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Building Autocracy: New Theoretical Insights and Empirical Findings

Sun, October 3, 8:00 to 9:30am PDT (8:00 to 9:30am PDT), TBA

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel deals with various core questions and topics in autocratic politics that pertain to how autocratic systems are being built. The types of building that we consider, ranges from power-sharing arrangements (and the autocratic nature of the regime itself), to a national community among the country’s citizens and popular support for the regime, to the fiscal capacity and state institutions underpinning the regime, to the physical presence of a new capital.

Common to all these topics is the underlying motivation of the leader and other key actors to bolster the power and longevity of regime leadership and the regime itself. Sometimes, threats to the leadership and regime is of a shorter-term nature, requiring strategies and policies that have an immediate effect, such as removing a coup-plotting general, placing armed security forces in the main square of the capital to deter protesters, or increasing spending on fuel subsidies to mitigate current grievances in certain parts of the population.

Yet, leaders and regime elites must also take a longer time horizon, in order to gradually reduce looming threats or avert these threats from ever arising. Forward-looking autocrats and their close allies may therefore undertake a range of costly investments and adopt policies with an eye towards mitigating long-term threats, and for this purpose often have an eclectic set of tools at their disposal. While it is often costly and difficult to undertake such “autocracy-building” initiatives, clever strategies can be highly effective and the prize – increasing the chances of retaining power over the long haul – may make the cost worth it. The papers included in this panel suggests that the underlying motivation of making the regime and current leadership more resilient, and thus retain power in the long-term, drives “autocracy-building” behavior in very different policy areas.

However, the different types of building activities undertaken often reflect how leaders and key regime elites react differently to very different security threats that they want to mitigate or hinder from arising in the future. Under some circumstances, a perceived grave security threat posed by the revolutionary potential of the popular masses in the country’s largest city may spur the regime to move the capital to a new and less populated area (see Paper 3 in this panel). In other contexts, an alternative strategy for mitigating the future threat of a revolution could be to build an education system that effectively indoctrinates the population in the existing regime’s ideology (Paper 2). In yet other contexts, the perceived future security threat is a set of elite groups that need to be co-opted or repressed in order to preserve the current regime. Building up or rolling back power sharing arrangements may be one strategy for mitigating this threat (Paper 1). Yet another strategy may be building up the state’s fiscal capacity to help finance the means to co-opt or repress such threats a few years into the future (Paper 4).

Collectively, these papers contribute with both new theoretical insights and new empirical data. Theoretically, the focus is on various strategies to bolster autocratic rule, i.e., to “build autocracy,” a timely topic in the current era of democratic stagnation or even creeping autocratization. Empirically, the papers span a broad range of countries from all over the world in both contemporary and historical time periods, drawing on both large-n statistical and small-n case study methods.

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