Orrin Judd

New research, drawing on an extraordinary data set from Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s and ’80s, suggests a very different explanation. It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality. The people who make those decisions, the research suggests, are neither extremists nor victims. They are often just middling workers looking for a way to get ahead.

“Making a Career in Dictatorship,” a new book by two German political scientists, Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, reads like what you might get if you crossed Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the “banality of evil” with a business school guide on how to get the most out of low performers.

Their in-depth study of Argentina’s military during that country’s era of coups and forced disappearances found that low performers — whom they refer to as “career-pressured” individuals — filled the ranks of the secret police. That service allowed them to “detour” around the ordinary military hierarchy, the book shows, achieving promotions and career success they could never have managed otherwise.

It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.

Decades of research have found that socioeconomic status, and particularly education, is key to explaining voter turnout. To understand why, consider this formula: Voting likelihood equals benefits minus costs, plus duty. The benefits of voting are small for individuals, but so is the cost. While few have cast the deciding ballot in an election, voting usually requires minimal effort.

However, in “The Turnout Myth,” my Hoover Institution colleague Daron Shaw and his coauthors discuss a large “diploma gap” that has existed for decades. We see turnout differences across education levels, with the most educated about twice as likely to vote, at 80 percent, as the least, at 40 percent.

Scholars explain this in several ways: First, education reinforces the belief that voting is a civic obligation, or duty. Second, education increases knowledge about politics and government. Voting is easier when you’re familiar with the issues and parties. Third, education enhances civic skills such as public speaking, group organizing and managing paperwork that can make political participation easier.

People with more education therefore have lower costs and higher duty, which leads to greater turnout among them. Education is also associated with higher incomes and professional occupations, which allow individuals to better meet any financial or time costs of voting.

So, when voting is made more challenging, the more educated are, on average, more motivated and able to overcome the obstacles than are people with less education.

And in today’s politics, those individuals are increasingly likely to be Democrats.