Presidents and Executive Power in Hybrid Regimes and Autocracies

Abstract

Way into the 2020s, the expectations of deepening democracy and enduring peace that characterized many optimistic outlooks of the 1990s seem distant. Instead, the current era is haunted by a gradual democratic backlash and military conflicts resisting proximate resolution. A recurring theme, commonly featured in the main body of both backlash and conflict, is a president who refrains from acting within democratic constraints, aided by constitutionally or contextually granted powers or insights derived from abroad. Therefore, this panel set out to discuss the role of presidents and executive power within a growing number of hybrid and autocratic regimes. Scholars focusing on the powers of presidents have long cautioned about the downsides of concentrating constitutional and de facto powers in the president and the country’s executive leadership, a scholarship currently spurred by the growing number of autocratization processes in which presidents take a prominent role. As part of this trend, studies have investigated the incumbent’s attempts to use strategies of different kinds, for example, of election manipulation, term limit evasion, reductions of the abilities for opposition, civil society, and media to demand accountability, and further extension of presidential powers through constitutional reforms. A few studies have placed such use and extension of presidential powers into more extensive historic-cultural, institutional-bureaucratic, or international ramifications. Even so, there is an enduring lack of studies that fully exploit newly available data or recent techniques, develop an in-depth understanding of the institutional contexts of presidential strategies in light of specific historic-cultural contexts, the push-or-pull effects of diffusion, or engage in comparative analyses beyond particular regions or historical periods. Therefore, the panel invites papers that explore presidential power in hybrid and autocratic contexts from diverse perspectives and with different methodological frameworks. We invite contributions that offer new case-driven, comparative, and/or statistically grounded insights into the role of presidential powers within current trajectories of autocratization in both autocratic and hybrid contexts, across both presidential and semi-presidential regimes.

Title	Details
Presidential Decrees as Instruments of Autocratization: The Case of Turkey’s Institutional Transformation	View Paper Details
Authoritarian Presidentialism: The Toolkit of Authoritarian Constitutional Customization	View Paper Details
‘Good Cop, Bad Cop’: Personalised Power Dynamics in Kyrgyzstan in 2020-2025	View Paper Details
Authoritarian Diffusion of Presidential Powers: Common Patterns in the Post-Soviet Eurasia	View Paper Details
Presidential Power and Authoritarian Regionalism: Mediating External Pressures in Post-Soviet Eurasia	View Paper Details