Dictators, Gordon Tullock noted in his 1987 book Autocracy, are individuals “who acquired power essentially because for personal reasons they preferred being dictators to being lower-ranking officials.” The book provides a theory of autocracy in the public choice tradition, which uses a rational-choice methodology to analyze politics. Public choice assumes that politicians in general and autocrats in particular are self-interested like the rest of us: Most of the time, they seek their own advantage. The historical evidence Tullock invokes to test his theory, he admits, is “mainly anecdotal,” but it still illustrates how dictators and other individuals respond to incentives.

A lawyer by training and self-taught economist, Tullock (1922–2014) was one of the main founders of the public choice school. His 1962 book with James Buchanan, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, was a cornerstone text of this school of thought (Lemieux 2022a). It argues that constitutional (that is, limited) democracy is explained and justified by a unanimous and tacit social contract in which everyone has an equal veto right.

Tullock was not a fan of autocrats. His Autocracy is an exercise in positive, not normative, economics; its purpose is to understand why kings and dictators do what they do. Most of the original book was reorganized and republished in Vol. 8 of The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock (Liberty Fund, 2005), under the editorship of fellow public choice economist Charles K. Rowley. (The present review quotes from this edition.)

An autocrat is defined as an individual who claims absolute political power over a society. In Tullock’s typology, autocrats comprise both dictators and monarchs, the difference being that monarchy is normally hereditary. “Electoral regimes” are a different sort of political system in which some part (often small) of the population vote. Democracy is a special case in which “voting is a significant part of the governmental process.”

The two polar cases of autocracy and democracy are useful to keep in mind but, as Tullock realizes, there is a whole spectrum of intermediate cases. Some autocratic regimes are totalitarian dictatorships like Stalin’s, others are less repressive such as Franco’s in Spain. We see cases of “limited autocracies” where the strongman or would-be dictator coexists with an elected legislature. Even absolute monarchs typically have been constrained by some legal rules.

Looking at world history, Tullock notes that autocracy has been “the dominant form of government.” He believes that democracy reached its peak in 1914 and has receded since. Despite a formal revival after the fall of communism (just a few years after the publication of Autocracy), the trend remains downward, especially if we are speaking of liberal democracy.

Dangerous life / The life of a dictator is not easy. He must prevent coups by other potential dictators. If he doesn’t succeed, he risks being imprisoned, killed, tortured, or at least forced into exile. He cannot do whatever he wants, if only because harming others in his government will tempt them into removing him.

Any autocrat, but especially a dictator, needs a praetorian guard; Stalin had some 15,000 praetorians from the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs stationed in Moscow. A dictator lives in a sort of Hobbesian state of nature. Just as a free society has a problem establishing a self-enforcing constitution, a dictator struggles to build a self-enforcing security for himself. The Gang of Four in China lost power because their praetorians arrested them. South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee was assassinated by the head of his secret police.

Perfectly preventing this threat is impossible. King Hassan II of Morocco had the police surveil the army, but this reinforced the position of the police. Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad had two different bodyguard forces of roughly the same size. To be secure in power, a dictator needs both “a strong military force to deal with foreign enemies” and “a military force which is weak enough so that it cannot overthrow him”; he must choose the least bad risk. One solution to this conundrum is to develop the loyalty of individual soldiers to the person of the dictator, which Hitler did.

And then there are “the people.” Dictatorship shares with democracy the risk of losing the support of the majority to another majority supporting somebody else. The Condorcet Paradox suggests that a different grouping often exists to form another majority coalition (Lemieux 2021). A fortiori, a minority of supporters is unstable.

The dictator must persuade his entourage (the high officials who lust for his job) that he will always win at the support game: If they conspire against him, the expected punishments are larger than the expected rewards. He will rigorously enforce laws against treason. He will endeavor to prevent conspiracies by undermining communications among potential conspirators and reward officials who denounce the latter. This, of course, incites his officials to report false conspiracies, if only to handicap their own competitors. The dictator has as much reason to distrust his officials as they have to distrust him.

Despite the existence of a legislature in Iran, the supreme leader is a theocratic dictator. We can start to understand why this apparatus could obtain significant support from the population, even without the theocratic element. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has become both the regime’s praetorian guard and its battlefield army. A militia of 700,000 volunteers also supports the regime on the internal front. Participants in these regime forces benefit from high rewards in cash, careers, and other privileges, meted out by a web of patronage and corruption that “binds millions of loyalists to the Islamic Republic’s survival” (Faucon 2026). The IRGC is said to control 50 percent of the Iranian economy. As Tullock suggests, the promise of virgins in the afterlife is the cherry on this cake of incentives. Ideology, especially of the religious kind, combined with a system of rewards and punishments, is a good formula for dictatorship.

