One of the odd features of the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany was that Hitler was made chancellor in an antidemocratic process, by elite leaders of the old regime, just when the Nazi Party was starting to lose popular support. Why? The eminent political scientist Nancy Bermeo argued, in a pattern that recurred in many times and places since, that Germany’s leaders overestimated the true level of support that Hitler enjoyed—because Nazi street violence and protests, taking place in the very narrow range of places frequented by the old elite, conveyed the impression that the Nazis were gaining strength. By contrast, the growing opposition to the Nazis was quieter, and completely escaped the notice of Hindenburg and the others in the old guard.

Similarly, many have noted that modern American journalists are almost all on Twitter, and spend most of their time talking to each other. As a result, more and more news stories are mere lazy stenography of whatever new trend is going viral on Twitter, a domain dominated by a relatively small cohort of young urbanized people that poorly reflects what is going on in the country as a whole. It is easy to convince a handful of cloistered journalists that some new rarified issue is a serious problem, even as the populace at large thinks it ridiculous and a distraction from more crucial concerns. Then the politicians read the news stories, and similarly think that they reflect actual problems, and so on.

If you want to change society, there appears to be the right way and the easy way. The right way is via a true popular grassroots movement. The easy way is by carefully constructing a Potemkin movement to scare existing elites with and make them think that they need to make concessions to you, well before you have the actual support to back up such a perception.

If you are an author trying to come up with a nefarious scheme for your heroes to thwart, Option 2 seems like a good one.

How might it work? The key is to understand how your setting’s elites get their news of the world, and then systematically subvert those channels. Do they work in a particular office building? Hire a handful of unemployed drifters to protest in front of the office every day. Do they read the same newspapers? Influence the journalists and editors to print what you want the elites to read—via persuasion, ideological appeals, manipulation of gullible journalists, or naked bribery. Create crises for politicians to panic over; carefully recruit friendly elites by hook or by crook, who can then work on their colleagues.

Above all, do your best to isolate the targeted elites from the “common people” who disagree with you. Wherever possible, create the appearance of popular support; stigmatize your opponents as out of touch, or actively disloyal to the society. Create time pressure; give the appearance that normal deliberation would take too long in the face of whatever crisis you choose to focus on; don’t give legitimate democratic mechanisms a chance to work against you.

This works in autocratic settings as well, and is easier. If your setting is a monarchy, how do you influence the king? Through his advisors, his queen, his mistresses or harem. Subvert each of them in turn, and you can gain control of the realm without any support at all from the people. The same principle is at work: understand how information flows to the leadership, and target those flows.

How can such a scheme be thwarted? By breaking through with other information flows, that better reflect reality. Perhaps the captain of the guard breaks protocol and speaks directly to the king, charging the corrupt advisors with treason. Perhaps a democratic populace starts holding voter referenda well before the next scheduled election, revealing the plotters’ lack of support. Perhaps a hacker replaces the falsified news reports in the elite newspaper with a hefty dose of the truth.

(That is one of the relative advantages of democracy, compared to autocratic systems. Information wants to be free, and helps the elites better govern. It is harder to convince elites to panic over a crisis, or to choose a harmful response based on falsified information, in a free society. Harder, but hardly impossible.)

This type of scheming can produce really compelling fiction. Give it a try.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

In democracies, we are used to politics being largely carried out via political parties. Parties are used to mobilize voters before an election, and to discuss policy platforms and figure out which policies might work best and have the most support. But not only democracies have parties. The Nazi and Communist Parties, for example, functioned long after democratic contestation ended in their countries. But what did they do? How were they useful to the regime? (And how can we use those concepts in worldbuilding?)

The most “natural” use for a political party, even in a tyranny, is to incorporate the people into political life. (This is the main function of parties in a democracy—mobilizing potential supporters so they will vote for you.) In a regime without contested elections, mobilizing the people may still be important; we noted previously that some regimes want the people to be politically active in a way that augments the regime’s power. In early Communist China, for example, the relatively stunted state had few institutional structures that reached down to the village level. Political control needed to be exercised by Party cadres in the villages, who took direction from the leadership and then carried it out in their local settings without formal oversight.

But what about regimes that demobilize the people, and in fact want the people to butt out of politics altogether? Why have a political party then?

For one thing, a party is useful to a dictator who is taking over an existing government, and has to deal with existing bureaucracies or security forces that might resist his orders. By organizing a political party, you can sidestep notional hierarchies and systems by imposing your own parallel system, responsive to control from the top, through which you can direct the government’s behavior outside of “official channels.” Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote extensively about how the Nazi and Communist Parties subverted the existing state institutions in Germany and the former Russian Empire.

