When people think of authoritarian regimes, they often imagine dictators at podiums and military parades with all the latest toys of warfare. These images capture the theater of power but not its foundations.

Authoritarianism is not sustained by speeches, ideology, and violence. Its true anchor lies in public administration.

It encompasses the collection of taxes, the distribution of welfare, the development of infrastructure, the regulation of markets, and the everyday functions that bind citizens to the state. It is through the administrative state that authoritarian regimes convert coercion into compliance and ideology into a lived experience.

If authoritarian control is rooted in administrative structures, then it comes as no surprise that traditional democratization efforts that seek to bypass them, such as our obsession with elections, protests, and other various forms of external pressure, always end up failing. 

The way to loosen authoritarianism’s control over populations is to decentralize administration itself by creating new systems of taxation and service delivery that are participatory and owned by the citizens. The decentralization of public administration is the decentralization of government. It is a redistribution of power at its most practical level.

To understand how that power is distributed, we should examine how authoritarian states operate. Every regime, no matter how repressive, must provide goods and services. PERIOD. Even rulers who prioritize military dominance or ideological control cannot govern without attending to roads, electricity, healthcare, economics, education, etc. These are not luxuries but necessities for maintaining order and legitimacy.

Citizens may not have a political voice, but they still demand functioning infrastructure, schools for their children, and access to food and medicine. Authoritarian rulers recognize this and build administrative systems that provide just enough to secure compliance.

The concept of the “authoritarian bargain” captures this dynamic. Citizens tolerate restrictions on political freedom in exchange for economic security and public goods. This bargain is as true for monarchies in the Gulf as it is for single-party states in Africa or Asia. 

And while I have no intention of expressing any political leanings within these writings, it's important to highlight that even non-state actors like Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon, both considered terrorist organizations internationally, depend on administrative capacity to maintain their legitimacy. 

Hamas, for example, not only governs through armed force but also runs schools, builds hospitals, provides medicines, and creates welfare programs funded through a mix of taxation, external aid, and other illegal activities. Citizens who oppose its ideology or violent tactics nonetheless depend on its administrative structures for daily survival. In this way, administrative provision becomes a source of both power and dependency.

The centrality of administration to authoritarianism highlights a critical observation in that citizens often become complicit in sustaining regimes they oppose because their livelihoods depend on the very institutions that oppress them. A population may despise its rulers yet continue to pay taxes, accept subsidies, and rely on state or quasi-state services because the alternative is collapse. This creates a feedback loop in which rulers extract compliance not only through coercion but through indispensability. To disrupt this loop, we must create alternative channels of administration that citizens can participate in and control.

The politics of taxation illuminate this logic. In democracies, the principle of “no taxation without representation” has historically driven the expansion of political rights. Rulers who sought to tax citizens were compelled to grant them some say in governance, whether through parliaments in medieval Europe or representative assemblies in colonial America. In authoritarian systems, the relationship is inverted, and rulers avoid granting representation precisely by minimizing taxation. If they can finance themselves through oil rents, foreign aid, or other external resources, they reduce their dependence on citizens and their vulnerability to demands for accountability. In other words, no representation without taxation.

This distinction explains why rentier states, flush with oil or gas revenues, often maintain stable authoritarian systems with minimal citizen participation. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the government collects little direct tax from citizens, relying instead on oil exports to fund their welfare programs and subsidies. Citizens receive benefits without bargaining power and their loyalty is bought, not negotiated. The regime can suppress dissent without fear of widespread revolts because it does not rely on broad-based contributions from its people.

By contrast, resource-poor authoritarian states must extract revenue directly from their populations. This creates vulnerabilities. In countries like Egypt or Ethiopia, where the state depends on taxes, citizens experience the cost of governance directly and demand accountability in return. This does not always lead to democracy, but it introduces pressure points.

This also provides the logic to state violence.  Non-rentier authoritarian states are typically countries with low per capita income, meaning you are dealing with a country that lacks a middle-class and the society is composed of the elites, and for a lack of a better term, the masses.  Authoritarian states that need to extract revenue from their population must play a game of balance between these two classes. 

