Connectivity of Dictatorships
Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics, presents a fascinating political analysis on the set of rules that guide a successful dictator and the surrounding circumstances that influence how they actions. One of the ideas that I found most interesting was the ability to identify dictatorships by analyzing their road networks.
The pinnacle of trade-off in creating a road in a new dictatorship is that any road built increases connectivity not just for yourself, but for your constituents as well. If the country becomes too well-connected, it facilitates the formation of regional power among the citizens — and a threat to the dictator. Thus, in the realm of road development, an autocrat must create a road network that maximizes their own access to resources but limits the connectivity between the people. These balancing trade-offs in roads allow us to identify dictatorships. These autocratic countries tend to have roads leading from the capital to larger markets and to escape routes from the country, but very limited roads connecting cities outside of the capital.
Indeed, when Mobutu Sese Seko, former dictator of Zaire, came to power, there were about 90,000 miles of road. And yet, when he was finally deposed thirty-two years later, only 6,000 miles were left.
If we create a graph for each country, where each node represents a city and each edge represents a direct route between two cities, our study of networks draws similar conclusions of how power is consolidated. If we follow the theories presented by the book, we should find that the edges in a dictatorship will have a comparatively low embeddedness because the autocrats want to limit the ways an average person can move around the country. Furthermore, the capital should resemble a structural hole on the graph. As explained by the textbook, by allowing the capital to span a structural hole across all other cities, the capital then acts as a gatekeeper, both for information and for transportation, thus maximizing the control of the autocrat.
It would be interesting to see if analyzing such graphs for connectivity and number of structural holes will help us identify dictatorships or countries that are moving towards dictatorships.
http://www.burmalibrary.org/docs13/The_Dictators_Handbook.pdf