I recently finished profiling the current leaders I dubbed "Asia's 5 Worst Dictators." You might wonder, what does it take to make a leader a dictator? I believe that the label gets thrown around all too thoughtlessly these days, both in common usage and in the media.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a dictator as "1 a: a person granted absolute emergency power... b: one holding complete autocratic control c: one ruling absolutely and often oppressively." It's actually a fairly high threshold; complete and absolute rule, with no possibility of removal through a free and fair election (hence "autocratic").

Some popular lists of putative dictators, such as Parade Magazine's "The World's Worst Dictators-2007," include elected leaders such as Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, Russia's Vladimir Putin, and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. Other media and blog reports use the word "dictator" to describe Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Venezuela's brash and mouthy President Hugo Chavez, and U.S. President George W. Bush. (The latter at least gets the courtesy of quotation marks around the label, oftentimes.)

Does it make any difference if duly elected leaders become known as dictators? Is it just a matter of semantics?

I believe this trend is not just intellectually sloppy, but actually damaging. When professional journalists and amateur bloggers alike toss around the title of "dictator," applying it to democratically selected leaders, it cheapens the word. We need to maintain the distinction between admittedly willful or obnoxious elected leaders such as Putin, Chavez and Bush, and true dictators like Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, or North Korea's Kim Jong-il.

It does, in fact, take more than a military uniform or a fondness for getting one's own way to make a leader into a dictator.

Photo of dictator statues in a Thai park by Sarah Baker on Flickr.com.