One way a dictator can prevent a coup is to frequently move his high officials to new jobs so none of them can build a personal following. Short assignments also teach them that they are removeable at the pleasure of the dictator. He must make sure that he is the real commander of the armed forces and that, under him, power is divided among different titles, such as Minister of War, Chief of Staff, etc. Mao shuffled personnel among different armies and ended up commanding all of them. Xi Jinping has been doing something similar: “After a dramatic recent purge of China’s generals, the country’s ruler, Xi Jinping, faces another stressful task: A five-yearly churn of leadership posts from bottom to top has begun” (The Economist 2026).

Like Buchanan, Tullock had a high opinion of the promises of the American constitutional enterprise, but I wonder if the author of Autocracy, were he still living, wouldn’t select some American politicians to add to his anecdotical observations of would-be autocrats. The actual or would-be autocrat, he might say, would frequently rotate the leaders of the national security and spy agencies. He would also prefer “acting directors” (or US attorneys) to Senate-approved nominees.

Other economists have noted that a dictator faces another dilemma. If he lets the press (including now the internet) operate relatively freely, subversive ideas against his regime are bound to circulate and undermine his authority. If he censors the press, he will have no independent way of knowing the problems his subjects face and what they think of him. For example, he cannot count on the minister of housing to tell him that the public housing goals of the current five-year plan will not be realized and that the tenants are unhappy with the unlighted corridors and broken elevators.

Compensating benefits / Benefits obviously compensate for the costs (actual and probabilistic) of being a dictator. Nobody is forced to be one, yet many compete for the job; they obviously think that their expected benefits are larger than their expected costs. One subjective benefit is the pleasure of ruling over others, as opposed to being ruled by somebody else. There is much uncertainty in being ruled—that is, in being under the arbitrary power of somebody else.

The autocrat also gets more mundane benefits, namely his high living standard while in power or, if pushed into exile, the money he has stolen and stashed away. When he left Argentina in 1946, Juan Perón took half a billion dollars with him, the equivalent of more than $8 billion today. At the same time, the autocrat must be careful that his standard of living does not attract too much envy from his subjects and his officials.

Doing good? / As long as he is in power, the autocrat has much leeway to implement the policies he likes. However, apart from ideologues, “there is really relatively little evidence that dictators have very strong ideas about policy.” Even Lenin was apparently willing to damage the prospects of communist control if he thought it improved his position within the movement. A more typical dictator such as Franco will follow the policies that make him loved by most people or that satisfy his important political clientèles. He will change the policies and even switch ideology if it helps him stay in power. In this respect, Tullock argues, there is not much difference between the public policies of democracies and those of dictatorships.

Even when he tries to do good, the dictator probably does not know what is “good” and for whom. He is likely to pick whatever seems fashionable and implement the same policies that would have been adopted in a democracy. When a new dictator comes to power, policy changes “are no larger than those which occur when Republican replaces Democrat in the presidency.” Of course, some dictators (or would-be dictators) are more activist than others.

A dictator will harm his enemies—that is, those who don’t support him or who challenge his power—but help those whose support he needs to stay there. Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator but increased his subventions to the Shia church, to which most Iraqis belonged. Whether in a democracy, a monarchy, or a dictatorship, organized interests and their lobbyists are pushing for the policies they want.

A dictator will harm his enemies—that is, those who don’t support him or who challenge his power—but help those whose support he needs to stay in power.

Political animal / We expect the dictator to be an efficient and manipulative political animal. He could not survive without these traits. Indeed, they were essential for him to reach the summit of the state. In this sense, he must be intelligent, but his reforms will seldom be brilliant or coherent. Typically, he knows nothing about economics and the social consequences of public policies. Getting in power and remaining there constitute his main goal and the focus of his attention.

According to Tullock’s historical observations, a potential dictator generally “rises in a functioning government of some size” and seizes power when the opportunity arises. He was previously a high official in the civilian state apparatus or in the army. He reached supreme power through opportunistic behavior, not competence. Dictators are opportunists who have been selected as such.

