Like I mentioned before, it wouldn't be autocracy or democracy by pure definition, because they're being molded together. It would simply be a blend of some of the characteristics and values from both systems. And of course, some characteristics and values would have to be sacrificed.
I agree with @BayView, the difference between autocracy and democracy is more than a semantic quibble. You could, however, have an autocracy where the autocrat allows limited, lower level democracy. For example, the Supreme Leader might allow her subjects to vote on local issues, like whether the park should stay open after 9, or if the local highway tax fees should be allowed to be used for school sports so long as the roads were in good repair. All of this would be subject to Supreme veto power, of course, but it might be possible. The danger in that is that people might get the idea that their opinions matter and wonder why they don't get to choose the Supreme Leader in the first place. Iran has a sort of limited democracy, where the citizens get to choose from one of, IIRC, four candidates for president (prime minister? too lazy to look it up right now), but the candidates are all pre-approved by a leadership council. Furthermore, there's another layer of leadership that can overrule the elected government if it goes astray. Another possibility is a democracy that's limited to the Right Kind of People. The United States, particularly the antebellum South, had a democracy in which ~40% of the population (slaves) were completely disenfranchised. From the bottom of that heap, things would look pretty autocratic.
Don't forget ~50% of the population (women) who were disenfranchised not only in the US South but just about everywhere that has called itself a democracy. And many other so-called democracies had property requirements or other economic limitations as well. I don't think we've ever seen a totally pure version of democracy.
I dunno. I'll never be able to Google search Autocratic Democracy because it can't exist. I can Google search Constitutional Monarchy and come up with wonderful blends of powerful individuals coupled with elected representation of the people, with all the powers and protections codified on a sheet of paper (or haphazardly written on all the paper, United Kingdom). The King of Morocco, until recently, had all the authority to shut the government down, start over, and rule by decree if he wanted to, but the people have a robust parliament. But that's called a Parliamentary Constitutional Monarchy, not an Autocratic Democracy, because a constitution limits both the power of the leader and the power of the people.
Correct. Just like we've never seen a true execution of Communism on a large scale. We just haven't. Early kibbutzes are an example of where it worked on a small scale (I said early), but on the large scale, nope.
When I hear Autocratic Democracy, I hear a government where the only power the public has is the power to vote. Once you get somebody into office, they have absolute power until the next election. You'd better hope that you voted for somebody who'd use their power for good and not for evil, because you wouldn't have any Constitutional safeguards except term limits. In between elections, you're stuck with what you've got. If the public know what one autocrat would do differently than the other, then yes, the public are choosing one autocracy over the over.
I'd be interested to know what kind of political set-up the OP is considering. While I'd not use "autocratic democracy" (simply because both terms come from the same greek root [kratos, meaning 'power'], and have different visions of where the ultimate power lies - in an individual, or in the people. Bar some kind of constitutional arrangement whereby power is legally split between the two over certain specific domains (and I'm not even sure how this would work), I don't know if this is possible. However, that's not to say either that a system with democratic elements must always come complete with a full range of civil rights and liberties (see: Nazi Germany, modern China, Stalin's USSR), nor must an "autocratic" leader necessarily be a brutal, suppressive dictator (Ataturk, for example). We might use as a model something akin to the early British Constitutional Monarchy, where the monarch served as unelected executive, but was required to consult parliament on issues like raising taxes. Inject a few more elements of modern liberal democracy in there (say, universal suffrage, freedom of the press and a civic education), and we might be getting to something like the OP has in mind.
This just ends up being mental masturbation for me, but once you mention constitutional safeguards, even if it's a napkin that says once the leader dies the people get to vote in a new leader, it's no longer an Autocratic anything, but a Constitutional Monarchy with an elected Monarch. History has many examples of those.
There's an interesting point in the UK currently, where the Brexit referendum has a democratic majority to leave. However, the executive (Theresa May - who wasn't elected to that post) has just lost a legal challenge to her power to execute the democratic decision without due parliamentary process. And this legal decision was made by three unelected judges. So, we have democracy, in the form of a legal challenge to force the (unelected) executive to follow the rules, being supported by the (unelected) judiciary and conflicting with democracy in the form of a national referendum decision...
If you change the wording round you'd have a democratic autocracy... does that make any sense @Foxxx?
