'Revolution & Dictatorship' by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way
Dictators come and go, authoritarian regimes rise and fall. According to Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way of Harvard and the University of Toronto, the ones most likely to endure are the ones that wreak havoc in the name of social revolution. The authors scrutinize statistics to build their case, and although their prose is numbingly repetitive, they make salient points. Dictatorial regimes with a coherent ideology endure because they have true believers. In regimes born in the polarized conflict of a social revolution—dedicated like Communist China or Islamic Iran to remaking their societies—elite leadership cadres are drawn together against enemies foreign and domestic. Like hardened steel, they are durable for being forged in fire. However, nothing lasts forever. The implosion of two of the authors’ long-endurance case-study regimes, the Soviet Union and Communist Yugoslavia, give rise to hope.
