In ancient Rome, 'dictator' was a legal emergency job with an expiry date
The early Roman Republic created the dictator as a lawful office: one leader handed absolute power for a limited time to deal with a crisis. The modern meaning, a ruler with near-total power and no time limit, took shape only in the nineteenth century with Bonapartism in Europe and the caudillos of Latin America.
A dictatorship today is government by a leader with absolute or near-absolute power, exercised through an inner circle of advisers, generals and senior officials. By the twentieth century dictatorship and constitutional democracy had become the world's two dominant forms of government, steadily displacing traditional monarchies. After the Soviet collapse democracies multiplied, and in the early twenty-first century they outnumbered authoritarian states by 98 to 80. A democratic recession followed the 2008 financial crisis and China's rise, and by 2019 authoritarian governments led again, 92 to 87.
Political scientist Barbara Geddes began a widely used classification in 1999 that asks where power actually sits. Military dictatorships are run by officers and are common in developing parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America; they are unstable, averaging only about five years, and tend to be followed by further coups. One-party dictatorships are dominated by a single party, whether all rivals are banned or merely kept powerless. Personalist dictatorships revolve around one individual, and hybrids mix the types.
Origins vary. Nearly half begin with a military coup, but others arise from foreign intervention, insurgent victories, popular uprisings or elected leaders abolishing competitive elections. Between 1946 and 2010, 42% started by overthrowing another dictatorship and 26% emerged at independence from foreign rule. New rulers who seize power by force often lack government experience or a detailed programme, and may create a party afterwards chiefly to reward loyal supporters.
Survival depends on managing two threats. The inner circle is indispensable to carrying out orders, which makes it both a check on the dictator and the likeliest source of betrayal, so it is courted with benefits. The wider opposition is handled by repression, restrictive laws or limited concessions, while staged elections supply a democratic facade. Regimes that fail to suppress opposition risk coups or revolution, yet dictatorships born in revolutions tend to be unusually durable.
Source: Dictatorship