Well, sure, technically, maybe. I just think when a potential contradiction come up, it's more fun to take each half apart to see if it's possible to combine pieces in a way that people haven't seen before, but that are still recognizable as both. Sometimes it doesn't work, but that just means that you came up with something completely new, and that's even more of a reason to try combining contradictory yet existing ideas in new ways. Autocratic democracy, for example. Have you ever seen the NationStates 3x3x3 version of the original 2x2 Political Compass? Spoiler: Big Imagine half the country wants one type of dictatorship, but the other half want the opposite type of dictatorship. They settle for an electoral system as a substitute for violent civil war, but whenever one side takes power, they take complete control of the economy, the legislature, and the military to force everybody to live one way and one way only. The people who voted for them don't mind being forced to do the things that they wanted to do anyway and forbidden from doing the things that they didn't want to do, but the people who voted against them are spending so much time unemployed and/or in prison for not following the rules that they don't have time to work on sustaining their political momentum. When one party (referring only in this case to the leader and his followers, rather than to any collection of legislators) wins an election for the first time, they're probably going to win the second time and maybe the third because they disrupted the opposition. If a party not currently in power wants to take over, then they need to be very careful to get their message out and their candidate onto the ballot, but not in in such a way that the current Powers That Be would have a chance of finding them and creating excuses to arrest them and their constituency before the election. Every candidate who makes it to the election would either be a skilled survivalist for living off the grid where no one cane find them, or would have the loyal support thereof, and the constituents most likely to make it to the ballot would be the best hackers at hiding the fact that they are sharing at Politically Incorrect materials. But the ballot itself is sacred because the ballot is the only thing standing between the country and the bullet. Thriving in an oppressive regime when it's not "your turn" is unpleasant, but it's generally considered to be better than not surviving in a civil war. What you end up with is a Tyranny by Majority: High Political Freedom, yet Low Personal/Economic Freedom. The drastic upheaval of every incumbent victory leaves the nation just barely on the edge of catastrophe, yet each side blames the nation's problems on the mere existence of the other side, rather than on how wild the transition is between the two.
A lot of what you said bears a striking resemblance to the two-party system that has dominated the United States since the beginning of the 1800s. And so it's actually quite close to the kind of society I was envisioning for a WiP that's still in the early planning stages. But that's exactly what I was envisioning with the autocratic-democracy. The people have a democratic choice in things deemed appropriate by the current autocrat, who they also elected into power. And the hope is that the autocrat is benevolent. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the reason this isn't a monarchy, is because the "representatives" strictly represent who the common people want as their leader. It's simply an easier and quicker voting process. That is where their job and power ends. Because once the autocrat is elected, he has full reign and control over the laws and economy, as you went on to explain. P.S. The great downfall I could see in a system like this, would actually rest with the sacred ballot. How do we maintain its sacredness? What if the autocrat decides to tarnish and spoil it? I would assume civil war, or revolution if the military did not support the autocrat. Also, thank-you for being willing to think this out with me. I was rather surprised by the initial refusal of some, writing it off as an impossibility. Personally I think it's fun haha.
Well, maybe you won't be surprised by my continued refusal... If the autocrat gets to say what the people can or can't vote on, then the autocrat still has absolute power. Right? Votes given at the discretion of the autocrat don't amount to political power, they just mean the autocrat doesn't care about some stuff. Alternatively, if the autocrat is somehow forced to give the people a vote on some things, then s/he's no longer an autocrat. I'm not saying you can't have systems of government that contain these elements - of course you can. It's just the labels that don't make sense. Words have meanings; they're meant to reflect certain ideas. The word "autocrat" reflects the idea of an absolute ruler, the word "democratic" reflects the idea of a system where the people have the power. They don't go together. It's like... if I'm dividing up Halloween candy. If I take all the candy for myself, then there's no candy left for anyone else. If someone else has some of the candy, then I no longer have all the candy for myself. I can't simultaneously have all the candy for myself and have other people having some candy. That's not what "all the candy for myself" means.
It's not so much the fact that the autocrat just doesn't care about some things. And regardless of what his motivation (or lack thereof) for letting the people vote, voting would still be political power. I suppose if you really wanted to get into the semantics of it, it'd completely depend on whether or not he said "and if you vote the wrong answer, I'm going to just do it my way" as opposed to "and regardless of the outcome, I will respect the decision of the people and not use my powers to overrule your vote". You're right that you can't have your cake and eat it too. But power isn't exactly like food. The autocrat is elected by the people. The people are using their democratic power to do that. The autocrat is then bestowed with all that power until the next election. Until then, all power presides with him, but he has the right to give some of that power (candy) to the people if he chooses, and how he chooses. It's both systems working with each other thanks to the sacred ballot, as coined by Simpson above. His idea is very close to how I'd imagined the system working, and he did a far better job of explaining it and creating the terms. If you think you have a better name for the system we're talking about here, you're welcome to share! @BayView, what about a social contract? According to a quick Google search: "an implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits, for example, by sacrificing some individual freedom for state protection." Of course, there are a variety of different theories and interpretations, since this is a model, not a form of a government. But that being said, perhaps what we've all been discussing here is a new social contract theory, that happens to contain pseudo-elements of democracy and autocracy? In which case, assuming that's true, I suppose a completely new name could be crafted for it.
