Authoritarianism and legality

This symposium essay offers some generalized theoretical propositions on the connection between authoritarianism and legality. It suggests that there are least some sociopolitical contexts in which authoritarian regimes may be even more strongly motivated to pursue legality than their democratic peers. This conjecture comes in three steps: first, authoritarian regimes fear organic social mobilization significantly more than their democratic peers. This incentivizes them, especially in larger, more diverse societies with less predictable sociopolitical landscapes, to pursue the atomized governance of society. Second, legality is, at its core, an institutional design that both responds to and produces social atomization. Not only is law a necessary ordering device in stranger-oriented societies where communal self-governance and self-regulation is unlikely to be effective, but it also produces reliance effects that render social relations more distant. Third, combining these two arguments, in very large, very diverse societies, authoritarian regimes may have even stronger incentives to pursue law-centric modes of sociopolitical ordering than do democratic ones. This does not necessarily mean that they will always act upon such incentives, but it does offer a deeper explanation for why the Chinese regime in particular is very unlikely to decisively abandon its current legalistic trajectory at any point in the foreseeable future. This is very much a thought experiment, but hopefully, one that offers useful ideas for future research.