Politics and Mechanisms of Authoritarian Regime Durability

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel focuses on the politics and mechanism that authoritarians employ to ensure the stability of their regimes, drawing on a range of quantitative and qualitative evidence from sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and global data. These papers, together, address the multifaceted approaches rulers take in order to protect their regimes, addressing a number of questions:
• Why are some authoritarian regimes able to persist or thrive when others wilt and collapse?
• How do authoritarians use intuitions in order to shore up their regimes?
• What kinds of domestic alliances allow authoritarians to adapt to changing international politics?
• How critical are international relationships in bolstering authoritarian regimes?
The paper by Josef Woldens finds that the third wave of democracy, spawned by the end of the Cold War, was merely an illusion. Existing authoritarian regimes “morphed” slightly to appease demands for electoral competition. Adaptations by authoritarian regimes to the new international world order insulated African rulers from democratization attempts. However, these adaptations also resulted in drastic shifts in cabinet makeup as leaders moved to balance their alliance bases to prepare for an uncertain future.
A complementary paper by Fiona Shen-Bayh examines how African autocrats strategically chose to appoint British subjects over indigenous Africans because doing so helped foster judicial subservience to autocratic rule. The author finds that one-party and military dictatorships in former British-controlled Africa take advantage of the colonial-era legal system, which insulated judges from local constituents. In the postcolonial era, judges focused on satisfying the executive, who controls the fate of judges’ careers, rather than the democratic needs of the people, thereby consolidating authoritarian rule.
Henry Thomson and David Samuels also delve into the ways in which institutions help to ensure regime durability. These authors explore coercive institutions, specifically the secret police in Poland. The authors find that intra-agency reforms of coercive institutions shape the incentives and constraints facing individual bureaucrats. Increases in the number of units within an agency responsible for the same task generate competition for successful outcomes on tangible, observable indicators, such as the registration of collaborators who provide information on the opposition. The resultant increased competition among regional secret police offices led to significantly faster growth in the state security's network of informants and collaborators.
In the final paper in the proposed panel, Daniel Baissa and Melani Cammett bring these topics together to explore what intuitions, if any, help shore up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. The authors use machine learning to uncover the determinants of regime durability, testing the gamut of explanations proposed in relevant literature, and find the strongest support for the claim that external support pays a substantial role in the application of both of the “carrots” and “sticks” strategies employed by rulers to preserve their rule. In particular, the authors find that external military and economic aid is the key predictor of regime stability itself, indicating that external actors bolster their authoritarian allies to ensure that these regimes that are less likely to face a revolution.

Sub Unit

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Individual Presentations

• The End of the Cold War and its Effect on the Autocrat’s Inner Circle - Josef Woldense, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Alex Kroeger, Texas State University

• Compliant Courts: The Logic of Judicial Appointments and Autocratic Stability - Fiona Shen-Bayh, William & Mary

• Terrifyingly Normal Authoritarian Bureaucracies - Henry Thomson, Arizona State University

• External Support and Persistent Authoritarianism in the Middle East - Daniel Baissa, Harvard University; Melani Cammett, Harvard University

Chair

• Elizabeth R. Nugent Yale University

Discussant

• Yuhua Wang Harvard University