Perhaps the more “right-wing” regimes tolerate different sorts of income inequality. Cuba and the USSR had plenty of inequality, but the main earners, in terms of living standards, are restricted to people within the state apparatus. That means a lot of the talent will want to leave. Many fascist regimes, however, are quite willing to cultivate multi-millionaires and then try to co-opt them into supporting the state. Since you can still earn a lot in the private sector, exit restrictions are less needed.
What would be other hypotheses?
The goal is to explain why right-wing authoritarian regimes allow people to leave, but Communist regimes don’t.
The term “right-wing authoritarian” is poorly chosen. It should be called “natural state” (North, Weingast, and Wallace) or “gangster government.” The goal is to remain in power and extract benefits from being in power. The ruler distributes privileges to those who might otherwise threaten the ruler. As a leader, you do not want to drive people away, but if people are unhappy, you would rather they leave than stick around and cause trouble.
Communist regimes do not operate on the basis of distributing privileges to others. Instead, they seek control through totalitarian methods. Their rule is based on intimidation and creating a climate of fear. But if people know that they can leave freely, why should they fear you? They can foment dissent and, if you turn up the heat, they just emigrate. You can’t really run an effective totalitarian state if you allow people to leave. You need to make sure that dissenters suffer, to set a clear example for other potential dissenters.
Re: “The goal is to explain why right-wing authoritarian regimes allow people to leave, but Communist regimes don’t.”
Is it the case that right-wing authoritarian regimes allow people to leave?
It seems that the evidence is mixed.
Christian Breunig et al. (2012) find:
“Political regimes also differ in their willingness to grant exit to their citizens. While many authoritarian regimes do not allow freedom of exit, all democracies allow both citizens and residents the freedom to leave. […] The difference in exit options is, we argue, one of the main reasons that democracies send more emigrants than autocracies. […] Autocracies in all regions restrict freedom of exit. […] In short, the increased freedom of exit found in democracies enables a higher-than-expected population to live abroad, and the restrictions placed on exit by dictatorships results in a lower-than-expected population living abroad.”:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8c1c/b0fa4629eed2c333d0270711773e23b20af2.pdf
Michael Miller & Margaret Peters (2014) find:
“Despite globalization, we show that emigration freedom has been steadily declining in autocracies since 1980.”:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2453350
These articles don’t neatly distinguish communist and right-wing authoritarian regimes, but it seems clear that the findings apply also to a subset of right-wing authoritarian regimes.
The United Nations’ position is that freedom to emigrate is a human right, part of the right to freedom of movement. According to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
The United States would appear to violate these human rights in that it denies its citizens access to the services of foreign banks through laws like FATCA and imposes severe tax penalties upon those attempting renunciation of citizenship, as well as naming and shaming renouncers in official publications. Despite these hurdles, US citizens, particularly the wealthy, emigrate and renounce in relatively large numbers. Interestingly, the government of Mexico announced that it believes that there are more US illegals in Mexico than Mexican illegals in the US.
The US’s system of governance with it’s bizarre rule by hieratic courts pulling law out of thin air and its weird election rituals in which the states, with no objective oversight or review conduct elections with voter rolls proudly and publicly unmaintained with many jurisdictions having many more registered voters than actual residents and court-ordered rules preventing any type of election audit and strictly limiting efforts to suppress voting fraud, doesn’t really fit well under either left or right, just a kind of governance via generalized incompetence.
FWIW, the EstadpNovo, the professor of economics dictatorship of Salazar in Portugal, doesn’t fit into neat categories either. Under Salazar emigration was widespread, both illegal and legal, and many leftist students, in particular, illegally emigrated to avoid military service. The Estado Novo was not a one-party state and elections were held although the rules highly favored the National Union party. The Estado Novo was anti-communist, anti-fascist, anti-liberal, anti-just about everything, instead professing itself to be “voluntarily non-totalitarian,” and preferring to let those of its citizens who kept out of politics “live by habit.” Libertarian one might say.
Best to list the right-wings:
In the Third Reich, it seems that even Jews were allowed to emigrate until 1941. Mussolini’s Italy didn’t impose extensive emigration controls either. And, accordingly to my admittedly casual familiarity with these regimes, neither did Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Pinochet’s Chile, nor the more generic authoritarian regimes of Chiang Kai Shek’s Taiwan or Park Chung He’s South Korea.
While all these listed were supporters of nationalism / patriotism, most were not expansionist. The leaders wanted to stay in power AND wanted their countries to be great. Plus they understood that a great country is full of people doing a great job – specializing, and trading with each other for cooperation. The usual goals were to sacrifice for the country (& Leader), but not for any (false) “equality”.
The market works, to a large extent, by rewarding the “successful”. So did most right-wing authoritarians. Didn’t Jeanne Kirkpatrick talk about something in the 80s?
Also, Pinochet in Chile was saving his country from a Chavez-like socialism by Allende, which would have resulted in more poverty much sooner than the much richer Venezuela has yet seen under Chavez & now Maduro.
Another hypothesis is that attempts to suppress emigration are a result of a greater tendency of people to leave, especially for economic reasons. Communism generally seems to be far worse for economic well-being than fascism (or more broadly, left wing authoritarian seems worse than right wing authoritarian for economic performance), so I imagine communist countries are far more afflicted with exoduses of productive people, and therefore have a stronger reason to try to prevent emigration.
One way to test this would be to look at when emigration restrictions are implemented in communist countries. Do they put them in place as soon as they take power? Or only after people start leaving en masse? If Dr. Kling’s hypothesis is right, I’d expect the former. If this alternative hypothesis is right – that emigration restriction isn’t ideological, but an ad hoc response to mass emigration meant to stymie loss of human capital – then I’d expect restrictions to only be put in place once emigration becomes a serious problem.
1. Null Hypothesis: there is no correlation between “emigration policy” and left-vs-right authoritarian ideals. We are seeing intentionality when there were not any strategic decisions involved. For example, maybe most states kept the status-quo emigration policy in place.
2. Alignment with short-term goals. Left-Wing Goal: punish the bourgeois (anyone who chooses to exit) by confiscating their capital and forcing them to perform communal labor. Right-Wing Goal: purify the nation-state by allowing undesirables/skeptics to leave.
3. Signaling. Left-Wing: signal control over the populace. Right-Wing: signal the voluntary nature of their supposedly superior culture.
Side-Note: I’m coming to warm to the label “right-wing” despite its inaccuracies in much the same way I’m OK with the term capitalist to represent someone who supports free markets. My non-derogatory right-wing label is more one of exclusion. Modern right-wingers are people that are specifically NOT left-wing which is defined as Kling’s Progressive Oppression/Exploitation axis. Both of Kling’s Libertarian Coercion axis and Conservative Civilization/Barbarism axis are Right-Wing as well as Trump and Brexit protectionists (ironically mostly made up of the modern-day proletariat).
The Left-Wing moniker had its roots in the French Revolution as anti-aristocracy but the term was embraced by Marx and the German term “die linke” and the evolution of the movement(s) has been on a constant trajectory since then. We have die-linke and everything else is nicht-die-linke.
a stationary bandit vs a status seeker
a “right wing” dictator wants to be rich
a “left wing” dictator wants to be the richest person in the country
IRL this is not a binary choice but the two ends of a spectrum
where a particular dictator falls depends not just on her personality and personal politics but also on local culture and power structure