Autocracy may not be the ideal way to describe your government. I have a highly advanced race that uses a Democratic Monarchy, and the winning party serves for life. A Monarch does not have the same amount of power that an Autocrat does. But I am sure you could technically fuse things and have an Auto-Democracy or an Auto-Republic, though it might be a tad harder to do either as Autocracy translated from Greek is Self Power, so might skip the Auto prefix altogether. Try the link it has enough information to help you figure this problem out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forms_of_government
Okay, I'll try once more and then I'm done. No, power isn't exactly like food. But "all" is exactly like "all". The definition of an autocrat is "a ruler who has absolute power". All the power. If someone else has some power, the autocrat is no longer an autocrat. So, again, I'm not challenging your imagined form of government. I'm just saying the terms don't work.
Right, I tried addressing that toward the end of my response. Can you suggest a better term? I still feel like it's all getting quite semantic here. If an autocrat decrees, via law, that he is giving all subjects the power and right to vote on something (and that something only), then he has officially removed himself from that equation. So, is he not an autocrat for that period of time until that vote is over? Is he a 95% autocrat? Moreover, I still don't see how it would suddenly not make that vote a democratic process. The people would be making that decision via majority rule, and the autocrat lawfully ordered himself to respect the outcome. Cheers, -Kyle
Dictator? It has a similar feel, but IIRC, the Roman Senate would elect dictators for the duration of a crisis.
Social contract is more of an overarching term that tries to explain how all governments can be legitimate, despite their seemingly oppressive aspects. I think it'd be too vague to use if you're trying to actually describe how a government works. How are you trying to use the term? If this is something the government itself uses, then maybe Democratic Autocracy is a good term, as long as you go into it understanding that it's a lie. Like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea that was mentioned earlier. If your government is all about the double-speak, this could be a good example--something that's literally self-contradictory. But if you're trying to describe the government to your readers... maybe you could just describe it, without technical terms? I mean, I don't think this is a recipe for a stable form of government - giving someone absolute power for life and then having the power revert back to the people for the length of an election seems...problematic. Who'd be running the country during election season? What kind of oppressive policing would have to occur in order to keep prospective leaders from assassinating the ruler in order to force an election? How much stability can there be if one all-powerful ruler with no checks and balances is replaced by another all-powerful ruler with no checks and balances but possibly with very different goals and principles? I think if you put the time into explaining how all of that will work, your readers will have a fair idea of how the government works even if you never give it a name.
That's very true, and I don't know why I hadn't considered it before. It really isn't even necessary to make a name for it, except in the case that you mentioned, where Democratic Autocracy would actually fit quite well. The focus should definitely be more about making sure the reader can understand how it works. Thank-you for pointing this out to me! And of course it has been fun and fruitful (at least for me) to have this discussion with you and everybody else. Just to do some brainstorming, figuring things out, and get a general reception from random people. Hope you didn't think I was trying to be a troll or something; this was meant to be legitimate business. Thanks @BayView!
I agree that the terms are mutually contradictory. You could have a democracy transition to autocracy (Third Reich) or a false democracy (Iraq under Saddam Hussein). That's not to say you can't invent a political system involves voting to placate the populace, but is not fully democratic.
If you're still looking for input, I suggest studying what Plato and Thomas Hobbes wrote. (Politeia and Leviathan)
Strictly speaking an autocracy does fall under the definition of tyranny as it is arbitrary use of power. In government when not governing from a democratically selected system (such as the U.S. Constitution, which was democratically selected by representatives and ratified the same way - albeit not one-man/one-vote, which isn't the only definition of democracy) any decisions made by an autocrat are arbitrary however well-intended, well-thought out or well-crafted. Government by the consent of the people doesn't include autocracy. Should the people vote-in an autocrat, they voted away their democratic system, and replaced it with an autocracy. It may have been exercising a vote, but it was a vote to exercise that as the last vote. Therefore, and you well know this if you have an inkling about poly-sci 101, you can't have an autocratic democracy, and it's a small wonder you've not been able to find one in history. Greece would periodically get itself into trouble, and would then suspend its democracy, hiring an "oligarch" who was allowed to dictate until whatever problem was solved, and then was removed. This practice is what calls Greek "democracy" into question - when push came to shove, they gave up on their system and reverted to a dictatorship. The concept of the U.S. representative form of government wasn't just some whim dreamed up by guys who were toying around with ideas. If you've read any of the literature generated by these people when they were debating government in decades previous, the time leading up to the Constitutional Congress (and the parallel events in France, concepts in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Germany as well) you'll see the concept was drilled into quite deeply. You may, OP, have the personal opinion that an autocrat is good if he (or SHE) makes good decisions, but you'll have no control over if one of those decisions is to set up a follow-on system ensuring people your autocrat wants in charge stay in charge ad infinitum. You also won't find many people agreeing with you, and civil wars have been fought over less. Personally, I think the view you state is naive.
