Book Discussion: The Social Roots of Authoritarianism, by Natalia Forrat

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This panel will discuss Natalia Forrat's book "The Social Roots of Authoritarianism" to be published by OUP in October 2024. The book unpacks the grassroot mechanisms maintaining unity-based and division-based authoritarianisms. It argues that they develop in societies with the opposite vision of the state: as the team leader or as an outsider. Depending on which vision of the state is dominant in society, autocrats must use different tools to consolidate their regimes or risk a pushback. The book demonstrates the grassroots mechanisms of authoritarian power comparing four Russian regions with the opposite patterns of electoral performance—the Rostov region, the Kemerovo region, the Republic of Tatarstan, and the Republic of Altai. In two of them, public organizations formed centralized political machines and blended civic and political functions amplified by the teamwork logic, while in the other two, clientelistic political machines ruled by the utility maximization logic dominated. The book uses the understanding of how unity-based authoritarianism works to shed a new light on the history of state-society relations in Russia focusing on the conflict between the ideal of a just state and the reality of a repressive state. The theory of unity- and division-based authoritarianisms developed in the book implies that these types of authoritarian regimes miss the opposite elements of democracy, and that democratization depends on cultivating these missing institutions over time.

Sub Unit

• Politics/Law

Chair

• Graeme Robertson, UNC at Chapel Hill

Roundtable Members

• Hannah Chapman, U of Oklahoma

• Natalia Forrat, U of Michigan

• Grigore Pop-Eleches, Princeton U

• Graeme Robertson, UNC at Chapel Hill