democratic transition has brought newfound scrutiny of senior politicians by journalists and activists. In South Korea, for example, the 2016-17 "candlelight revolution"-which brought improved executive oversight after years of presidential scandals-provides a demonstration of the robust democratic culture that has taken shape since the country's 1987 transition. In Taiwan democracies, Indonesia, a combination of radical decentralization and top-down enforcement from Jakarta are starting to check the distributed system of clientelism that replaced the centralized kleptocracy of the Suharto years. For scholars of democracy, these "success stories" highlight an important point: Simultaneous democratic transition and state-building are possible, and can be achieved across diverse regions and stages of economic development. 5 Skeptics of democratic statebuilding, however, have no shortage of counterexamples to draw upon. Across Latin America, Africa, and both Southern and Eastern Europe, newly elected governments have struggled to overcome endemic problems of corruption, criminality, and state fragility. 6 These difficulties are reflected across a wide range of indicators, ranging from homicide rates to assessments of the ease of doing business to ratings of bureaucratic quality. 7 But if we restrict ourselves to a fairly conventional measure for some of the world's largest new democracies-Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index-we can see that in the last decade alone Brazil has fallen from 75 th to 105 th place, Mexico from 89 th to 138 th , and South Africa from 55 th to 73 rd position.
So why have public accountability and transparency eroded in so many young or reemerging democracies? There is not a single explanation that fits all cases. In countries where political parties swept to power with ambitious social-reform agendas, clientelism has grown as direct party-to-voter channels have been used to distribute public goods and benefits, leading to resentment over unequal access to resources. 8 In South Africa, for example, the state apparatus developed since 1994 under the aegis of the dominant African National Congress has largely relied on patronage networks extending from that party, leading to a situation where patronage networks work "in parallel with, and sometimes in opposition to, the impersonal political institutions of the state." 9 Similarly in postauthoritarian Greece, the distribution of public jobs and contracts to party supporters began under Andreas Papandreou in the 1980s, while in Brazil and the Philippines political parties have long existed primarily as vehicles for channeling resources to political clans. 10 Even in countries where voters are not offered privileged access to benefits in exchange for political support, political parties may seek to undermine the bureaucracy's independence in order to gain a strategic In countries where political parties swept to power with ambitious social-reform agendas, clientelism has grown as direct party-to-voter channels have been used to distribute public goods and benefits, leading to resentment over unequal access to resources.
advantage over their rivals. This can be seen in postauthoritarian polities that engage in selective policies of lustration-that is, the removal of civil servants who ostensibly have ties to the former regime, but in practice are not members of the governing party. In Ukraine, for example, a 2014 lustration policy purged seven-hundred officials who had served in the administration of ousted president Viktor Yanukovych, while in Hungary Viktor Orbán has justified his attacks on the independence of the courts and the civil service with claims that these institutions represent the forces of communism. 11 Finally, a very different problem faced by many new democracies is the persistence and growth of organized crime and criminal violence. Urban security has deteriorated across much of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe in the decades following democratic transition. In particular, this problem has been exacerbated in countries where the security services were tarnished by their association with a former dictatorship, and have faced chronic underfunding since its fall. In Brazil, for example, the murder rate during the final years of military rule was similar to the 10 per 100,000 rate found in the United States at that time, but five years after democratization had already doubled to 20 deaths per 100,000. It reached a record high of slightly above 30 per 100,000 in the year before the 2018 election of Bolsonaro, whose presidential campaign had promised to liberalize gun laws (enabling Brazilians to "defend themselves") and give security forces the right to "shoot and kill" armed criminals. In Russia, the murder rate also soared to more than 30 per 100,000 during the first decade after the Soviet collapse. Finally, in the decade leading up to Duterte's 2016 election as president of the Philippines, the country's murder rate climbed from about 7 to 11 per 100,000, creating popular support for calls for harsh measures to restore urban security. In much of Eastern Europe and Latin America, not only criminal violence but also the growth of organized criminal networks threatens perceptions of democratic state efficacy. These groupings now form a shadow export sector, based upon the trafficking of narcotics, arms, sex workers, and undocumented migrants to major cities in Western Europe or North America, that runs in parallel to the official supply chains of the global economy.
Regardless of their exact nature, shortcomings in state capacity and the rule of law pose a serious challenge to the legitimacy of new democracies. Although political science teaches scholars to distinguish between "state legitimacy," "regime legitimacy," and "government legitimacy," these three concepts are rarely so discrete in the minds of citizens. 12 A newborn democracy in a state that is failing to contain corruption, conflict, or criminality will take on these attributes as its own in the public mind. Meanwhile, a succession of elected governments that become mired in scandal and policy paralysis will undermine civic evaluations of the democratic system as a whole, and not simply evaluations of individual administrations.
