Many autocracies emerge through military coups, but studies of hybrid regimes and electoral autocracies largely disregard the role of militaries in their trajectory. Sebastian Elischer shows how armies consolidate their power when they take control and suggests a further research agenda
When democracies’ most basic features lose their distinctive edge, differentiating regime types becomes a problem for scholars of democracy and autocracy alike. Hager Ali wants to redraw demarcations between regimes across the political spectrum. To do so, she argues that civilian control over militaries is just as fundamental as suffrage
Legitimacy is as vital to the consolidation of authoritarian regimes as it is in democracies, where it is more studied. Nahla El-Menshawy illustrates how regime type, ideology, and historical legacies influence autocratic legitimation strategies
Hager Ali launched this series by pointing out that 'we lack the terminology to do anything beyond counting non-democracies'. Yet Edward Goldring argues that we sometimes struggle to accurately do that. This raises troubling questions for analyses of non-democracies – and emphasises the importance of studying history
Can we see autocracy more clearly if we see it as the opposite of democracy? Or do we need to look at autocracy as a category in its own right? Matthijs Bogaards provides an answer through a critical examination of the concept of defective autocracy, the mirror of defective democracy.
Since the 80s, electoral autocracy has been considered the most common form of dictatorship. Yet, as Adrián del Río shows, little is known about what this regime is and how we can recognise it. There is, in fact, only a 34% probability of datasets agreeing on examples
To understand today’s autocratic regimes, we should look at how they exploit social media, argues Bakhyzhan Kurmanov. In Kazakhstan, a referendum in the name of ‘open government’ is effectively a sham. What's more, it is a cover for autocratic practices of silencing dissent
Catherine Owen argues that understanding how regime type influences public sector performance can illuminate varieties of ‘authoritarian public policy’ and the resilience of authoritarian states. To do so, she calls on the fields of public administration and comparative politics to work together
Researchers of authoritarian politics and civil-military relations have long examined military rule. However, our understanding of civilian participation in military regimes remains limited and requires greater analytical attention, argues Salah Ben Hammou. Amid last year’s coup resurgence, researchers must move to appreciate the subtle but salient differences among military dictatorships
The study of regime types, Hager Ali argues, is imbalanced. Theories and concepts of democracy have received attention for decades. But amid the resurgence of autocracies, scholars of authoritarianism still do not have the luxury of nuanced typologies to dissect the broad spectrum of non-democratic regimes
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