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Bureaucratic authoritarianism is a type of authoritarian regime that features rule by an alliance of military leaders, civilians with technical expertise (especially in economic policy), and leading business sectors. These regimes are hypothesized to form under certain conditions where a nation is attempting to industrialize and faces popular agitation or unrest that makes it difficult for elites to maintain order. The original paradigms of the bureaucratic-authoritarian regime were Latin American countries of the 1960s, Latin American regimes in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as East Asian countries that have provided the opportunity for political science to test the theories proposed about their development.

Origin Of The Concept

Guillermo O’Donnell coined the term bureaucratic authoritarianism in Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism (1973), which examined the military regimes of South America that made economic performance a key component of their legitimation formulae. O’Donnell argued that the modern authoritarian regimes that came to power in Brazil (1964) and Argentina (1966) were supported by a coalition of military officers, civilian technocrats, and big business (especially multinational firms) that sought to move beyond the populist, distribution-oriented politics previously prevalent in those societies. The new regimes sought to replace distributional conflict with a more technocratic, bureaucratic approach to making economic policy.

Scholars using this concept criticized modernization theory for failing to predict the emergence of military regimes in some of the developing world’s most advanced economies. Political development theorists following the modernization paradigm had associated higher levels of economic development with greater political pluralism and hence higher probabilities of democratic advancement. O’Donnell observed that Latin America’s most economically advanced countries had fallen to nondemocratic rule in the 1960s and offered an alternative explanation that linked economic development with authoritarianism in late developers.

Features Of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism

Specifically, he suggested that in late-developing countries following the import-substituting industrialization (ISI) model— which promoted economic development by protecting and subsidizing local production of manufactured goods previously imported from already industrialized countries—the political power of lower-class and middle-class urban groups (especially the urban working class) grew as their numbers increased and as populist politicians developed coalitions that relied on their support. As the market for consumer goods became saturated due to the success of the first, “horizontal” stage of ISI, those economies required “deepening” into the production of capital goods and consumer durables in order to further economic growth.

Such heavy industries required investments by foreign capital. International investors were discouraged from entering these economies, however, where populist politics, featuring popular sector agitation and economic nationalism, prevailed. O’Donnell identified an “elective affinity” between the military, concerned about the implications for domestic order in the face of popular sector mobilization, and civilian technocrats, who sought military support for the adoption of orthodox economic policies. From this affinity, coup coalitions were formed, leading to authoritarian regimes in which the military chose to rule as an institution (rather than via persona list rule by a single strongman), but brought civilian technocrats— especially economists and engineers—into key roles managing the nation’s economic development.

This alliance of the military and civilian technocrats is the key characteristic of bureaucratic authoritarianism. O’Donnell’s conceptualization of bureaucratic authoritarianism stresses political exclusion of the masses, a highly technocratic policymaking process shared by the military and civilian experts, and rule that benefits transnational business and permits the country to further engage in the global economy.

Empirical Investigations

Originally developed to apply to Argentina and Brazil, the concept of bureaucratic authoritarianism was subsequently used by many scholars of Latin America to apply to military regimes that emerged in Chile and Uruguay in 1973 and to a second military regime that came to power in Argentina in 1976. As the Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay regimes, and the later military government of Argentina, evolved, attempts by scholars to refine the theory and to use it to predict the evolution of Latin American dictatorships produced valuable empirical research on patterns of political development in Latin American but failed to extend the theory. Scholars paid substantial attention to the idea that the degree of threat posed to the coup coalition partners by popular sector agitation could predict the severity of repression, the commitment to economic orthodoxy, the country’s economic performance, and the unity both of the military institution and the coup coalition after the seizure of power.

However, as Karen Remmer and Gilbert Merkx convincingly demonstrated, actual events in the four countries of South America’s Southern Cone did not bear out these hypotheses. For example, Brazil’s relatively low precoup threat levels were nevertheless associated with initial fiscal orthodoxy while relatively high threat levels in Argentina in the 1970s and in Uruguay were followed by unorthodox fiscal policies under the military regimes that seized power. High threat levels led to low initial military unity in Uruguay but high initial unity in post-1976 Argentina.

The concept of bureaucratic authoritarianism has been applied with modifications to industrializing economies in East Asia, particularly South Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia. As the model has been applied more broadly and critiqued by comparative politics scholars, the elements that have proven most useful remain two: (1) The prediction of modernization theory that democracy would result from economic development proved too optimistic, as many late industrializers opted for (often harsh) authoritarian rule during the initial phases of their heavy industrialization, and (2) when threatened by popular sector mobilization military officers, civilian technocrats, and business elites could agree on the merits of imposing a dictatorship that emphasized apparently rational, technical decision making based on objective criteria and the exclusion of the political interests of the broader public.

In the later evolution of regimes labeled as bureaucratic authoritarian, this early unity of the coup partners typically dissolved, however, because politics did invade the decision-making process in the form of interservice rivalries within the military and suspicions of private sector investors that state enterprises operated by military and civilian technocrats threatened to crowd them out of the economy. Internal rivalries eventually led the Argentine military regime to attempt to forge unity by seizing the Falklands (Malvinas) Islands from the British, a failed venture that hastened the regime’s downfall. Prominent critics of the Brazilian regime in the 1980s came to include industrialists concerned about the growing control of the economy by military and civilian technocrats at the head of state enterprises.

Conclusion

While the classic examples of bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes have given way to renewed democracies, the concept has continued to be used as an “ideal-type” or a tendency toward which certain regimes gravitate. The autogolpe (self-coup) of Peru’s president Alberto Fujimori in 1992 is seen by some as a variant on the bureaucratic-authoritarian tradition; others have targeted post-communist Russia under Vladimir Putin as a regime whose democratic elections are in tension with an alliance among politicians, business leaders, and secret police that tends toward bureaucratic authoritarianism.

Bibliography:

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Malloy, James M., ed. Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977.
O’Donnell, Guillermo A. Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics. Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1973.
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Shevtsova, Liliia Fedorovna. “The Limits of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism.” Journal of Democracy 15, no. 3 (2004): 67–77.