Another real-world reason, even if absurd, is “dictator envy.” All the cool dictators had political parties, says the local tinpot dictator, so I want one too! For example, Mobutu Sese Seko, dictator of Congo/Zaire, created the Popular Movement of the Revolution in 1967, ostensibly to represent the “national revolution” which legitimized him. In practice, its ideology was incoherent, being “neither left, nor right, nor even center” and calling for a repudiation of “both capitalism and communism.” Essentially, Mobutu’s party was another way of formalizing his absolute control over the country.

A more intellectually interesting reason was pointed out by Beatriz Magaloni. She noted that an absolute ruler faces an unexpected problem when dealing with subordinates: because the ruler can do whatever she wants at any time, even her most essential subordinates cannot trust her. History is replete with rulers who decided to execute their advisors on a whim.

Some rulers enjoy creating this kind of uncertainty; but it comes with problems as well. A subordinate who is constantly keeping an eye on Plan B is not going to be as efficient a functionary for the ruler as one who trusts the ruler to keep her bargains, and is thus motivated to serve the ruler well. An even bigger problem is that if the subordinates cannot trust the ruler, then the ruler cannot trust the subordinates either; she can never dare to give up her hold on power, or she will soon find herself before a hastily-formed firing squad, or swinging from a lamppost.

This is particularly true if the ruler is faced with strong opponents, and wants to co-opt them into her government. Any offer of power that the ruler makes would have to be better than the power than an opponent already has, which is dicey since the whole point of co-opting an opponent is to remove him as a threat.

In this reading, a single-party system can actually serve as a commitment device for both sides. The party provides an institutional structure and a career path for young subordinates to follow, with some assurances that one’s position wouldn’t be summarily stripped from him whenever the ruler feels like it. By the same token, the party provides relatively predictable mechanisms for the dictator to transfer power to a trusted successor, and gratefully head off into a safe and long retirement.

Magaloni found that single-party regimes tended to last longer than pure military dictatorships; moreover, after the end of the Cold War, most autocratic regimes were actually hegemonic-party regimes, that had the ruler’s political party in control but had also legalized opposition parties. Magaloni argued that allowing other parties strengthened the usefulness of the ruling party as a commitment device; if party members were dissatisfied, they could credibly threaten to jump ship to the opposition.

This is a brutally short treatment of Magaloni’s argument, and I recommend reading the whole article if you can. In any case, few works of speculative fiction really make use of the possibilities of a tyrannical regime’s official political party. The machinations of party politics offer another avenue to really spice up your story.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

If you’ve read Beyond Kings and Princesses, you would know that I appreciate the power of a good simplifying model for worldbuilding. When we authors create a new setting, we are faced with infinite possibilities for how to structure things—but as a result, we often become paralyzed with indecision, or we simply default to some standard trope. On the other hand, having a simple model, presenting clear choices between paths, can sometimes help us narrow in on the truly bold choices we want to make in our writing.

For example, let’s say you wanted to have a tyrannical regime in your story. Excellent; but tyrannical in what way? Hitler was different from Pinochet was different from Hugo Chavez. Should your country be a military dictatorship? Should it have an official Party? Should it be prone to massive societal upheavals like the Cultural Revolution? The answer will depend on what story you want to tell; but already the range of possibilities seems overwhelming. Is there any way to simplify the problem?

What we could use is a nice juicy typology of tyrannies. Happily, political scientists have come up with a few good ones, and my personal favorite comes from Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, by Juan Linz. It has a few moving parts, but we can focus in on two main variables: pluralism/centralization, and mobilization/demobilization.

Pluralism/centralization refers to the state’s relations with civil society. It describes the degree to which the regime has to negotiate with other powerful actors in society, such as unions, business federations, religious organizations, or universities; or, conversely, the degree to which all actors in society have been forced under the control of the state. Not all regimes aspire to totalitarian control of their societies; many are content to let sleeping dogs lie, allowing other powerful actors like the Catholic Church or trade unions to have certain privileges as long as they behave themselves. Totalitarian regimes such as Nazism or Communism, on the other hand, deliberately destroyed existing social institutions and replaced them with state-controlled caricatures.

Mobilization/demobilization, on the other hand, refers to the state’s relations with the citizens. Essentially, it asks whether the regime wants citizens to be active participants in the political system—in ways that amplify state power, but do not truly threaten state control—or to be passive observers. Party-based systems such as Nazism or Communism relied on the active involvement of the populace; the Party was the true locus of power, and often displaced official state organizations. Persian-Gulf despots or military juntas, meanwhile, often get itchy when the people become politically active; they would rather the people mind their own business and stay out of politics, so they buy off the populace with lavish subsidies on the one hand, and threaten them with violence on the other.

So, a two-by-two matrix with four possibilities: pluralist-mobilized, pluralist-demobilized (a common pattern), centralized-mobilized (often found in Party systems), and centralized-demobilized. These provide a powerful starting point when you are developing your own tyrannical setting.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)