Classifying Contemporary Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes: Old Questions, New Data, and Salvaged Concepts

Abstract

In the last two decades, authoritarian regimes resurged either incrementally through incumbents chipping away at democratic institutions, and through violent overthrows. New datasets and advanced methods enabled scholars to track this apparent reversal of the Third Wave of Democratization. But as autocracies increasingly emulate democratic features, and democracies adopt authoritarian characteristics, newer hybrid forms of authoritarianism pose a salient challenge to the validity and reliability of commonly used regime indicators and methods, which limits the accuracy of data generated through them. The challenge of analyzing or typologizing contemporary authoritarian regimes is therefore as much about generating new knowledge as it is about augmenting data and methods that emerged in the last decade. Advancing the study of authoritarianism also needs revisiting the same conceptual questions that have once driven research on democracies, transitions, and how to measure them. What needs to be measured to accurately reflect the nature of consolidated and unconsolidated non-democracies? How many “adjectives” or sub-types do we need to measure autocracies? And which underlying concepts were stretched beyond their limits in existing research?

Title	Details
Doing Fieldwork as a Native Researcher in Authoritarian and Illiberal countries: Lessons and Challenges	View Paper Details
Autocracies with Adjectives: The Need for Better Classifications of Autocratic Regimes	View Paper Details
Non-traditional authoritarianism: A new theoretical framework of contemporary regime transformations	View Paper Details