Authors: Lipset
Summary: In about 2000 words, this entry defines authoritarianism, describes some of its key characteristics and compares it with other forms of government.
The entry defines authoritarianism as a political system where a leader (or ruling group) exercises formally unlimited power without competitive elections or democratic participation. Authoritarian regimes can allow opposition, but it is not in any way legally institutionalized. Such regimes also limit citizen freedoms and use political repression against their opponents, often in the form of military justice. Furthermore, virtually all authoritarian regimes violate basic human rights to some degree. Many twentieth century authoritarian regimes have had military leaders as their heads of state, and the entry provides numerous examples.
Next the entry distinguishes authoritarian regimes from other nondemocratic political systems, corporatist regimes and tutelary democracies. Other nondemocratic regimes include sultanistic or despotic, totalitarian and post-totalitarian systems. Sultanistic or despotic systems are motivated primarily by personal gain and are generally lacking in any collective goals or concept of society. Unlike authoritarian systems, which have a monistic but not monolithic power center, totalitarian regimes are dependent upon an autonomous ideology for legitimacy. Post-totalitarian regimes experience more pluralism than do totalitarian systems, as well as more institutional and bureaucratic autonomy.
Corporatist regimes institutionalize interest representation and eschew class conflict in addition to the individualist assumptions underlying liberal democratic systems. Authoritarian regimes often find corporatism a convenient form of pseudodemocracy because legislative representation under such systems may only be allocated by the central power. Finally, many tutelary democracies, or modernizing oligarchies as they are often called, are inspired by a communist, one-party rule model and often adopt an "African socialist" ideology to emphasize a goal of noncapitalist development. This form of political system is generally found in areas under Western colonial rule prior to World War II.