This can be seen from Figure 2, which shows the relationship between changes in citizen evaluations of democracy-the average response when publics are asked if they are "satisfied" with the functioning of their democratic system-and changes in levels of corruption, as measured by the Worldwide Governance Indicators. The trend is clear: In those new democracies that have seen the greatest improvements in transparency and accountability in public life, satisfaction with the political system has risen. That is the case for the Baltic states, Taiwan, and South Korea. Yet in democracies where accountability has deteriorated most sharply, it is evident that public satisfaction has collapsed. This pattern can be observed in countries such as Greece, Brazil, and South Africa.

The Rise of Authoritarian Populism
Once we consider the effects of inadequate state capacity, the rise of "strongman" leaders across emerging democracies becomes a great deal less puzzling. Figures such as Putin in Russia, Modi in India, or Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdo¢ gan win support by pledging to bring back public order, state authority, and national pride, in the context of political systems exhibiting various pathologies of state failure. In early twenty-first century Russia, for example, Putin's promise to "restore the power vertical" and end a decade of delayed salary payments, urban violence, and petty corruption proved critical to winning the support of the country's fragile middle class, and this promise remains key to the loyalty of his dwindling support base today. 13 In the Philippines, a sense of physical insecurity among the country's swelling urban population, shaken by a homicide rate that has soared in the last decade, helps to explain why between seven and eight out of ten Filipinos continue to support Duterte's brutal "war on drugs" despite its heavy toll in lives lost and rights violated. 14 And in Brazil, almost 70 percent of voters in São Paulo state voted for Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential runoff not because of any newfound distaste for homosexuality-after all, the state's capital has hosted the world's largest gay-pride parade annually for almost two decades-but due more to widespread disgust with political corruption, despair at the persistence of urban crime, and sympathy with calls for harsh measures to restore "order and progress." 15 A similar misunderstanding is common in analysis on other emerging democracies, where the opposition of "cosmopolitan liberalism" to "social conservatism" does a poor job of explaining the salient social cleavages and dividing lines between political parties. In Poland, for example, both the populist Law and Justice party (PiS) and the more moderate Civic Platform opposition rose to prominence in the early 2000s on socially conservative platforms, advocating stances against abortion, gay marriage, and secular schooling that were broadly in line with majority public opinion. The real difference between the parties was the prominence given by PiS to issues of anticorruption and social justice, in the wake of bribery scandals that had brought down the rival Democratic Left Alliance.
In particular, the party chose to decry what it termed "Latinization": the nexus of economic privilege, political connections, and unequal access to justice depicted as characteristic of Latin American societies and, to a lesser extent, the countries of Southern Europe. One prong of PiS's approach was to promote welfare programs for those in "leftbehind" regions of the country, while the second was a "law and order" campaign that became increasingly populist in both style and implementation. Ministers during the party's first stint in government, from 2005 to 2007, went so far as to arrange televised arrests of alleged offenders, which proved widely popular despite their reliance upon weak or circumstantial evidence.  This intersection of the populist style with preexisting social and institutional grievances is critical to understanding populist breakthroughs across developing democracies. It is true that populist politicians are often distinguished by a rhetorical approach that, as Cas Mudde's classic definition puts it, contrasts the "pure people" with a "corrupt elite." Yet to cast populism simply as a rhetorical device risks ignoring its contextual significance in developing democracies where malfeasance in office is in fact relatively widespread, and deep inequalities do in fact separate political elites from the rest of society. This can also help to explain why conspiracy theories, which play a central role in populist discourse, have greater resonance in countries with dense elite networks facing only fragmentary exposure to the public eye.
In a democracy where investigative reporting does at regular intervals expose conspiracies and malfeasance among key political, economic, and bureaucratic actors, it is difficult to dismiss such theories out of hand, and any such accusation begins from a baseline level of "truthiness." For concerned citizens, the line between "pragmatic skepticism" and simple na¦veté is blurred; there emerges a form of "posttruth politics" in which any number of plausible yet unverified claims can be circulated about one's political opponents, leaving the average voter adrift on a sea of half-facts and falsehoods. It is therefore unsurprising that among both developed and developing democracies the relationship between support for populist politicians, who habitually lambaste corruption among elites, and the objectively assessed level of corruption is fairly strong (Figure 3). This suggests that the appeal of such anti-elite messaging is due at least in part to the behavior of elites themselves and the plausibility of conspiracy accusations, regardless of whether they turn out to be real or fictitious.
