What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Authoritarian Regimes?
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Authoritarian Regimes?

Author: Natasha Lindstaedt

Publisher: SAGE Publications Limited

Published: 2024-01-05

Total Pages: 115

ISBN-13: 1529670799

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At least 70% of the world’s population now lives under an autocracy. There are more openly authoritarian states than ever, democratic regimes are ‘backsliding’ into autocracy, and authoritarian values and practices are increasingly normalized. Regimes in China and Russia are as prominent and urgent as ever, but authoritarianism is spreading across the globe. Why is this happening? What can we do about it? This book is a concise and compelling exploration of the increasing number and influence of authoritarian regimes. It explains the realities of recent trends to ‘autocratisation’, the tools these regimes use, what we can do to resist, and why we might even allow ourselves a degree of optimism. Professor Natasha Lindstaedt works at the Department of Government at the University of Essex. The ‘What Do We Know and What Should We Do About...?′ series offers readers short, up-to-date overviews of key issues often misrepresented, simplified or misunderstood in modern society and the media. Each book is written by a leading social scientist with an established reputation in the relevant subject area. "Short, sharp and compelling." - Alex Preston, The Observer "If you want to learn a lot about what matters most, in as short a time as possible, this is the series for you."- Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford

Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism

Author: Erica Frantz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-08-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0190880228

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Despite the spread of democratization following the Cold War's end, all signs indicate that we are living through an era of resurgent authoritarianism. Around 40 percent of the world's people live under some form of authoritarian rule, and authoritarian regimes govern about a third of the world's countries. In Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Erica Frantz guides us through today's authoritarian wave, explaining how it came to be and what its features are. She also looks at authoritarians themselves, focusing in particular on the techniques they use to take power, the strategies they use to survive, and how they fall. Understanding how politics works in authoritarian regimes and recognizing the factors that either give rise to them or trigger their downfall is ever-more important given current global trends, and this book paves the ways for such an understanding. An essential primer on the topic, Authoritarianism provides a clear and penetrating overview of one of the most important-and worrying-developments in contemporary world politics.

Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes
Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes

Author: Tom Ginsburg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1107047668

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This volume explores the form and function of constitutions in countries without the fully articulated institutions of limited government.

What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Fake News?
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Fake News?

Author: Nick Anstead

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2021-03-17

Total Pages: 109

ISBN-13: 1529737958

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Voters need to be informed to make political decisions, but what if their media diet not only prevents them from getting the information they need, but actively shapes inaccurate perceptions of the world? Drawing on examples and evidence from around the world, this book aims to make a timely intervention to the debate about the concept of fake news. Its underlying argument will have three objectives. First, to offer more precise definitions for a term that is often loosely used. Second, to offer a less technologically determinist view of fake news. New social media platforms, such as Facebook and WhatsApp, are clearly an important part of the story, but they exist in wider social, political and institutional settings. Third, to situate the idea of fake news (and our concern about it) in broader arguments about an ongoing crisis and loss of confidence in liberal democratic institutions. Only with this perspective, it will be argued, can we possibly address the question of what we should do about fake news.

The Autocratic Middle Class
The Autocratic Middle Class

Author: Bryn Rosenfeld

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-12

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0691192197

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"The conventional wisdom is that a growing middle class will give rise to democracy. Yet the middle classes of the developing world have grown at a remarkable pace over the past two decades, and much of this growth has taken place in countries that remain nondemocratic. Rosenfeld explains this phenomenon by showing how modern autocracies secure support from key middle-class constituencies. Drawing on original surveys, interviews, archival documents, and secondary sources collected from nine months in the field, she compares the experiences of recent post-communist countries, including Russia, the Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, to show that under autocracy, state efforts weaken support for democracy, especially among the middle class. When autocratic states engage extensively in their economies - by offering state employment, offering perks to those to those who are loyal, and threatening dismissal to those who are disloyal - the middle classes become dependent on the state for economic opportunities and career advancement, and, ultimately, do not support a shift toward democratization. Her argument explains why popular support for Ukraine's Orange Revolution unraveled or why Russians did not protest evidence of massive electoral fraud. The author's research questions the assumption that a rising share of educated, white-collar workers always makes the conditions for democracy more favorable, and why dependence on the state has such pernicious consequences for democratization"--

Competitive Authoritarianism
Competitive Authoritarianism

Author: Steven Levitsky

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-08-16

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139491482

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Based on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized.

Authoritarian Police in Democracy
Authoritarian Police in Democracy

Author: Yanilda María González

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1108900380

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In countries around the world, from the United States to the Philippines to Chile, police forces are at the center of social unrest and debates about democracy and rule of law. This book examines the persistence of authoritarian policing in Latin America to explain why police violence and malfeasance remain pervasive decades after democratization. It also examines the conditions under which reform can occur. Drawing on rich comparative analysis and evidence from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, the book opens up the 'black box' of police bureaucracies to show how police forces exert power and cultivate relationships with politicians, as well as how social inequality impedes change. González shows that authoritarian policing persists not in spite of democracy but in part because of democratic processes and public demand. When societal preferences over the distribution of security and coercion are fragmented along existing social cleavages, politicians possess few incentives to enact reform.

Dealing with the Legacy of Authoritarianism
Dealing with the Legacy of Authoritarianism

Author: Antonio Costa Pinto

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1317986423

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In recent years the agenda of how to ‘deal with the past’ has become a central dimension of the quality of contemporary democracies. Many years after the process of authoritarian breakdown, consolidated democracies revisit the past either symbolically or to punish the elites associated with the previous authoritarian regimes. New factors, like international environment, conditionality, party cleavages, memory cycles and commemorations or politics of apologies, do sometimes bring the past back into the political arena. This book addresses such themes by dealing with two dimensions of authoritarian legacies in Southern European democracies: repressive institutions and human rights abuses. The thrust of this book is that we should view transitional justice as part of a broader ‘politics of the past’: an ongoing process in which elites and society under democratic rule revise the meaning of the past in terms of what they hope to achieve in the present. This book was published as a special issue of South European Society and Politics.

What Do We Know about War?
What Do We Know about War?

Author: John A. Vasquez, Mackie Scholar in International Relations, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2000-09-26

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 1461621682

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What Do We Know About War? reviews the causes of war and the conditions of peace. Drawing analyses from the thirty-five year history of this discipline, leading researchers explore the roles played by alliances, territory, arms races, interstate rivalries, capability, and crisis bargaining in increasing the probability of war. They emphasize international norms and the recent finding that democratic states do not fight each other as factors that promote peace.