What Is Authoritarianism? Definition, Types and Examples

Authoritarianism in plain terms

Political scientists use the word authoritarianism in two ways, and it helps to keep them apart.

1. A type of regime. A system of government where those in power cannot be removed by free and fair elections, and where opposition, media and courts are restricted. This guide focuses on that meaning.
2. A personal attitude. A preference for order, obedience and strong authority over individual liberty. This is the meaning used on the vertical axis of the political compass, and our guide to authoritarian vs libertarian covers it, along with the psychology research.

As a regime, authoritarianism is defined mostly by what it lacks. There is no real competition for power, limited political pluralism and weak or captured checks and balances. The rulers decide, and citizens have no reliable way to hold them to account.

How political scientists define it

The Spanish-born political scientist Juan Linz gave the classic modern definition in the 1960s. He described authoritarian regimes as systems with limited, not responsible, political pluralism, where a leader or small group exercises power within formally vague but in practice fairly predictable limits, and which do not rely on an elaborate guiding ideology or constant mass mobilization. Linz's key move was to treat authoritarianism as its own category, separate from both democracy and totalitarianism.

Today, researchers often measure regimes on a scale. The V-Dem Institute's Regimes of the World classification, published by Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg and Staffan Lindberg in 2018, sorts countries into four groups:

Freedom House takes a related approach. Its annual Freedom in the World report rates countries and territories on political rights and civil liberties, and labels them Free, Partly Free or Not Free.

Types of authoritarian regimes

The political scientists Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright and Erica Frantz built one of the most used data sets on autocracies, published in Perspectives on Politics in 2014. They classify regimes by who holds power:

• Personalist regimes. Power is concentrated in one leader who controls the military, party and state, and often appoints family and loyalists.
• Single-party regimes. A ruling party controls access to office and policy, and leaders rotate within it.
• Military regimes. A group of officers rules as an institution, often after a coup.
• Monarchies. A royal family holds real power, as in several Gulf states.

Many regimes are hybrids of these types. The type matters because it shapes how regimes behave and how they end. Geddes and her colleagues found that military regimes tend to be shorter lived and more likely to hand power back to civilians, while personalist regimes often end in violence or chaos.

Competitive authoritarianism

Since the end of the Cold War, many authoritarian governments have kept the outward form of democracy. In a 2002 article in the Journal of Democracy, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way coined the term competitive authoritarianism for regimes where elections are real and opposition parties can compete, but incumbents abuse state resources, harass journalists and opponents, and bend courts, so the contest is unfair. Opposition can sometimes win, which makes these regimes more unstable than closed autocracies.

Researchers also describe democratic backsliding, the gradual weakening of democratic institutions by elected leaders, as one of the main ways democracies become authoritarian today, rather than through coups. V-Dem's annual Democracy Reports and Freedom House both track this trend, and Freedom House reports that global freedom has declined for roughly two decades.

Authoritarianism vs totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is the most extreme form of non-democratic rule. The idea was developed by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which studied Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, and by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in 1956 listed six features: an official ideology, a single mass party, a system of terror, a monopoly on mass communication, a monopoly on weapons and central control of the economy.

Arendt argued that totalitarian regimes use terror and ideology to atomize individuals, cutting the ties of family, community and association that let people resist. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four gave the idea its best known fictional form.

Authoritarianism can exist under almost any ideology. Communist states, fascist regimes, traditional monarchies, military juntas and some regimes with no clear ideology at all have been authoritarian. See what is fascism for one example.

Warning signs political scientists look for

Researchers who study how democracies weaken often list similar early signals. In their 2018 book How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt highlighted four:

• Rejecting the democratic rules of the game, for example refusing to accept election results or proposing to suspend the constitution
• Denying the legitimacy of opponents, such as describing rivals as criminals, traitors or enemies of the nation
• Tolerating or encouraging violence by supporters
• Readiness to curb civil liberties of opponents, including the media

Other common signs include packing or sidelining courts, changing election rules to favor the incumbent, removing term limits, and using tax or regulatory agencies against critics. These measures can be adopted by leaders of any ideology, left or right, and often each step looks legal on its own.

The arguments for and against strong authority

The case for strong authority

The case for strong central power is old. Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan (1651) that without a powerful sovereign, life would be a war of all against all. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote about the uses of power for founding and holding states. In modern times, some defenders of authoritarian or semi-authoritarian systems point to rapid economic development in places such as Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, arguing that stability and long-term planning can matter more than electoral competition. Others argue that strong leadership is needed in crises or in deeply divided societies.

The case against

Critics argue that unaccountable power is eventually abused. Without elections, a free press and independent courts, citizens cannot correct mistakes, remove bad leaders or protect themselves from repression. The economist Amartya Sen argued that no major famine has occurred in a functioning democracy with a free press, because governments that face voters and critics have strong reasons to act. Critics also note that for every authoritarian success story there are many cases of corruption, stagnation and violence, and that succession crises make such regimes unstable.

A middle view

Many political scientists stress that the line between democracy and authoritarianism is a spectrum. Most people value both order and freedom, and the real argument is about how much power the state should have, who checks it, and what happens when leaders refuse to give it up.

Find where you fit

On a personal level, you may lean authoritarian if you value order, security and strong leadership, and libertarian if you value personal freedom and limits on state power. That attitude is separate from left or right economics.

The Political Compass Test measures your views on authority separately from economics, and the Political Values Test scores liberty vs authority as its own axis. For a quick check, try the Libertarian Quiz. Then read authoritarian vs libertarian and democracy vs republic.