What is the impact of repression on opposition to authoritarian rule? Studies of repression and dissent have yielded contradictory results. Some research suggests that repression reduces popular ...resistance while others show that it creates backlash and more dissent. In this article, we present an informational theory of repression to account for such divergent findings. We argue that the impact of repression hinges on the degree of censorship. Where alternative media is present, violence is more likely to increase support for opposition. By contrast, where alternative sources of information are limited, repression may reduce support for opposition and actually increase support for incumbents. We test and confirm these expectations with an original dataset that combines the results of a panel survey that spanned the authoritarian repression of electoral protests in Moldova in 2009 and geocoded data on the subnational variation in repression and alternative information availability. The hypothesized interaction between repression and censorship is corroborated in cross‐national analysis of repression, censorship, and government support (2005–16).
The electoral rise of unorthodox parties (UOPs) in recent East European elections raises some puzzling questions about electoral dynamics in new democracies. Why did the power alternation of the ...mid-1990s not result in party-system consolidation, as suggested by some earlier studies, but instead give way to a much more chaotic environment in which established mainstream political parties lost considerable ground to new political formations based on personalist and populist appeals? Why did this reversal in Eastern Europe happen during a period of economic recovery, remarkable Western integration progress, and a broad acceptance of electoral democracy as the only game in town? This article suggests that these electoral dynamics can be explained by focusing on the interaction between protest voting and election sequence. While protest voting to punish unpopular incumbents has been a widespread but understudied practice since the collapse of communism, the beneficiaries of these protest votes have changed in recent elections. Whereas in the first two generations of postcommunist elections, disgruntled voters could opt for untried mainstream alternatives, in third-generation elections (defined as elections taking place after at least two different ideological camps have governed in the postcommunist period) voters had fewer untried mainstream alternatives, and therefore opted in greater number for unorthodox parties. This explanation receives strong empirical support from statistical tests using aggregate data from seventy-six parliamentary elections in fourteen East European countries from 1990 to 2006, survey evidence from twelve postcommunist elections from 1996 to 2004, and a survey experiment in Bulgaria in 2008.
The wave of neoliberal economic reforms in the developing world since the 1980s has been regarded as the result of both severe economic crises and policy pressures from global financial institutions ...such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Using comparative evidence from the initiation and implementation of IMF programs in Latin America and Eastern Europe, From Economic Crisis to Reform shows that economic crises do not necessarily persuade governments to adopt IMF-style economic policies. Instead, ideology, interests, and institutions, at both the international and domestic levels, mediate responses to such crises.
Friction and wear experiments were performed on carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites, and the tribological behavior of these materials under boundary lubrication (based on the 5100 4T 10 ...W-30 engine oil with TiO2 Degussa P25 nanoparticles) was investigated. Experiments were carried out in two directions: one at a different normal load from 6 to 16 N and one at a low sliding speed of 110 mm/min under boundary lubrication conditions. The obtained results reveal the stick-slip effect and the static and dynamic coefficient of friction decreased slightly with increasing normal applied load on the carbon fiber reinforced polymer composite pairs. The second direction highlights through experimental tests on the pin on disc tribometer that the friction coefficient increases with the increase in normal load (20–80 N) and sliding velocity (0.4–2.4 m/s). On the other hand, it is found that the friction coefficient is slightly lower than in the stick-slip phase. During the running-in process, the friction coefficient of the CFRP pair increases steadily as the rubbing time increases, and after a certain rubbing period, it remains constant regardless of the material of the counter face. The obtained results show that for the observed interval, the influence of normal load and sliding velocity have relatively small fraction coefficients and low wear depths. A 3D analysis of the profile demonstrated the texture of wear marks and tracks of these engineering composite materials. Furthermore, the height variations of wear marks and the morphologies of the worn surfaces of specimens under boundary lubrication conditions were analyzed.
This introductory essay outlines the key themes of the special issue on the long-term impact of autocracies on the political attitudes and behavior of their subjects. Here, we highlight several ...important areas of theoretical and empirical refinements, which can provide a more nuanced picture of the process through which authoritarian attitudinal legacies emerge and persist. First, we define the nature of attitudinal legacies and their driving mechanisms, developing a framework of competing socialization. Second, we use the competing socialization framework to explain two potential sources of heterogeneity in attitudinal and behavioral legacies: varieties of institutional features of authoritarian regimes, which affect the nature of regime socialization efforts; and variations across different subgroups of (post-)authoritarian citizens, which reflect the nature and strength of alternative socialization efforts. This new framework can help us to better understand contradictory findings in this emerging literature as well as set a new agenda for future research.
