Democracy worldwide is under strain. Recent measurements show a large share of the global population now lives under regimes that are becoming more authoritarian. At the same time, the last few decades of economic globalization—trade liberalization, privatizations and deregulation—were widely expected to weaken dictatorships by reducing citizens’ dependence on the state. That prediction has often failed.
Jose Kaire, a political scientist at Arizona State University, explores this contradiction in his book The Road to Repression. He argues that economic opening frequently produces a political backlash inside autocracies because it threatens the regime’s own elites. Instead of producing more political freedom, liberalization can prompt rulers to tighten their grip.
The conventional logic behind the democratizing hypothesis is intuitive: when governments lose direct control over jobs, credit and suppliers, ordinary people and emerging business actors gain independence from state patronage. Freed from economic dependence, they should find it easier to organize, press demands and challenge authoritarian rule. This idea underpinned the influential Washington Consensus and remains associated with economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.
But real-world outcomes have been messier. Kaire documents cases — including Mexico, Malaysia and Senegal — where liberalizing reforms coincided with more frequent and severe human rights abuses. In roughly half of the autocracies that opened their economies, repression increased rather than declined.
Why? Kaire centers his explanation on the internal politics of authoritarian regimes: the party leaders, military officers, bureaucrats and other insiders who command real power. For many of these figures, economic reforms are not merely technocratic adjustments; they are existential threats. Liberalization can create new business elites, reduce the scope of state-owned firms that sustain patronage networks, and slowly transfer resources and influence away from the established ruling coalition.
Leaders who push reforms therefore face a twofold problem. They need to keep their inner circle on board — a failure to do so can invite coups, plots or defections — while also delivering the economic changes demanded by foreign governments, lenders or investors. Repression becomes a political tool in this balancing act. By cracking down on opposition movements and independent organizers, rulers can reassure insiders that their privileged position is still safe even as the economy is opened.
Put differently, many acts of state violence are less about silencing immediate dissent and more about managing elite incentives. Repression signals to regime insiders that the leadership will protect their interests against outsiders who might profit from opening. Kaire shows how, in Mexico, presidents used coercion against previously tolerated opponents in order to compensate party elites for reforms that undercut their patronage power.
Which regimes are most likely to follow this path depends on the relative strength of elites vis-à-vis the leader. When elites are powerful, leaders must placate them, often with coercive measures directed at potential challengers. When elites are weak and the leader enjoys consolidated authority, there is less need to use repression as compensation.
That distinction helps explain contemporary cases such as Cuba and Venezuela. Reforms in both countries have been encouraged or pressured by external actors, notably the United States. In Cuba, changes over the past decade have increased the institutional role of the Communist Party and enhanced the economic autonomy of the military, expanding the bargaining power of insiders. In that environment, further economic opening risks provoking the elite-management dynamics Kaire describes and could lead to new waves of repression.
Venezuela’s trajectory may be similar. Recent events that changed the regime’s leadership dynamics could create space for insiders to consolidate influence. If so, future deregulation might strengthen those insiders’ incentives to demand protection, with repression used to reassure them.
Kaire’s original intuition came from a personal story: his father’s experience working in an automobile factory in Mexico after sectoral liberalization. What began as a narrowly observed phenomenon turned out to be widespread. Statistical analysis in the book indicates that the pattern of liberalization followed by increased repression is common across many autocracies.
The book also points to extensions of the argument. Leaders who fear international prosecution or exile — for example, from tribunals like the International Criminal Court — may be especially motivated to cling to power and satisfy elites at great cost, intensifying repression. And the core dynamic is not limited to trade or privatization: any economic transformation that reshapes who controls wealth and influence can trigger similar responses.
A contemporary frontier is the rise of artificial intelligence and other high-tech sectors. New industries create new winners. If those winners are independent of traditional elites, they can become a base of support for leaders, or conversely a source of rivalry. China offers an instructive case: under Xi Jinping, the state has recently centralized oversight of key science and technology sectors and disciplined independent tech entrepreneurs, steering the sector toward actors loyal to the leadership. Where leaders succeed in creating a new elite whose fortunes depend on them, they may gain room to sideline old insiders without large-scale repression; where they cannot, they may respond to disruption with force.
The policy implication is sobering. International pressure or incentives to open an authoritarian economy do not reliably produce better human rights outcomes. In many cases, reforms intended to reduce state control over resources end up prompting rulers to use repression as a way to secure elite support. Encouraging economic liberalization without considering regime politics risks making dissidents and ordinary citizens worse off, not better.
