Dictators Walking the Mogadishu Line : How Men Become Monsters and Monsters Become Men
History offers many examples of dictators who worsened their behavior significantly over time (like Zimbabwe's Mugabe) as well as dictators who displayed remarkable improvements (like Rawlings of Ghana). The authors show that such mutations ca...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/08/26628865/dictators-walking-mogadishu-line-men-monsters-monsters-men http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24859 |
| Summary: | History offers many examples of
dictators who worsened their behavior significantly over
time (like Zimbabwe's Mugabe) as well as dictators who
displayed remarkable improvements (like Rawlings of Ghana).
The authors show that such mutations can result from
rational behavior when the dictator's flow use of
repression is complementary to his stock of wrongdoings:
past wrongdoings then perpetuate further wrongdoings and the
dictator can unintentionally get trapped in a repressive
steady state where he himself suffers from ex-post regret.
This then begs the question why such a dictator would ever
choose to do wrong in the first place. The authors show that
this can be explained from the dictator's uncertainty
over his degree of impunity in relation to wrongdoing, which
induces him to experiment along this dimension. This
produces a setting where any individual rising to power can
end up as either a moderate leader, or as a dreaded tyrant.
Since derailment is accidental and accompanied by ex-post
regret, increasing accountability can be in the interest of
both the public and the dictator. |
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