Mobilization and Repression under Authoritarianism

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel addresses enduring questions of mobilization and repression under authoritarianism, focusing particularly on how repression is shaped by the complex interplay among authoritarian leaders, policing organizations, and the societies they rule. The panel papers employ a methodologically diverse set of approaches—historical case studies, new quantitative data, focus groups, and survey experiments—and geographically diverse settings to explore the micro-foundations of coercive power in non-democratic polities. The first two papers, by Suzanne Scoggins and Travis Curtice, examine the relationship between communities and law enforcement under authoritarian rule: Scoggins examines efforts by China’s Public Security Bureau to mitigate criticisms of its work through public relations campaigns to explore the social construction of authoritarian legitimacy, and Curtice leverages two survey experiments in Uganda to analyze the politics of policing a multiethnic autocracy, demonstrating the importance of “coethnic bias”: that citizens are more likely to report crimes if officers are from their community or region. Wonjun Song, John Chin, and Joseph Wright argue that vulnerability to civil resistance from below is conditioned by regime type, drawing on new data from 1946-2010 to show that personalist dictators are less likely to confront societal mobilization challenges, but more vulnerable to regime failure if they do. Finally, Sheena Chestnut Greitens leverages a comparison of three North Korean leaders, alongside complementary cross-national data, to show that dictators’ paths to power condition the threats to political survival that they face as well as their subsequent repressive tactics toward other political elites and ordinary citizens. Together, these papers probe and test the mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes manage and repress popular mobilization, and the implications of these efforts for the success or failure of dictatorial regimes worldwide.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 44: Comparative Democratization

Individual Presentations

• Coethnic Bias & Policing: Evidence from Two Experiments in Uganda - Travis B. Curtice, Emory University

• Constructing Local State Legitimacy: Police-Community Relations in China - Suzanne E. Scoggins, Clark University

• Personalist Politics and Civil Resistance - Wonjun Song, Pennsylvania State University; Joseph Wright, Pennsylvania State University; John Joseph Chin, Carnegie Mellon University

• Explaining Patterns in Global Adoption of Chinese Public Security Technology - Sheena Chestnut Greitens, University of Missouri, Columbia

Chair

• Courtenay R. Conrad University of California, Merced

Discussants

• Mai Omer Hassan University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Christopher M. Sullivan Louisiana State University