The aspiring dictator needs to wage some sort of coup d’état (violent or not) or grab power after a civil war. Commanding an army, like Mao did, is useful. In organizing his coup, the would-be dictator in the high spheres of the state cannot count on his government colleagues. Many of them share the same ambition and are looking for allies, not a future boss. As previously suggested, the problem with a carefully laid plot is that many people must be involved. A vast conspiracy is a complicated and risky adventure.

The high official who intends to replace the current dictator has a difficult task for another reason. He needs to both satisfy the current dictator that he is a perfect “yes man” and project for his colleagues the image of being a tough man (or woman) who will win the competition for power. One could argue that the problem is the same as that of a democratic politician—say, a cabinet member—who wants to become president or prime minister, except that the aspiring dictator is walking on a higher wire and with a heightened probability of falling—and not only from grace.

It is dangerous for a dictator to name his successor in advance. It would incentivize the latter to depose or kill his benefactor, if only to prevent him from changing his mind. If he does commit the murder, the anointed successor is likely to control the investigation into his predecessor’s death, which can be blamed on a natural or accidental cause. This is why appointing a successor in advance is rare. When it happens, it is late in the life of the current dictator. The best autocratic solution seems to be a rule of hereditary succession, which is probably why such a rule evolved in monarchies. Tullock might observe that Kim Jong Un is trying to pull the dynasty trick his father and grandfather did by anointing his young daughter as the next leader.

Democracy and autocracy / In “the long sweep of history,” Tullock argues, autocratic governments seldom change into electoral systems, let alone democracies. In the other direction, electoral systems are often overthrown by internal or external dictators. But he confesses that developing a general theory of the fall of electoral systems “has so far defeated [him].” We might add that the task is especially complicated if we want to distinguish between “democracies” and “electoral systems” or between “democracy” and “constitutional democracy.”

The dangerous executive / In his chapter on “Democracy and Despotism,” Tullock notably proposes three historical generalizations. First, democratic systems “tend to be overthrown by the executive branch of the government rather than by the legislative.” One reason that we saw before is the executive typically controls the army and the police. Tullock also points out that a clear majority of the legislature would lose from being replaced by a dictatorship, while a majority in the executive—including the would-be dictator himself—would gain from dictatorship. When the executive hasn’t turned dictatorial, it may be that some arrangements “kept the executive very weak.” Examples of this include the ancient doge of Venice, who was checked by many mechanisms imposed by the tyranny-fearing Venetians, and Switzerland’s use of a seven-member Federal Council in place of a single chief executive. Tullock could have added that, in America, the theory of the “unitary executive” works in the other direction.

When the executive hasn’t turned dictatorial, it may be that some arrangements “kept the executive very weak.” In America, the theory of the “unitary executive” works the other way.

Second, the author of Autocracy argues that the right is “firmly democratic” in the United States, England, and Switzerland. I suspect he would reconsider this evaluation today, especially as he was referring to constitutional democracy, the sort of democracy of which he was a lifelong defender.

Third, Tullock seems to argue that constitutional monarchy—a mix of democracy and autocracy—is especially beneficial. Among historical examples, he invokes England under George II. In his own time, he mentions the promises of Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand, hoping that their regimes would move toward constitutional monarchy with a “decorative king.” But he admits that this is only a conjecture suggested by the historical record at the time he was writing.

Popular uprisings are rare / Tullock argues that genuine popular uprisings against autocratic regimes are rare and stories of them are largely artifacts of democratic mythology. In his view, overthrowing an autocrat is usually an internal state affair. Many successful revolutions—including in France, America, and Russia (against the czarist regime)—were revolts within the state, even if they had the support of much of the population. In the case of America, the central actors were the royal governors against local legislatures. Or, as Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman puts it with reference to our current world, “men with guns have a better chance of toppling Putin than unarmed civilians” (Rachman 2026).

The rarity of genuine popular uprisings makes sense when we reflect on the difficulty of “the people” to coordinate a collective action (in the sense of Olson 1965) against the state. Few individuals will volunteer for a high probability of being among the first ones shot; it’s better to let others do it, and get the personal benefits of the revolution and none of the personal costs. It’s the problem of the “free rider” in collective action. Thus, “preventing overthrow by the common people is, in general, quite easy if the ruler is only willing to repress vigorously”—to torture dissidents and shoot into crowds of demonstrators.

Only when “the ruler does not actually have professional forces at his beck and call,” or when he chooses not to fight back, does a popular uprising appear possible. Tullock suggests that Louis XVI probably sounded the death knell of the monarchy when, in 1792, he ordered his Swiss Guard to cease fire and withdraw from a confrontation with insurgents.