The rise of "authoritarian populism" in developing democracies, in short, may require an explanation that is quite different from the theories about cultural backlash or the economically "left-behind" that are commonly applied to mature democracies. In polities where elites are distrusted, parties are weak, and welfare systems are clientelistic, antisystem movements that promise to overhaul the status quo may make broad inroads among middle-class voters, as well as among poorer voters tired of endemic corruption and urban insecurity. Meanwhile, in democracies where elite networks conceal genuine malfeasance among politicians, businessmen, and career bureaucrats, the conspiracy accusations promulgated by populist demagogues find broad resonance in society-and not simply among those who are less educated or especially credulous.
This relationship has a number of implications, most importantly for democratic stability. In mature democracies such as the Netherlands or Denmark, populists are first and foremost identitarians campaigning on a platform of grievance, and this curtails their electoral appeal to at most a third of the vote. They must compete with an established moderate center-right that remains appealing to the median middle-class voter, and in this context they frequently struggle to make inroads among citizens who value traditional conservative goals such as stability, accountable governance, or "law and order." Where populist parties are able to enter government, as they have in Austria and Denmark, it is only by forming coalitions with establishment conservatives, who limit their partners' capacities to damage liberal and democratic institutions. In this way, as Daniel Ziblatt has argued, conservative parties may play an essential role in preserving democratic stability today, as they have done in Europe historically. 16 And as James Loxton contends, the same may be true in postauthoritarian regimes where former elites form "successor parties" bound to the democratic rules of the game. 17 In fragile democracies, by contrast, authoritarian populists are able to sweep to power by combining a narrow identitarian support base with a much broader coalition of supporters among the urban middle class, who are motivated by the desire for public order, accountability, and an end to clientelism and graft. This is clear within movements such as Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India, which must balance its religious-nationalist "Hindutva" wing against reformist supporters in the urban middle classes, but is also evident elsewhere. Putin's early administrations, for example, included relatively liberal and Westernizing reformers such as Andrei Illarionov, Alexei Kudrin, and Hermann Gräf alongside the "siloviki" network brought in from the security services.
In Brazil, Bolsonaro's government initially included reformist technocrats such as economist Paulo Guedes or the (now departed) judge Sérgio Moro alongside ideologues such as Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo. These choices satisfied the swing voters who, tempted by promises of order and reform following the mammoth Lava Jato corruption scandal, opted for Bolsonaro in the second round of the 2018 election. Finally, Erdo¢ gan's governments in Turkey have included technocratic reformers such as Ali Babacan, the deputy prime minister who was previously responsible for IMF-negotiated reforms and EU accession talks, and Ahmet Davuto¢ glu, who before serving as prime minister (2014-16) inspired the government's "dual-track" foreign policy of seeking both "neo-Ottoman" influence in the Middle East and eventual EU membership.
Coalitions of this kind are a response to real societal problems, but it is precisely the convergence of interests between populist currents and pragmatic reformers that imperils democratic survival. It is far easier for authoritarian populist leaders to enter office where public institutions and norms of accountability have decayed, because this allows such leaders to reach out beyond their ideological base and tap into a broader upswell of antiestablishment feeling-both among voters and among figures within the technocratic elite itself, with the latter's participation adding legitimacy to the populist cause. Then once such temporary alliances have smoothed a populist's path to power, they may give way to a more complete consolidation of personalist rule after liberal reformists are marginalized.
We have seen this pattern in Russia since Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, in 1990s Peru following Alberto Fujumori's "self-coup," and in Turkey following Erdo¢ gan's 2017 constitutional reforms. In the latter case, Erdo¢ gan's own premier and vice-premier, Davuto¢ glu and It is by no means inevitable that, once started down the road of democratic decay, a country will continue until it reaches consolidated authoritarianism.
Babacan, went from leading the government to founding opposition parties committed to restoring parliamentary democracy and reversing the authoritarian drift that had occurred on their watch. In this way, technocratic and liberal reformists can end up facilitating an authoritarian turn, much as they may attempt to resist this tendency from the inside-and even if they eventually join forces with their onetime civic opponents on the streets.

Democracy's Prospects
A generation has passed since the onset of the third wave of democratization, while we are more than a decade into a phase of populist mobilization sweeping both developing and developed democracies. It is therefore possible to begin drawing some general conclusions regarding the subsequent trends in democratic performance, their implications for the health of democratic institutions, and prospects for the future.
