The Formation of Authoritarian Governments

The Formation of Authoritarian Regimes Over half the world’s population still live in societies defined as “partly free”, where many basic human liberties and democratic liberties are limited and the public has very little individual freedom. This paper will examine the origin of authoritarian regimes. Social scientists look at competing societal and economic explanations to determine whether society’s natural state is one of democratic or nondemocratic rule. Although authoritarian regimes display a great deal of diversity, comparative politics can identify and contrast a number of common features. Authoritarian governments by their nature are built around the limitations of individual freedom. Scholars define authoritarianism as a political regime in which a small group of individuals exercises power over the state without being constitutionally responsible to the public (O’Neil p111). In authoritarian regimes the public has no significance in electing or removing their leaders from political power. Therefore political leaders in authoritarian regimes have boundless authority to develop policies that they dictate to the people. In other words an authoritarian regime (Nazi 'nationalist socialist'/in between the right and left) is a type of dictatorship where a leader controls social/public life and the government, and gives its people limited private freedoms and privacies in their own homes. Despite its complete control on the public life, it is not like the confining, full time prison of the totalitarian regime, where the state controls the private as well as the public domain. Although they are on opposite sides of the political ladder, fascism (Mussolini/right wing) and communism (Lenin, Stalin/left wing) share a few things in common, 1) the rejection of liberal democracy as a substandard form of social organization, preferring powerful state and restricted individual