Rethinking Regimes: Understanding Democratization as Autocracies Evolve

Abstract

Authoritarian and autocratizing regimes today look vastly different from the empirical universe of one-party and military dictatorships of the 1980s, but many of our conceptual assumptions and analytical vocabulary survives from that Third Wave era. As a result, we still lack the conceptual tools to understand this authoritarian variety and what it means for regime stability and change at a time when autocratic behaviour is evolving before our eyes. This session brings together scholars of authoritarianism and of democratic decline to rethink the processes through which autocratization occurs at a time when many Third Wave democracies are faltering in ways that earlier models failed to anticipate. Discussions of democratic consolidation in the 1990s, for example, relied on a number of positive and even perhaps teleological assumptions that seem increasingly suspect with the passage of time. At the same time, it has been argued that the dominant conceptual models that have emerged to explain the deterioration of Third Wave democracies - the rise of illiberal populism (Müller2014) and power centralisation (Bermeo 2016) – are themselves prone to similar pitfalls of empirical narrowness and unidirectional teleologies (Cianetti & Hanley 2021). To what extent may the conceptual vocabulary of the Third Wave era still be of use in describing these still unfolding processes? To what extent are the zeitgeist terms concerning populism and executive aggrandizement any better? Another fruitful avenue may be to examine authoritarian regimes, to the extent that these serve as models for would-be autocrats: what they are, what they do, and how they change. Two propositions may guide these discussions. First, that to understand how different authoritarian regimes work, how and why they are stable, and how and why they change we must pay more attention to how they govern, that is, how they formulate and deliver public policies. So we must look at autocracies in practice rather than (only or primarily) in theory. Second, that we cannot understand authoritarian regimes’ practices without accounting for the way in which the domestic and the international interact with one another. References Bermeo, N., 2016. On democratic backsliding. Journal of Democracy, 27(1), pp.5-19. Cianetti, L. and Hanley, S., 2021. The end of the backsliding paradigm. Journal of Democracy, 32(1), pp.66-80. Müller, J.W., 2014. Eastern Europe Goes South. Foreign Affairs, 93(2), pp.3-4.

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