In this paper we examine the legacies on civil society of routine repressive activities carried out by authoritarian regimes, such as the targeting of opposition organizations. We focus on participation in voluntary associations in post-authoritarian Spain. We hypothesize that while repression...

Analysis of the growth patterns in the global South in the 21st century suggests there is room for authoritarian states to search for new growth models. Authoritarian states, such as Turkey and Egypt, benefited from global financial circumstances in the early 21st century and opted for new...

Tanzania received significant global attention for its COVID-19 response during the first year of the pandemic. It did not share pandemic statistics, require masks, implement lockdowns, or close borders; it questioned testing and vaccine efficacy; and it emphasized traditional medicines as a...

Unlike Latin American peers, and contrary to World Health Organization recommendations, Nicaragua eschewed lockdowns and other common strategies to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Analysts have since demonstrated how Nicaraguan authorities dramatically under-reported the number of deaths and...

We explore the effect of oil import price shocks on political outcomes using a worldwide dataset on elections of chief executives. Oil import price shocks cause a reduction in the odds of reelection of incumbents, an increase in media chatter about fuel prices, and an increase in non-violent...

This paper presents a simple formal theoretical model to explain why citizens in authoritarian regimes trust the illiberal official media more than the commercial media. Media trust is defined as changes in the citizen's belief based on good or bad news from the media. Using this definition, the...

Previous studies on the justification of repression have analysed large-scale protests, about which autocratic officials communicate to avoid backlash effects. However, we know much less about how everyday repression against dissidents and ordinary citizens is communicated and justified under...

Although many virtuous leaders are guided by the ideal of prioritizing the need and welfare of their subordinates, others advance their self-interest at the expense of the people they purport to serve. In this article, we discuss the relationship between leadership and the spread of conspiracy...

In the space of just nine months, Tunisia's President Kais Saied has centralised power and dismantled the institutions established by the young democracy since the revolution of 2011. His new constitution establishing a "New Republic" will be put to a referendum on 25 July 2022. Saied’s plans...

With the background of the Syrian crisis, irregular migration, and authoritarianism - strengthened by the collapse of the Peace Process of the Turkish state with the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK) in 2015 and the 2016 coup attempt - the Turkish government has amended the Citizenship Law,...

We investigate the effects of extreme weather events on voicing political opposition against authoritarian regimes. We use the Brazilian general elections of 1982 as a case study. At the time, Brazil was under a military dictatorship that promoted local and gubernatorial elections to validate...

Can autocratic governments gain support by implementing a welfare reform and a repressive law? This paper studies a famous case - Bismarck's policies of social insurance and the antisocialist law in late 19th century Germany. The socialist party, I find, increases its vote share in...

This purpose of this paper is to analyze pension policy in an autocracy, using contemporary Hungary as a context. The inefficiencies and unfairness of the current policy can be characterized by tensions: the intra- and intercohort polarization of benefits rises, the difference between the loose...

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has consolidated his authoritarian regime in recent years. This has been accompanied by a significant increase in Cairo’s foreign debt, which more than tripled between June 2013 and March 2022. The country’s debt policy was directly linked to the...

The worldwide wave of autocratization is doing away with many of the democratic achievements made since 1989. Scholarship on international democracy promotion is yet to theorise how democracy can be protected from autocratization. Such a theory must account for different democratic and...

This paper explores whether coups cause increased crisis risk, and if some types of coups are associated with stronger risk. I use a worldwide sample with data on more than 1200 onsets of economic crisis between 1950 and 2019, treat separate effects of military and civilian coup attempts, and...

This paper argues that for the imposer of a regime change or war, installing an authoritarian regime is one of the best ways to impose the political will on the target. Previous scholarships contend that an absolute win and a total resolution is likely to neutralize the vanquished party from its...

A significant part of economic coercion deployed by the US, EU and the UN targets authoritarian regimes' ruling elites, and aims to promote liberalization by encouraging defections and discouraging repression. We develop a model to study the effects of such measures. The ruler chooses how much...

