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PhilGoetz comments on Orwell and fictional evidence for dictatorship stability - Less Wrong Discussion
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These cases might have happened because the dictator in charge after the power transition was weak and sought public support. A dictator tends to deliberately build a state that will be highly unstable after he dies, by making sure no one person is politically stronger than everyone else. In that sense dictatorships are inherently unstable. Oligarchies, though, are different.
[Edited heavily because I mixed up my responses first, sorry.]
I think there's a selection bias here. When we look at the worst recent dictators (Stalin, Mao) we see that their successors were less despotic. But that's because we selected the most despotic outliers, so of course there was regression to the mean afterwards. We could as easily ask: when Stalin or Mao were rising to power and still weak, why did they turn out to be more despotic than their predecessors?
Also, the states that Stalin and Mao built were stable, even if successorship wasn't clear. A weak successor can seek support from a court party, the army, the rich, the church, or other privileged groups. All these groups are often united against the broader population, no matter what faction they support in court politics.
Many monarchies have had weak or contested successors, or outright succession wars. And many dictatorships have had strong successors who were just as despotic once they established their rule. So I don't think monarchies are more stable as a rule, not without seeing a quantitative analysis.
Do we have many examples of relatively stable regimes that suddenly got a lot worse? Robespierre, Stalin, Mao - they all came to power in a type of revolution (and Hitler came to power in a very illegitimate democratic regime).
Maybe some of the monarchies, thinking about it... but the worse examples still seem to be just after regime changes.
Drastic change in most policies, and in either direction (good/bad), is most likely to happen after a regime change. This is just because in an autocracy, the most important policies are set by the ruler, and people don't change their opinions much, and changing an important policy is a politically weak move.
Whereas when a new ruler acquires power, he will want to make at least some changes - what's the chance that the existing policies suit him better than any alternative? And differentiating himself from the previous ruler can be politically beneficial.
But it doesn't follow the changes he makes will be to improve or relax his rule.
This seems to need a formal analysis, rather than an exchange of anecdotes. But we should have some examples, to define what we're talking about. Can you give examples of long-term regimes that got worse some time after their creation? I'm thinking Henry VIII, for instance, but I'm not sure what you have in mind.
Stalin's regime got significantly worse some 10-20 years after the Bolshevik revolution, once he got rid of the last of his comrades.
Point taken.
I'm not sure why you're asking this. That long regimes can (or tend to?) get progressively worse wasn't part of my argument. I was saying that there tends to be more change at the start of a reign than later on. And therefore, absent data to the contrary, I see no reason to believe these changes trend towards relaxation after regime changes, rather than merely showing regression to the mean.
As for long-term regimes that got worse later on: Mao seems to qualify, since the worst of his tyranny (e.g. Cultural Revolution) happened later on. Hitler didn't commit any world-scale atrocities until World War II started. Stalinism was worse in the Thirties than in the Twenties, and worse again in WW2.
Points taken. A dangerous individual at the beginning of a regime can make that regime go much worse over time.