While there are individual cases of countries that have managed to achieve state strengthening and political liberalization simultaneously, the general record among new democracies has been disappointing. In many countries, bureaucratic structures inherited from authoritarian regimes have been subject to attrition and clientelism. Elected politicians have used public-sector jobs as a form of patronage, engaged in partisan vetting and lustration of civil servants, tolerated corruption among party allies, and politicized formerly autonomous government agencies. Meanwhile, persistent challenges of organized criminality and violence have beset new democracies in Latin America, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. These shortcomings have not only eroded support for the first generation of posttransition political elites, but also led to fraying confidence in liberal democracy among the growing urban middle class. For this reason, authoritarian politicians promising to cut through the gridlock and "make tough decisions" have acquired a mass base of political support. In many cases, they have managed to gain elected office, and from that position have begun eroding democratic rights and freedoms-by pursuing authoritarian approaches to law and justice or to fighting ethnic insurgency, and by removing legislative checks and balances while consolidating their own power.
Yet there are still reasons for optimism when it comes to the challenge of authoritarian populism in fragile democracies. First, in democracies suffering from persistent graft, scandal, and maladministration, populist movements-whether authoritarian or not-frequently serve as magnets for individuals attracted by the goal of political reform, and are sometimes capable of delivering positive measures when in office. As in the classic visual illusion, such parties may appear alternately as both the "duck" of populism and the "rabbit" of democratic refoundation, with no clear indication as to which form they will finally take. In Ukraine, for example, Volodymyr Zelensky's 2019 candidacy had all the hallmarks of a populist campaign: Zelensky was a celebrity outsider lacking a political party, a policy platform (beyond overturning the political duopoly of then-president Petro Poroshenko and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko), or political experience (beyond performing as a Ukrainian president in a comic television series). Yet Zelensky's campaign attracted veterans of the 2013-14 EuroMaidan protest movement, and his administration implemented serious governance reforms during its first year in office, even if this momentum has since faded.
Similarly, Italy's Five Star Movement includes under its broad tent a panoply of conspiracy theorists, postcommunist radicals, and graduates of the country's many anticorruption campaigns, and it has now swung its support behind a technocratic administration led by former law professor Giuseppe Conte. The confusing reality of course is that such parties are both "duck" and "rabbit" simultaneously-they genuinely do include both populist extremists and idealistic reformists, and for a long period may oscillate between these tendencies. And this same contradiction lies at the heart of more authoritarian forms of populism, such as that of India's BJP or Bolsonaro's founding cabinet of ideologues and technocrats. The "Janus-like" fusion of populist authoritarians and reformist technocrats does for a time yield genuine opportunities for governance reform, with no clear indication as to which faction will ultimately predominate.
Second, right-wing populist administrations may eventually moderate to form establishment conservative parties within stable multiparty systems. Models for such a trajectory can be found in the political histories of established democracies-the 1958 refounding of the French Republic under General Charles de Gaulle, for example, or the evolution of authoritarian "successor parties" into moderate conservative parties in many new democracies, as illustrated for instance by the Alianza Popular in post-Franco Spain. The tension within "law and order" populist movements between their more liberal, technocratic wing and their illiberal, identitarian, and authoritarian leadership is a genuine political contest-and one in which moderates do sometimes prevail, not least when the founding autocrat passes from the scene. And even when populist leaders manage to concentrate power in their individual office rather than in the ruling party-as Putin has done in Russia and Erdo¢ gan has done in Turkey following the 2017 constitutional referendum-this frequently alienates moderate insiders, who then become a source of credible and experienced opposition. In addition to the abovementioned defection of Erdo¢ gan's top officials, examples include an oppositional turn by Fujumori's 1990 presidential running mate following the 1992 Peruvian autogolpe, or former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad's spectacular unseating of his own chosen suc-cessor in alliance with a jailed opposition leader during Malaysia's 2018 election.
These observations give cause for hope regarding the future of backsliding democracies. It is by no means inevitable that, once started down the road of democratic decay, a country will continue until it reaches consolidated authoritarianism. Democratic consolidation may be hard, but authoritarian consolidation is a great deal harder. Not only does the personalistic nature of populist movements make them vulnerable to changes of leadership, but factions within them may be far more amenable to political liberalization than is commonly appreciated, as the past decade's steady defection of liberal reformists from the Putin and Erdo¢ gan administrations illustrates. In this respect it is also important to learn from the experience of third-wave democratizations, in which internal reformists such as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev or Taiwan's Lee Teng-hui often played pivotal roles in paving the road to political liberalization. Working with such actors may be distasteful to many Western NGOs and activists. But if or when there is a fourth wave of democratization, its prospects for success may depend as much on reformist successors located within today's populist movements as on liberal dissidents without.