Scholarship on autocratisation has investigated the strategies of cooptation and repression that autocratic and autocratising regimes employ to maintain and enhance their power. However, it has ...barely explored how civil society reacts to these strategies. Concurrently, the existing research on civil society and social movements mostly suggests that civil society organisations (CSOs) will either resist autocratic repression or disband because of it, thereby often neglecting the possibility of CSOs’ adaptation to autocratic constraints. In this article, I seek to bridge these theoretical gaps with empirical evidence from Cambodia. I argue that for CSOs that operate in autocratic and autocratising regimes allowing themselves to become coopted by the regime can constitute a deliberate strategy to avoid repression, secure their survival, and exert social and political influence. However, while this strategy often seems to be effective in allowing CSOs to survive and escape large-scale repression, its success in enabling civil society to exert social and political influence remains limited, owing to structural limitations embedded in the autocratic context. Moreover, CSOs’ acceptance of cooptation often enhances divisions within civil society.
This paper introduces a special issue that examines civil society and democratic decline in Southeast Asia. Using the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Cambodia as case ...studies, the articles in the special issue examine often divergent reactions in civil society to increasing authoritarian pressures, diminishing political space, and increased repression. The paper at hand reviews the literature on concepts at the core of this inquiry, including civil society, backsliding, and diagonal accountability, and summarises the main findings of the special issue for Southeast Asia specifically and more broadly.
For more than a decade, the quality of democracy around the world has been declining, but we still know little about the diverse impacts of this democratic recession on environmental politics. This ...article provides new insights about the implications of democratic regression for environmental politics in Indonesia, which is Southeast Asia's largest democracy, a globally important biodiversity hotspot, and an example of democratic decline. Based on an analysis of academic literature, international and Indonesian media reports, as well as survey data, this article argues that in Indonesia, democratic decline has had several detrimental consequences for environmental politics. In particular, we argue that the nationalist framing of infrastructure development, along with controversial new laws and tightening restrictions on both activists and academics are undermining prospects for environmental protection. The article also highlights some silver linings that provide hope for both Indonesia's democracy and its embattled environment.
This article aims to identify and analyse the mechanisms and manifestations through which the Venezuelan police have undergone a gradual and incremental counter‐reform in the scope of the ...autocratisation process of the political regime from Chávez to Maduro. It is argued that police counter‐reform has operated through three mechanisms: politicisation, militarisation and informalisation of policing, whose manifestations have become more pronounced when a deepening of autocratisation has taken place
Besides the introduction of multi-party elections, the sub-Saharan wave of democratic reforms of the 1990s encompassed the introduction of limits to the number of terms that a chief executive can ...serve. Executive term limits (ETLs) are key for democracy to advance in a continent with a legacy of personal rule. However, the manipulation of ETLs has become a recurring mode of autocratisation, through which African aspiring over-stayers weaken executive constraints, taint political competition, and limit citizens’ possibility to choose who governs. This article presents a three-phase model of autocratisation by ETL manipulation and, using new data, offers one of the first regional comparative studies of ETL manipulation in sub-Saharan Africa that rests on econometric modelling. The analysis leads to revisiting some previous findings on the drivers of ETL manipulation and highlights the relevance of other previously underestimated factors that may either discourage a leader from challenging ETLs or prevent their successful manipulation.
In Subsahara-Afrika wurden im Zuge demokratischer Reformen in den 1990er-Jahren nicht nur Mehrparteienwahlen eingeführt, sondern auch Beschränkungen der Anzahl der Amtszeiten des Staatsoberhauptes. Amtszeitbeschränkungen auf einem Kontinent mit dem Erbe personalistischer Herrschaft sind ein Schlüssel für mehr Demokratie. Die Manipulation von Amtszeitbeschränkungen jedoch ist eine wiederkehrende Form der Autokratisierung geworden. Dadurch schwächen die Herrschenden Beschränkungen der Exekutive, sowie den politischen Wettbewerb und begrenzen die Möglichkeit der Bürger zu wählen, wer regiert. Dieser Artikel stellt ein Drei-Phasen-Modell der Autokratisierung durch die Manipulation von Amtszeitbeschränkungen vor und führt unter Verwendung neuer Daten eine der ersten regional vergleichenden statistischen Analysen durch. Die Ergebnisse revidieren einige frühere Erkenntnisse hinsichtlich der Ursachen der Manipulation von Amtszeitbeschränkungen und unterstreichen die Relevanz anderer zuvor unterschätzter Faktoren, die den Versuch und die erfolgreiche Umsetzung einer Manipulation von Amtszeitbeschränkungen erklären.
