(iPoster) The Political Economy of Autocratic Transitions: The Role of Violence Delegation

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Foundations of Political Theory II & Autocratic Politics and Democracy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Autocratic Politics and Democracy

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a political economy model of institutional change leading to a transition from democracy to autocracy. A powerful political center lacks commitment to repress surges of instability which threaten the economic elites it represents. A process of institutional delegation of political power to a violent group allows the center to gain the commitment it lacks and to re-establish political stability. However, the limited forward-looking capacity of the democratic political system induces excessive delegation of power, leading the violent group to establish an autocratic government. The institutional mechanism leading to autocracy delineated in the paper fits well the rise to power of Fascism in Italy after World War I - from 1919 to 1925 - but the main political economy component of the mechanism we identify are common to several historical transition phenomena.

We are currently designing an empirical strategy to assess how the rhetoric of parliamentary debates evolved in a manner consistent with our model of institutional delegation to violent actors, using text embeddings and large language models (LLMs), and constructing a metric of discursive convergence across political groups based on a systematic comparison of the narrative styles of official party newspapers in the historical context of Italy between 1919 and 1925. We aim at tracing the occurrence of a progressive alignment of centrist rhetoric with the discourse of violent actors and the simultaneous marginalization of socialist narratives.

Authors

• Fabio Enrico Traverso, TU Darmstadt

• Unregistered Participant

• Thierry Verdier, Delta, Ecole Normale Supérieure