Bureaucratic-authoritarianism In Modernization: Formation, Operation, And Crisis

During the 1960s and 1970s, from Latin America to East Asia a lot of nations built bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes and these regimes collapsed during the third wave of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s. By the perspective of modernization of developing nations, this thesis follows the formation, operation, and crisis of bureaucratic-authoritarian regime to analysis its rise and fall.Bureaucratic-authoritarian regime can be seen as a modification of traditional authoritarian which contains strong development orientation and manifest modernity. Compare with traditional caudillo-like authoritarianism, this new regime rely on institution rather than might. Its decision-making procedure is rational and predictable, and contains, although on very low level, limited pluralism which reflect a compromise between government and ever-rising participation requirement from the society. The ruling base of bureaucratic-authoritarian builds on the coalition of international capital groups, local capital, and military-political elites. The ruling class, which represented by military and technocrat, suppress political rights to maintain stability, and reject the appeal for fair distribution to concentrate national power on some certain public goals.From historical perspective, the modernization of developing nations was interrupted by colonialism. The pressure of external demonstration from developed nations, and the relative deprivation from local society made these nations facing serious challenges. These challenges can not nether be relaxed by the pre-colonial traditional regime nor the transplanted democracy. Practically speaking, historical economic backwardness, over-extended political power, autocratic political culture and the U.S. foreign policy during cold war which prop up authoritarian governments if they repress communism made bureaucratic-authoritarian regime keep expanding during the 1960s and 1970sIn practical operation, the political power in bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes concentrate in administration sector, and to be exact, in the president's hand. Military usually interferences in domestic affairs, and in such a ruling group, they integrated with technocrat. From vertical dimension, this regime represses public opinion express channel such as parties and parliament, so that state-society relation in such regime is either patron-client relation or state corporatism. In such a closed system, the lack of check-and-balance resulted in weak self-amending fuction.Most of these nations develop their economy according to import substitution strategy or export oriented strategy, but resulted in totally different achievements, because of their different performance in reform the history-formed negative economic structure and apply complementary policy to reconcile social problems combined with economic growth. Generally speaking, the performance of bureaucratic-authoritarian government connected with two facts:reform the backward economic structure and add in social complementary policy during economic increasing.The fundamental contradiction between the logic of market economy and character of authoritarian ruling leads to a dilemma:its measure to achieve development and its developmental target incompatible with each other, furthermore, the performance can not provide legitimacy for long-term authoritarian ruling. Therefore, after a short upsurge, bureaucratic-authoritarianism can not avoid collapse.