A democratic transition is more likely to happen under monarchs who agree to constitutional monarchy, as happened in 19th century Europe. That epoch was characterized by a strong intellectual current in favor of democracy, which suggests the importance of ideas in motivating individuals to surmount the obstacles of collective action.

“There do not seem to be any clear-cut cases of an enraged people rising up, throwing off a vicious and corrupt dictator, and establishing a pure and noble democracy,” Tullock concludes. But when there is “some kind of representative assembly” to “check the power of the ruler,” a popular uprising appears possible via the assembly. Isn’t this admitting that, when a radical change is desired by large numbers in the population, people can solve the problem of collective action through gaining the support of a component of the state?

Faces of legitimacy / One definition of legitimacy—under an autocracy or any political regime—is a widespread belief that public support would continue even without coercion. In this sense, legitimacy can be explained by certain evolved traits in the “indoctrinable” psychology of humans. We need to economize the brain’s computing power with the general presumption that what others tell us is true except if proven wrong. Another psychological trait is the need to reduce cognitive dissonance: If one doesn’t have the government he wants, he can instead like the government he has. In short, legitimacy has little to do with the virtue of the government, and much to do with the values and habits that evolution has instilled in our minds. French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel similarly argued that people obey political rulers essentially because “it has become a habit of the species.”

This is not to say that individuals will continue to behave as told when it is clearly not in their personal interests. Popular credulity does not forever trump experience. At a certain point, Tullock notes, residents of communist countries stopped believing their governments; they had been told too many falsehoods that their experience contradicted. The dictator (or would-be dictator) may try the trick of “firehose of falsehoods”: “The idea is to throw out so many different conspiracy theories and ‘alternative facts’ that the truth simply becomes one version of events among many” (Rachman 2022).

Ultimately, in the cases under consideration, legitimacy needs to be supported by rewards to part of the population and fear of punishment instilled in the rest. Tullock emphasizes the role of high officials, who stand in a better position to guess whether the dictator will win if challenged—a more practical definition of legitimacy. The legitimacy belief can be in error, but it still has some self-fulfilling power. Yet, it is true that “many governments thought by their subjects to be legitimate have been overthrown.”

Pluses and minuses / Despite the book’s illuminating approach, many readers of Autocracy will find it loosely structured, with numerous repetitions and some arguments that are not easy to follow. Apparently, Tullock was in the habit of dictating his writings, giving them the look and feel of an off-the-cuff lecture.

He confesses that, despite observing “general patterns,” he does not find a general and testable theory of dictatorship. He hopes that his analysis will inspire others to do more research. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight and further analysis, we can find some exceptions or qualifications to his observations. For example, populist leaders with dictatorial intentions often come from outside the government, and their intellect is not a source of wonder. But Tullock’s epistemic humility is an advantage, not a drawback.

By asking relevant questions, Autocracy contributed to a better understanding of autocratic regimes and to the development of an economic literature on this topic. It showed the usefulness of public choice analysis of autocrats’ incentives. The light Tullock threw on the long history of autocracy confirmed that their practitioners are not so different from democratic politicians. Under the ideal of constitutional democracy, rulers are simply more effectively constrained, which is what matters most.

Readings

• Faucon, Benoit, 2026, “The Web of Patronage Keeping Iran’s Regime in Control,” Wall Street Journal, March 26.
• Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 1945, Du Pouvoir. Histoire naturelle de sa croissance, Éditions du Cheval Ailé (On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth, translated by J.F. Huntington, Liberty Fund, 1993).
• Lemieux, Pierre, 2021, “Populist Political Choices Are Meaningless,” review of William Riker’s Liberalism Against Populism, Regulation 44(1): 54–57.
• Lemieux, Pierre, 2022a, “The State Is Us (Perhaps), But Beware of It!” 60th anniversary review of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, Econlib, January.
• Lemieux, Pierre, 2022b, “An Easy Path for the Strongman-To-Be,” Regulation 45(3): 57–60.
• Olson, Mancur, 1965, 1971, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Harvard University Press.
• Rachman, Gideon, 2022, The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy around the World, Other Press.
• Rachman, Gideon, 2026, “Putin Could Pay a Personal Price for Failure in Ukraine,” Financial Times, June 1.
• The Economist, 2026, “China’s Leadership Is About to Be Shaken Up,” May 29.