Category: Uncategorized
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Cutting Along the Diagonal Line: Purging Elites and Masses for Regime Survival
by: Fabio Angiolillo and Austin S. Matthews How do dictators purge their ruling parties of insider threats? Previous literature has placed the focus on elite (horizontal) purges or mass (vertical) purges, speaking to the conditions under which each takes place and who they specifically target. However, links between elites and masses in these regimes may…
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The rise of authoritarian multiparty governments
by: Laure Bokobza & Jacob Nyrup In 2021, almost 50% of dictatorships included multiple parties in their government. Existing research has not studied this systematically, and instead considers granting outsiders access to ministerial cabinets a risky and costly strategy. This article introduces a novel conceptual category: Authoritarian multiparty government (AMG), and provides evidence of its theoretical and…
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Dictator’s Dilemma in News Management
by: Lanabi La Lova How do news manipulations in an autocracy vary across different types of mass media? I hypothesise that state-controlled news published online, for consumption by a digitally literate audience, exhibits less pro-regime bias than programming created for those who rely on national television to learn about daily affairs. I test this hypothesis…
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How do opposition parties contest elections in democratic backsliding countries?
by: Hanna Folsz How do opposition parties adjust their electoral strategies in response to the increasingly unequal electoral playing field in countries experiencing democratic backsliding? Opposition electoral victory is a necessary condition for restoring democracy. Yet, the literature on backsliding has primarily focused on the incumbent and voters, paying limited attention to opposition parties. My…
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The Origins of Direct Rule: Evidence from the Qing Empire
by: Jun Fang As alternative institutions of governance, indirect and direct rule have different implications for the costs and benefits of governing a territory. We argue when the economic benefits provided by the peripheral regions to the central state are minimal, indirect rule would be favored as it helps to minimize the cost of ruling.…
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Civic Education and Regime Support Under Authoritarian Regimes
by: Aykut Ozturk , Steve Finkel , Anja Neundorf and Ericka Ramirez-Rascon Building support for democracy and raising awareness about the consequences of its absence is essential to support the process of democratization in autocratic regimes; however, it is not an easy task. While an abstract discussion of the merits of democratic institutions might be…
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Economic crisis and democratization: the role of elite divisions within authoritarian governments
by: Adrian del Rio Defections from the ruling elite are acknowledged as the primary mechanism behind the relationship between economic crisis and democratization. Yet, there is no cross-sectional research testing this observation. Using a novel dataset on elite defections based on the political career of above 35 thousand politicians in 28 electoral autocracies, this paper…
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“This Post Contains False Information”: How Do non-democratic Governments Use Fake News Labels to Restrict Online Dissent
by: Yilin Su The amount of information that is flagged as ‘fake” on social media and news websites is on the rise. In non-democratic regimes, the authorities can flag social media posts as ‘fake’ in order to impede criticism and compromise their opponents’ ability to generate support. However, we know very little about these measures’…
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Asserting Autonomy: Strategic Investment in State Capacity in Opposition Local Governments in Autocracies
by: Rachael McLellan How do opposition local governments (LGs) change how autocrats manage competition? How can opposition LGs resist regime attempts to hamstring them? Opposition LGs change the strategic interaction between opposition parties and regimes because local state capacity gives opposition politicians the agency to act autonomously. Opposition LGs invest in local state capacity to…
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The role of Pan-The role of Pan-African ideology in ethnic power-sharing
by: Janina Beiser-McGrath, Sam Erkiletian and Nils Metternich What are the conditions under which governments form more ethnically inclusive coalitions? Existing contributions highlight strategic incentives, colonial legacies, and pre-colonial legacies as determinants of ethnically inclusive government coalitions in African states. We argue that Pan-African ideological preferences for ethnically inclusive government play a vital role in leaders’…
Authoritarian Political Systems Group 