Authoritarian rule concentrates political impact in leaders’ personalities.

Evidence

The dramatic reduction of political repression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s led to an outpouring of political action. Just as the absence of authoritarian rule leads individuals in the aggregate to express their personal political proclivities, its presence magnifies the effects of leaders, assuming that the authoritarian system is one in which the individual or individuals at the top have more or less absolute power (Tucker, 1965). The striking capacity of leaders’ personalities to shape events in an authoritarian system was evident in the leeway Gorbachev appears to have had at the time of the initiation of glasnost and perestroika, if not later when the forces of pluralism began to bedevil him. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1142

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the institutional logic of collective action and the Milgrom law-merchant chapters on how institutions shape individual latitude, but in reverse — absolute power expanding, not constraining, individual agency.