When Does America Drop Dictators?

Abstract

In some countries during some periods America promotes liberal democracy; in others countries and periods, it tolerates or even supports authoritarianism. Why the variation? We focus on discrete decisions by a U.S. President to retain a dictator or instead impose democracy. Two conditions must be satisfied. First, an exogenous regime crisis must threaten the authoritarian client. Second, America’s capitalist-liberal-democratic regime must face no credible alternative in the region as a route to national development and security. Credible alternative models threaten U.S. hegemony by empowering rivals that exemplify those models and by making dissenting elites in a client state more hostile to U.S. hegemony; thus they make free elections riskier for Washington. When these two conditions coincide, a new bargain emerges: dissenting elites pledge to participate in the U.S.-sponsored regional order, and Washington forces free elections. We test our argument against two cases of fraudulent elections in a U.S. authoritarian client, namely the Philippines in 1978 and in 1986. In 1978 communism’s high credibility in Southeast Asia forced Jimmy Carter to continue supporting the Marcos dictatorship. In 1986 communism’s lack of credibility allowed Ronald Reagan to drop Marcos and sponsor democracy. We conclude that America’s ambivalence about democracy in the Muslim world today owes much to the lack of credibility of U.S.-style capitalist liberal democracy in Muslim societies.