Authoritarian regimes are often seen to be hostile toward the environment, albeit there is a growing body of literature suggesting a more nuanced image when it comes to authoritarian governments and the environment. However, several aspects of human-nature relationship need further clarification...

This study analyses a mechanism to explain how internal mobility in the dominant party enhances authoritarian resilience. We argue that authoritarian leaders incentivize their political agents to advance economic development by using age-based promotion and retirement rules. We empirically...

With the rise of illiberal democracy, the legality as a traditional component of Western legalism has become increasingly important for authoritarian regimes. This is “authoritarian legality” which has been briefly defined as ‘legal norms of authoritarian states and the process in which...

The rise of right-wing populism, particularly Trumpism, has presented a daunting challenge to democracy. We explore the historical roots of Trumpism among the Chinese diaspora. We collect nearly one million tweets posted by approximately 250 Chinese overseas opinion leaders from 2019 to early...

This short essay explains why deeply embedding international law (IL) directly into domestic legal orders is seen as a helpful democratic legal strategy to make international law more effective. It also describes the logistics of embedding international law into national legal systems. The goal...

Despite a recent surge in the academic literature on central bank independence (CBI), little is known about its drivers in authoritarian states. Our theoretical argument starts from the simple idea that no country is an island. Whereas autocratic regimes possessing abundant resource wealth have...

Explanations for persistent authoritarianism in the Middle East invoke a plethora of domestic and international factors. Building on existing research, we propose that external economic aid and small arms transfers are crucial for shoring up authoritarian regimes, in part by facilitating...

Although this article is based on the example of authoritarian governance in Azerbaijan, it covers issues of authoritarian governance in general, especially for countries where rentier incomes from the production, export, or transportation of oil and natural gas and other mineral resources...

It is widely agreed that durable authoritarian rule requires power-sharing institutions. But how do autocrats rule under such institutions? We analyze formally how an autocrat distributes information inside the coalition to preserve and consolidate power while remaining constrained by the...

Energy megaprojects have enormous impacts on society, the environment and political systems. The global decline of democratic norms in the last decade has important implications for the development of energy megaprojects, which have not been systematically examined in extant literature. This...

Democracy has been in decline across Asia and the Pacific for more than 10 years. Information disorder, an environment in which distorted and manipulated information is ubiquitous, is believed to play an important role in affirming authoritarianism and destabilizing democracy across the region....

Populism is no longer considered a disease of the developing world. In recent decades it has spread throughout Europe and North America, while maintaining its grip in its historical stronghold, Latin America. It now represents the biggest threat to the survival of liberal democracy. Unlike...

One decade after the Arab uprisings of 2010/11, the present discussion paper revisits processes of political change in the Middle East and North Africa MENA) with a focus on the question of systemic change. Core questions in this context are: How, among all possible varieties of political...

Can autocracies and their associated institutions successfully implement economic policies that promote growth and investment? Can 'good economics' somehow offset the effects of 'bad' politics? Kazakhstan is a case where an autocratic regime has actively projected market-friendly policies and...

We analyze a model of moral hazard in local public services which could be efficiently managed by officials under local democratic accountability, but not by officials who are appointed by the ruler of a centralized autocracy. The ruler might prefer to retain an official who diverted resources...

Can autocracies and their associated institutions successfully implement economic policies that promote growth and investment? Can 'good economics' somehow offset the effects of 'bad' politics? Kazakhstan is a case where an autocratic regime has actively projected market-friendly policies and...

The origins of fiscal capacity have traditionally been linked to warfare and democratization. However, non-democratic states also invest in fiscal capacity, even in times of peace. In fact, the majority of income taxes-a cornerstone of government finance-were introduced by non-democratic states...

In order to elucidate the revival of religion in the Muslim countries, we must not only understand the spread of puritan interpretations of the faith (as they have permeated movements running from Muslim Brothers to violent Islamist movements), but also comprehend the process whereby these more...

Autocracies have diverse records of economic growth. This paper provides a theory of endogenous coalition formation to explain economic performance in autocracy. The nature of the ruling coalition that the autocrat relies on to rule the society and extract rents affects the degree of...