Conceptualising Autocracy

Abstract

The number of books and articles on different aspects of authoritarian rule has grown considerably during the last roughly ten years. Notwithstanding the fact that the increasing tendency to conceive of autocracies as objects of study in their own right has produced important insights in such fields as electoral politics, one-party rule, and the dynamics of authoritarian institutions more generally, conceptual development in the field has yet to catch up with the pace of empirical research. As the different ‘post-democratization’ debates revolving around ‘hybrid regimes’ and ‘new authoritarianisms’ exemplify, scholars are increasingly questioning the extent to which the traditional notion of authoritarian regimes can capture the empirical realities of contemporary autocracies. Despite this skepticism, however, conceptual development in the field has barely moved beyond Juan Linz’s path breaking contribution. Problems arising from this situation include but are not limited to the following questions: (1) How can we conceptually come to terms with new forms of authoritarian rule? What makes these new forms new? (2) How can different forms of new authoritarianism be differentiated from hybrid regimes? (3) What are adequate conceptual strategies for building typologies of nondemocratic rule (radial or family resemblance categories vs. classical categories; continuous measures vs. dichotomies, etc.)? (4) Along which dimensions should authoritarian subtypes be constructed? Inviting contributions in the form of up to five individual papers, the panel will critically analyze recent conceptual developments in the field and discuss different ways of moving these debates forward. In order to achieve a discussion that will be as broad as possible, we aim at including contributions from different methodological backgrounds and academic traditions.

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