Question: I observed that dictators often appoint highly educated and qualified technocrats as advisors or spokespersons.

For example,

* Dr. Gowher Rizvi, advisor to Sheikh Hasina, Ph.D. from Oxford University.
* Ibrahim Kalin, spokesperson of Erdogan, Ph.D. from George Washington University.
* Bouthaina Shaaban, advisor to Bashar Al Assad, Ph.D. from the University of Warwick.
* etc.

My question is, Do dictators find such people, Or, those people find dictators?

Answer: 
> 
> Do dictators find such people, Or, those people find dictators?
> 
> 
> 

It's mutual.

Dictators need someone to "make the trains run on time" and operating a modern state is a complex enterprise beyond the capacity of the ambitious soldiers and politicians who usually end up as dictators to do without expert advice for very long. So, like any other executive leading a large organization, they hire people to fill these posts and look for people who can provide them with quality advice.

In many cases, their view of what quality advice looks like is quite mainstream. Many dictators are not particularly ideologically pure and they often don't have well worked out policy doctrines themselves, instead seizing upon a historical moment to take power when it arises. Hitler and Mao's manifestos were the exception and not the rule among dictators. Ideologically driven and thought out agendas are more common among small "d" democratic politicians and revolutionaries (who often fail entirely or have short lived regimes) in order to persuade large numbers of mid-level elites to join their movement.

In contrast, run of the mill dictators tend to be less ideological than political genius manifesto writers. They frequently step into a power vacuum marked by chaos, corruption and incompetence on the part of the democratically elected regimes that they replace, or the incompetence of their authoritarian predecessors whom they replace. Since dictators often rise to power based upon the gross incompetence of a predecessor, being able to show some level of competence is often a significant goal for the new dictator if the dictator wishes to hold onto power for long.

Skilled professionals need jobs and also believe in their ideas and long to test out those ideas. Dictatorships allow intellectuals to implement their ideas rapidly and uncompromisingly in a way that democratic political processes which tend towards incrementalism and traditional solutions to social and economic problems rarely do.

A famous historical example of this is the advice provided by famed democratic free market supporter and premier economist [Milton Friedman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman#Chile) who provided economic guidance to military dictator President Augusto Pinochet in Chile the 1970s. Friedman was heavily criticized for this and later attempted to publicly justify his involvement as a voice for positive change from within the regime in the long run (from the same link).

> 
> During the 2000 PBS documentary The Commanding Heights (based on the
> book), Friedman continued to argue that "free markets would undermine
> [Pinochet's] political centralization and political control.", and
> that criticism over his role in Chile missed his main contention that
> freer markets resulted in freer people, and that Chile's unfree
> economy had caused the military government. Friedman advocated for
> free markets which undermined "political centralization and political
> control".
> 
> 
>
A simple factual analysis leads to the following conclusion: the autocratic power that dictators hold may not have been granted through a process reflecting the will of some concept of majority of the citizens in the country but, see, their decisions are not based on their whims or personal interests, but on solid technocratic advise - hence the PhDs. So there is a certain drive from the dictator's side to seek out technocrats.

In other words, it can be seen as a marketing tactic to make the political product "dictatorship" more palatable to end-users (or end-sufferers, as the case may be).

In principle, this does not eliminate the possibility that these technocrats are seriously listened to, and they may be listened to in matters "not politically sensitive". But historical experience says that in a dictatorship *everything* is considered "politically sensitive", so this possibility has rather low probability.

Note that we are talking here about "technocrats as *personal advisors* to dictators", not "technocrats as part of the wider government system".

Of course, elected officials in countries with representative systems, also tend to use technocrats as advisors. Casual observation indicates that the reason here is slightly different: Not so much to provide credibility to decisions taken, but to take away responsibility for them, if the need arises: if the decision is unpopular or is deemed a failure, well, it wasn't us, the technocrats told us to do it.