We investigate the effect of individual exposure to communism on support for democracy and capitalism. We examine whether this effect varies across different types of communism, at different periods ...of people's lives, in different countries, and across different types of individuals. To do so, we propose a modified approach to solving the APC problem that relies on (a) survey data from multiple countries (b) historically defined cohorts and (c) variation in the time-periods related to these cohorts across countries. We provide a series of robustness tests for the method, and show that results are not very sensitive to panel structure. We conclude that generally communism had an indoctrinating effect, with more exposure to communism resulting in more opposition to democracy and capitalism.
•A cross-national approach to APC analysis with historically defined cohorts.•Analysis of effect of communist exposure on attitudes towards democracy and market.•More exposure to communism has an indoctrinating, not resistance, effect.•Early childhood exposure is more influential that adult exposure but both matter.•Catholics & Protestants more likely to resist communist imprinting than Orthodox.
The process of methanol conversion to dimethyl ether over an H-SAPO-34 molecular sieve was studied, using the catalyst as synthesized or formulated in an alumina matrix. The experiments were ...performed on the temperature interval 100−250 °C, liquid space velocities of 1−5 h−1, and pressures between 1 and 10 bar. The results evidenced a high catalytic activity of the H-SAPO-34 molecular sieve, providing in these conditions a practically total methanol transformation to dimethyl ether. Also, a special run, performed at 180 °C, with an output composition close to chemical equilibrium, showed no significant change of catalyst activity during an on-stream time of 50 h, this proving a good stability and resistance to deactivation. A published rate expression for the methanol dehydration reaction was selected and adapted to describe the experimentally observed process kinetics.
This article shows that post-communist regime trajectories have been largely circumscribed by historical legacy differences, but the question about which particular legacy matters most is much harder ...to answer, since statistical results are sensitive to model specification and to the choice of democracy indicator. While some of these discrepancies reflect the inherent limitations of traditional statistical methods, others reflect the different dimensions of democracy captured by different indicators. Therefore, the article contributes to a more nuanced explanation of post-communist democratization by showing that different legacies drive different aspects of democratization. Finally, the results demonstrate that several prominent alternative explanations—initial election outcomes, institutional choices, geographic diffusion, and external conditionality—played a relatively modest role in explaining democratization patterns beyond the constraints imposed by historical legacies.
Communist regimes were avowedly leftist authoritarian regimes, a relative rarity among autocracies. The growing literature on regime legacies would lead us to expect that postcommunist citizens would ...be more likely to exhibit “left-authoritarian” attitudes than their counterparts elsewhere. Finding that this is the case, we rely on 157 surveys from 88 countries to test if a living through Communism legacy model can account for this surplus of left-authoritarian attitudes. Employing both aggregate and micro-level analyses, we find strong support for the predictions of this model. Moving beyond previous legacy studies, we then test a variety of hypothesized mechanisms to explain how exposure to communist rule could have led to the regime congruent left-authoritarian attitudes. Of the mechanisms tested, greater state penetration of society is associated with a strong socialization effect and religious attendance—and in particular attending Catholic religious services—is associated with weaker socialization effects.
How harshly should perpetrators of past abuses be punished, to reinforce the legitimacy of a new democracy? Drawing on sociopsychological theories, we hypothesize that prodemocratic mass attitudes ...are favored by the perception that defendants in transitional justice trials have been punished in a way that is morally proportional to their offenses. This perception is shaped by the social categorization of defendants and the opinions about the certainty of their guilt that predominate in the mass public. When defendants are largely seen as co-ethnics and their guilt is contested, like in the West German case, prodemocratic attitudes are likely to be strengthened by lighter punishments and undermined by harsher sanctions. The analysis of subnational variation in patterns of punishment in postwar West Germany confirms this hypothesis and shows that these attitudinal effects persist in the medium term. Our findings have implications for research on transitional justice and democratization.
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