There has been a rise in archival activism, including the birth of social movement archives, leveraging marginalised communities' voices, and challenging mainstream discourses. Through a case study ...of the Umbrella Movement Visual Archive (UMVA) in Hong Kong, this paper explores the risks faced by and the strategies of the archivists when preserving social movement objects amidst rapid autocratisation. Based on semi-structured interviews and documents analysis, this paper argues that autocratisation significantly restrains political opportunities for archival activism. When Hong Kong was relatively liberal before 2020, the UMVA encountered problems common in community archives in liberal democracies, such as sustainability crises and loss of public attention. Even so, archivists could still manage the risk by facilitating public communication and group solidarity. Nonetheless, the rapid autocratisation of Hong Kong since 2020 has created extreme political risks for archivists and the collection. Archivists could only migrate the archives overseas, resulting in public inaccessibility of the collection. While most extant literature on archival activism focuses on democratic or post-transitional context, this project offers an authoritarian-political perspective that tests the limits of the notion in the global wave of democratic backsliding.
Zambia experienced an episode of distinct democratic backsliding between 2011 and 2021. Autocratisation resulted from the deliberate use of legal mechanisms to enhance executive power. Tracing key ...legal changes through legal documents, press reports and informant interviews, the article examines this recent episode of autocratisation as a consequence of a poorly institutionalised party system in a fledgling and unconsolidated presidential democracy. We show that under PF rule, autocratisation resulted from the deliberate use of legal mechanisms to enhance executive power, stifle the opposition, muzzle the press and undermine civil society forces. The election of opposition candidate Hakainde Hichilema in August 2021 may have ended this episode of backsliding as for the third time in the country´s history, power changed peacefully through the ballot box. But, to what extent the 2021 elections will move Zambia away from this authoritarian trend is uncertain as the state of the country's political institutions, hereunder a poorly institutionalised party system in an unconsolidated presidential democracy, may leave it vulnerable to further episodes of backsliding. The main contribution of this paper is the documentation of the role of lawfare in processes of autocratisation, and how integral it has been to the decline of democracy in Zambia.
Concerns have been raised over the possible link between the growing political polarisation and fears of autocratisation in Slovenia. Faced with a lack of empirical data, we seek to answer two ...questions. First, how has political polarisation developed in Slovenia? We show that Slovenia has experienced massive increases in both ideological and affective polarisation on the levels of the citizenry and political parties. Second, what has been the effect of political polarisation on liberal democracy in Slovenia? A GLS (generalised least squares) model for the period 1992 to 2022 confirms negative effects only for affective, but not ideological polarisation regarding V-Dem’s liberal democracy and judicial constraints on the executive indices. Keywords: Slovenia, affective polarisation, ideological polarisation, autocratisation, SJM
Following the coup attempt of 15 July 2016, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency that would last for two years. In this paper, we focus on an understudied aspect of this period, ...protest repression during the state of emergency, using an original dataset of protest bans issued in 2007-2019. Engaging with the theoretical claims of emergency scholarship, our paper demonstrates that emergency powers were used to target areas, groups, and issues that were not related to the 'urgency' underpinning emergency rule. Moreover, such derogations of rights were perpetuated after the termination of the state of emergency within so-called ordinary legality. These practices were nevertheless embedded in the already authoritarian political-institutional context of Turkey and its layered history of emergencies.
The world is experiencing a new wave of autocratisation, characterised by a global democratic reversal. From 2010 to 2020, the share of the world population living in autocracies increased from 48 to ...68%. Electoral autocracies are now the world's most common regime type, and along with closed autocracies they number 87 of the world's 195 states. Even during the height of the third wave of democratisation, elections in Africa rarely led to an alternation of power. Thirty years after the third wave, this special issue introduction takes stock of how many transfers of power occurred in the three crucial decades between 1991 and 2021. In this special issue, we focus on Zambia to understand some of the factors that contributed to an electoral turnover, notwithstanding the many benefits of incumbency that were enjoyed by the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) led by President Edgar Lungu. We show that the outcome of Zambia's August 2021 election demonstrates the limits of incumbency. We suggest that voters and opposition parties in countries with previous experiences of peaceful transfers of power might rely on a 'democratic muscle-memory', to dislodge autocrats and call for more research on when and why incumbents lose.
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