Civilian dictatorship

A dictator is a political leader who governs a country with absolute and unlimited power or one who circumvents existing rules, regulations and laws, against the common good. Countries ruled by dictators are called dictatorships. The term was first applied to magistrates in the ancient Roman Republic who were given extraordinary powers temporarily to deal with emergencies, modern dictators from Adolf Hitler to Kim Jong-un. A civil dictator, on the other hand, is one who rose to power through trickery or fraud, holding total and absolute power over the armed forces, over legislators, does not respect the decisions of the judiciary, muzzles the media and does not tolerate any form of opposition.

Dictators typically use military force or political fraud to gain power, which they maintain through terror, coercion, and the suppression of basic civil liberties. Often charismatic in nature, dictators tend to employ bombastic mass propaganda techniques to stimulate feelings of support and nationalism among the people. While dictators may have strong political opinions and be supported by organized political movements, they are motivated only by personal ambition or greed to retain power, by all means and at all costs. They often employ a common slogan to gain mass appeal, creating a false sense of revolution, such as anti-corruption or the like. They crave absolute power for a limited time, supposedly to deal with social or political emergencies.

As the prevalence of monarchies declined during the 19th and 20th centuries, dictatorships and constitutional democracies became the predominant forms of government around the world. Likewise, the role and methods of dictators changed over time. During the 19th century, several dictators came to power in Latin American countries when they gained independence from Spain. These dictators, such as Antonio López de Santa Anna in Mexico and Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina, typically formed private armies to seize power from weak new national governments.

Characterized by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany and Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union, the totalitarian and fascist dictators who came to power during the first half of the 20th century were significantly different from the authoritarian rulers of postcolonial Latin America. These modern dictators tended to be charismatic individuals who rallied the people to support the ideology of a single political party such as the Nazi or Communist parties. Using fear and propaganda to quell public dissent, they harnessed modern technology to direct their country's economy to build ever more powerful military forces.

After World War II, the weakened governments of several countries in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa fell to Soviet-style communist dictators. Some of these dictators posed as hastily “elected” presidents or prime ministers who established autocratic one-party rule by quashing all opposition. Others simply used brute force to establish military dictatorships. Marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, most of these communist dictatorships had fallen by the end of the 20th century.

Throughout history, even some fully constitutional governments have temporarily granted their leaders extraordinary dictator powers in times of crisis. The dictatorships of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy began under state of emergency proclamations. During World War II, both the United States and Great Britain granted their executives extensive extraconstitutional emergency powers that ended with the declaration of peace. Africa, in particular, has become notorious today for creating civilian dictators who remain in power for decades, some even in very debilitating health conditions, calling on the people to suspend or amend their constitutions in order to perpetuate themselves in power, even in older ages and apparent senility.

• Dictatorship
• Comparative politics