On Dictatorship, Economic Development and Stability

5 The role of the threat of anarchy

The political stability of dictatorship eventually depends on the insurrection threat but
the conditions of this threat’s occurrence may vary across dictatorships. Each society
possesses its own structural parameters that may differentiate the perimeter of the dic-
tator’s political stability across different societies. Depending on these parameters, some
societies may offer more propitious conditions for the establishment and the stability of
dictatorship. However, all societies experience internal evolution and, hence, a modi-
fication of these structural parameters. Any unexpected change in them may be fatal
for dictators. Although there are certainly many structural parameters constituting a
society, we will study two of them. The first is the natural level of social order, l. We
consider that this level is different across societies because it depends on factors such as
demography, geography, history, culture, etc..., all the factors which make that the world
population does not form a single political community but a plurality of them. Therefore,
it may be more or less challenging across societies to maintain social order. The second
parameter is probably the one that has modified the most all societies in the world in
the last two centuries: sustained economic growth, represented in the model by the total
factor productivity parameter A. The objective is then to examine in what way economic
growth may affect the stability of dictatorship.

To study the effect of the parameters on the perimeter of the dictatorship’s political
stability, we need to analyze how they affect the insurrection constraint. Recall that the
insurrection constraint, I , is not violated if and only if

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