Given that opposition views tend to be kept secret from a dictator for obvious reasons, how does a dictatorial government determine the views of it’s population ?
Spies and informers?
Google trends ?
Do you think that a dictator cares what his people think.
Yes, but only in the sense that he needs to know in order to keep his grip on power. It’s a cold and calculating sort of caring.
Obsessively.
This. There are reams and reams of papers from various 20th dictatorships documenting exactly the complaints and dissents the security apparatus had uncovered.
But can it ever be a complete assessment ?
Thinking Ceaucescu here, taken by surprise by the sentiment of his population ?
It’s very much in the interests of a dictator to be aware of public opinion and public sentiment, and the wise (and self-interested) dictator will not only be aware of it but also be sensitive to it.
And there’s no particular difficulty in being aware of it. Elections are about 0.001% of how we know what we know about public sentiment in democracies and, in any case, lots of dictatorships have elections. All it takes is a willingness to listen, an open mind and a degree of intelligence. Read the papers. Read the blogs. Listen to what people say around the water cooler. Have a staff of people whose job it is to do these things, and to relay what they learn back up to you. If you want to you can even research with focus groups.
We in the U.S. today, right now, have more voices of the people available to listen to in the history of humankind.
Is that a complete assessment? Forget complete, can anybody make any sense of it whatsoever?
Real dictators have it 99.9% easier than democratic leaders.
It doesn’t have to be complete. It just has to be good enough that the dictator can tailor his policies and actions so as to retain the degree of public assent he needs to keep his dictatorship viable.
Yes, dictators sometimes fail in this. But, nine times out of ten, this isn’t because they didn’t know what public sentiement was; it is because the circumstances didn’t allow them to do what they needed to do to retain popular assent and/or their judgment about what they needed to do failed them.
After all, democratic governments frequently lose power, despite having all the information they could possibly want about public opinion and sentiment. Sometimes, they are even surprised to lose power.
Ian Kershaw has a fascinating book, “The Hitler Myth” on exactly that topic.
Part of the Third Reich’s SD (Sicherheitsdienst) intelligence operation was monitoring jokes - as they provided clues to public opinion.
Kershaw also covers how little things revealed public opinion in the Third Reich. For instance, in the early years of World War II, soldiers’ death notices often said “died for “Führer, Volk, and Fatherland” - after Stalingrad, they trended toward only stating " for Volk/Fatherland.”
The same was also true of the F.B.I. under the late unlamented J. Edgar Hoover, and probably largely still true to this day.
Saddam Hussein held sham elections, and the people who didn’t vote or who voted for the wrong party got send to the torture chambers.
But that is too obvious, I’m sure most people knew not to give their true opinion in a staged election.
There are actually several books on amazon that teach you how to be a dictator.
This is a good question though, and I don’t know the answer. If a dictator knows the wants/needs/beliefs of his people he can offer carrots to certain groups to keep them happy and loyal, and incentives to others to keep them ‘content’ enough to not rebel.
One of the books above says that the dictators true ‘inner circle’ are the political, military and business leaders. A small group of a few thousand. Those people need to be kept happy with bribes. Pretty much everyone else (the masses) is just intimidated into submission.
They don’t do bread and circuses and endless propaganda for the sport of it.
Whether you’re talking modern day nation states like China or America or the earliest palace economies generally the leadership has a variety of constituencies they have to pay attention to if they want to get anything done: the military, religious authorities, the merchant class, the tradesman - basically the people who run the state. It doesn’t do well to unnecessarily abuse the most powerless either, though it’s probably the safest bet. Still, there’s always the risk of ambitious people in the upper class or a neighboring state seeing an opportunity to rally the people to their side. Then you get a civil war, or stabbed by your body guards, or suffer a mysterious hunting accident.
A good dictator will tell the population what to think. A very good dictator will get the population to believe they have free choice in what to think
I had a Chilean tutor, she said soldiers overlooked the polling booths - and the polling cards were transparent.
I often wonder how the dictators in Washington read the population.
Did you mean that soldiers *oversaw *the polling booths?
To overlook is to not notice, to ignore. That seems to be the opposite of what you implied.
overlook
verb |ˈōvərˈlo͝ok| [ with obj. ]
2 have a view of from above: the chateau overlooks fields of corn and olive trees.