Although authoritarian countries often repress independent citizen activity, lobbying by civil society organizations is actually a widespread phenomenon. Using case studies such as China, Russia, ...Belarus, Cambodia, Malaysia, Montenegro, Turkey, and Zimbabwe, Lobbying the Autocrat shows that citizen advocacy organizations carve out niches in the authoritarian policy process, even influencing policy outcomes. The cases cover a range of autocratic regime types (one-party, multi-party, personalist) on different continents, and encompass different systems of government to explore citizen advocacy ranging from issues such as social welfare, women’s rights, election reform, environmental protection, and land rights. They show how civil society has developed adaptive capacities to the changing levels of political repression and built resilience through ‘tactful contention’ strategies. Thus, within the bounds set by the authoritarian regimes, adaptive lobbying may still bring about localized responsiveness and representation. However, the challenging conditions of authoritarian advocacy systems identified throughout this volume present challenges for both advocates and autocrats alike. The former are pushed by an environment of constant threat and uncertainty into a precarious dance with the dictator: just the right amount of acquiescence and assertiveness, private persuasion and public pressure, and the flexibility to change quickly to suit different situations. An adaptive lobbyist survives and may even thrive in such conditions, while others often face dire consequences. For the autocrat on the other hand, the more they stifle the associational sphere in an effort to prevent mass mobilization, the less they will reap the informational benefits associated with it. This volume synthesizes the findings of the comparative cases to build a framework for understanding how civil society effectively lobbies inside authoritarian countries.
The scholarly debate on the durability of autocracies is vivid. It has explored a broad spectrum of regime types and respective sources and mechanisms of regime survival. A bias towards the strong ...effect of material means of regime survival, for example repression, cooptation or output-legitimation, is striking. In resource-rich Middle East and North African (MENA) countries, this has been deeply rooted in the logic of rent economies. Only recently have nonmaterial factors of authoritarian power such as emotional engagement or affective behaviour of the populace gained more prominence in the literature, since autocrats are, for example, increasingly trying to strengthen societal bonds by referring to the past. In order to deconstruct this phenomenon in twenty-first-century autocracies, this article introduces sentimentality as a conceptual approach that allows a more fine-grained analysis of contemporary meaning-making attempts on a national level for the sake of regime survival. We assume three dimensions in which forms and functions of sentimentality can be seen - actors, spaces and media - and provide empirical evidence from the Gulf monarchies.
In the run-up to the American invasion of Afghanistan, much was made of a previously obscure infrastructure proposal: a gas pipeline to connect the Caspian Sea with Pakistan and the open ocean ...beyond. This led to breathless articles claiming, "it's about oil" and statements about a new American War for Oil from the Green Party USA and others. This theory never bore out, despite two full decades of American occupation - most likely because the actual export routes from Azerbaijan were shorter, more direct to European markets and did not have to pass over the forbidding landscapes of Afghanistan and eastern Turkmenistan. Even though this information was clearly available in 2001, it seemed that some among the American Left had difficulty envisioning an imperial war without a petroleum motivation.
A large literature expects that as protests unfold in electoral autocracies, voters who supported the ruling regime in the past will withdraw support and shift to supporting its opponents. Yet there ...are only a few empirical tests of how opposition protests influence voter defections in these regimes. To gain empirical traction on this question, I draw on evidence from Russia. Tying together evidence from a protest-event dataset and a panel survey of voters conducted prior to and during the 2011-2012 protest wave, I examine how voters who supported the ruling regime in the past respond to anti-regime mobilization. Results reveal differentiation in defections. While opposition protests dampen support for the ruling regime and depress engagement, they do not necessarily translate into greater support for the regime’s challengers. Findings, which have implications for debates on defection cascades in autocracies, speak to the literatures on authoritarian endurance and the legacies of (attempted) revolutions.
Given Asia-Pacific's diversity and the large variance of potentially relevant causal factors, the region presents social scientists with a natural laboratory to test competing theories of democratic ...erosion, decay and revival and to identify new patterns and relationships. This introductory article offers a brief review of the relevant literature and introduces the different categories of analysis that build the analytical framework considered in various forms in the special issue. The article discusses the reasons for the renewed pessimism in democratization and democracy studies and provides a survey of different conceptualizations intended to capture forms of democratic regression and the autocratization concept to which the contributors to this special issue adhere. We discuss how Asia-Pacific experiences fit into the debate about democracy's deepening global recession and examine assumptions about the causes, catalysts and consequences of democratic regression and resilience in the comparative politics literature. Finally, the remaining twelve articles of this special issue will be introduced.
Less than 30 years after Fukuyama and others declared liberal democracy's eternal dominance, a third wave of autocratization is manifest. Gradual declines of democratic regime attributes characterize ...contemporary autocratization. Yet, we lack the appropriate conceptual and empirical tools to diagnose and compare such elusive processes. Addressing that gap, this article provides the first comprehensive empirical overview of all autocratization episodes from 1900 to today based on data from the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem). We demonstrate that a third wave of autocratization is indeed unfolding. It mainly affects democracies with gradual setbacks under a legal façade. While this is a cause for concern, the historical perspective presented in this article shows that panic is not warranted: the current declines are relatively mild and the global share of democratic countries remains close to its all-time high. As it was premature to announce the "end of history" in 1992, it is premature to proclaim the "end of democracy" now.
This article analyses the state of democracy around the world in 2021. The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2021 was down to 1989 levels. In 2021, autocracies were on the ...rise, harbouring 70% of the world population, or 5.4 billion people. There was also a record number of countries autocratizing in 2021: 33 countries, home to 36% of the global population. In recent years, the EU seems to be facing its own wave of autocratization, with 20% of its members autocratizing over the last decade. In addition to the continued downturn in global democracy, this article documents several signs that autocratization is changing in nature. Polarization increased substantially and significantly in 40 countries between 2011 and 2021, and our analysis indicates that polarization increasingly damages democracy especially recently and under anti-pluralist governments. Over the past decade, the data also shows that autocratic governments more frequently used misinformation to shape domestic and international opinion. Finally, with five military coups and one self-coup, 2021 featured an unprecedented increase in coups for this century. These coups contributed to the uptick in the number of closed autocracies in 2021 and seem to signal a shift toward emboldened autocratic actors.
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