Although it is conventional wisdom that innovation requires free mind, diversity, or creativity all of which are closely associated with political and organizational decentralization, it is in fact more politically centralized countries in East Asia that successfully capitalized on innovation to...

Authoritarian neoliberalism : towards a new research agenda / Cemal Burak Tansel -- Authoritarian neoliberalism and the disciplining of labour / Mònica Clua-Losada and Olatz Ribera-Almandoz -- Commodified pacification : police, commercial security and the state / Kendra Briken and Volker Eick...

"By examining the system of authoritarianism in eight Arab republics, Joseph Sassoon portrays life under these regimes and explores the mechanisms underpinning their resilience. How did the leadership in these countries create such enduring systems? What was the economic system that prolonged...

Previous research, which has focused mostly on pre-1990 dynamics, has shown that sanctions have a negative impact on the level of democracy in targeted authoritarian countries. Given this finding, it is puzzling that democratization has become the most common goal of sanctions issued against...

In the last two years, the Syrian uprising has turned from a civil protest movement against an authoritarian regime into an outright civil war in which the antagonists affiliations' and identities are increasingly framed in sectarian speech. In summer 2012, various politicians and analysts...

The aim of this study is to discover the role played by regimes of exception (RoEs) in contemporary Bolivian politics. RoEs have been seldom studied by political scientists, despite constituting a key legacy of authoritarian regimes that have survived the transitions to democracy in Latin...

There is ample evidence for a "democracy premium". Laws that have been implemented via election lead to a more cooperative behavior compared to a top-down approach. This has been observed using field data and laboratory experiments. We present evidence from Chinese students and workers who...

Authoritarian regimes use multiple forms of international cooperation to sustain their rule. In scholarly research, however, the study of these phenomena has been marginal and still lacks conceptual clarity. This paper takes stock of these shortcomings and embarks on a review of the existing...

Since the end of the Cold War, Western powers have frequently used sanctions as a reaction to declining levels of democracy and human rights violations in authoritarian regimes. However, some of the world's most repressive authoritarian regimes have never been subjected to sanctions, while other...

Associationalism under authoritarian rule is not automatically a good thing. The empirical findings laid out in this article indicate that authoritarian dispositions and practices are prevalent in all types of Vietnamese civic organizations, at least as far as internal decisionmaking processes...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of geography on the transition process in authoritarian political regimes, and to investigate the nature of the links between political change, economic reforms and geographic location. A simple model of transition and democratization is...

Natural resources are generally associated to negative effects on the political environment of a country. This paper explores the impact that oil revenues have on the establishment of a given political system. Based on previous literature, a political economy perspective is employed. A simple...

This contribution explores the importance of independent organizations in authoritarian regimes. While some authoritarian governments delegate policy tasks to (relatively) autonomous agencies simply in order to improve their domestic or international image as modern political leaders or to build...

We analyze the influence of IMF and World Bank programs on political regime transitions. We develop an extended version of Acemoglu and Robinson's [American Economic Review 91, 2001] model of political transitions to show how the anticipation of new loans from international financial...