The idea that authoritarian leaders can maintain their power by pretending to care about the public good has been around for thousands of years. In The Politics, Aristotle discusses two strategies by which a tyrant sometimes strives to preserve his rule: he may keep his subjects too preoccupied to challenge his rule (distracting them with war or with fighting each other), or he may dissuade them from conspiring against him. The second strategy requires that the tyrant publicly present a false image of himself, so that he “seems to be a steward of the public rather than a tyrant” (5.11.1314b6–7). This kind of tyrant maintains his tight control of power, but pretends to work for the good of society and creates a public persona as a benevolent ruler torn by tough real-world challenges. His objectives, however, are not only to preserve his power and wealth, but to increase them as much as possible, even at the expense of the people he rules.

A contemporary correlate to Aristotle's “benevolent” tyrant is the authoritarian regime that professes a commitment to democratization while adopting only superficial reforms. The goal is to seem to move toward democratization while preventing the new “participatory” institutions from playing a meaningful role in governance. Political dissent and opposition movements are channeled into institutions controlled by the state as a means of managing or deflating threats to the ruling elite and preserving existing hierarchies of power.