When the state comes down on the elites, they must offer private-sector companies and their agents enough freedoms, and overlook enough crimes in order to justify the taxes that are demanded from them.  When the states come down on the masses, they must offer enough public goods and services in order to maintain control.  They avoid extracting from whichever class of people serves as the greatest threat to organized revolt, and if that is not sufficient, they can either increase their offerings or utilize targeted political violence to quell uprisings. 

In both scenarios, the use and control of administrative mechanisms are required as a means of justifying their extraction.  If those instruments are not available to them (wink), violence is the only form of control they have, and this will always lead to revolt.  

Understanding these dynamics reveals both the strength and fragility of authoritarian systems. Their strength lies in the administrative apparatus that ties citizens to rulers through goods, services, taxation, etc. Their fragility lies in the fact that these very functions could, under different conditions, empower citizens instead. If taxation, budgeting, service provision, and coordination were facilitated in a p2p manner and locally controlled, the authoritarian bargain would unravel. Citizens would no longer need to depend on rulers for survival, and rulers would strictly depend on their citizens for legitimacy. This is the potential for decentralizing public administration.

The decentralization of public administration is a reconfiguration of political power. By shifting control of taxation, budgeting, and service delivery away from centralized bureaucracies and into citizen-governed networks, it alters the foundations of authoritarian rule. It is here that decentralized public administration networks (dPANs) have the potential to work extremely well.

dPANs envision public goods managed through interoperable and community-controlled systems. Built with digital tools and local blockchain networks, they allow citizens to see how taxes are collected, how budgets are allocated, and how services can be delivered. They create mechanisms for direct participation, where citizens can determine priorities, track spending, and determine how collective funds can be allocated. Instead of relying on state-operated ministries and councils, governance flows through networks that are wholly independent and reward participation.

The hypothetical use of dPANs in authoritarian contexts holds a lot of potential.  They provide citizens with alternatives to state-controlled services. Imagine a community in Gaza managing welfare distribution through a local-chain, funded by local contributions and external aid, and independent of Hamas’s administrative structures. Citizens would no longer be forced into dependency on the organization and could push back on actions and behaviors they deem unacceptable.  They could build parallel systems of legitimacy, and over time, these systems could expand to encompass taxation, infrastructure, education, and gradually hollow out the organizations administrative monopoly. 

The potential is not confined to conflict zones either. In resource-poor authoritarian states, dPANs could directly challenge fiscal dependence. If citizens collectively manage taxation at the municipal level, they gain bargaining power, and create accountability loops that bypass central rulers. In resource-rich states, where rulers rely on rents, dPANs can carve out pockets of democratic practice by giving citizens control over local budgets and services. While they may not immediately disrupt national authoritarian bargains, they plant seeds of democratic culture that can grow over time.

When citizens control administration, they cultivate democratic habits.  

However, it is important to mention that the decentralization of public administration does come with risks. Authoritarian regimes may attempt to capture or co-opt dPANs, presenting them as reforms while manipulating them for control. Likewise, local elites could dominate decentralized systems, reproducing the same inequalities that lead to repression. International actors, preferring to deal with central governments, may ignore or even undermine decentralized initiatives.

But, despite these risks, the opportunity imo is too great to ignore. Democracy cannot be reduced to elections, especially in authoritarian settings where elections are often rigged or absent. Democracy must be embedded in daily governance. This is where citizens experience the state most directly, and this is where empowerment matters most. By decentralizing administration, we create spaces of autonomy that erode authoritarian control through a gradual and subtle rebalancing of power.

In the long arc of history, authoritarian regimes always appear immovable until they suddenly collapse. Their collapse has often stemmed from structural shifts rather than some form of ideological battle.  Usually, some fiscal crisis arises or the weight of administration erodes their legitimacy until it ends in a violent revolution. By decentralizing public administration, we can hasten these shifts by hollowing out the foundations of their control mechanisms. We can create parallel systems of governance that demonstrate democracy’s effectiveness and make authoritarianism increasingly obsolete.

Democracy is not a gift handed down by rulers, it is a practice cultivated by citizens. I believe that decentralized administration can be a key tool for embedding democratic principles everywhere. When citizens reclaim ownership of governance by collectively deciding on the taxes they pay, the services they receive, and the decisions that shape their communities, this idea can become a reality. In authoritarian contexts, it is revolution by another name. It is the patient, deliberate work of building democracy from the bottom up, embedded in the infrastructure of daily life.

Come Build Democracy.