International factors set an important scope conditions for the study of autocratic regime types. The political changes around 1990 fundamentally altered the conditions for autocratic endurance. In the Cold War, Soviet and US supported autocracies worldwide to ensure regime durability and allied in the Cold war. The support enabled even fragile regimes to remain autocratic. In the post-Cold War era a democratic Zeitgeist has characterized the western world, in which western countries have seeked to promote democracy in even the most remote areas of the worlds. This has made conditions for sustaining autocracy much more difficult. Not least because diffusions effects from neighboring democracies fuels popular demands. In the post-Cold War era a number of countries have, nonetheless, entrenched and maintained autocracy against these otherwise strong efforts to push for democracy around the world. Moreover, these anomalous countries are characterized by high levels of modernization and democratic neighbor countries – factors that are consistently related to democracy. These anomalous autocracies must be characterized by some extraordinary strong obstacles to democracy, given that they have trumped otherwise strong forces of democracy. The study of these cases might expose the factors that are decisive for autocratic stability and, thus, illuminate what the important obstacles are that needs to be overcome to ensure the emergence and endurance of democracy. Pursuing this idea, these anomalous autocracies might paradoxically have more to teach us than studies of successful democratization. No previous work has been dedicated to systematic studies of these anomalous autocracies. A necessity of making any progress in this field is to get an overview of which cases that are actually anomalous autocracies. In doing so, we are forced to think carefully about what characterizes these cases. The present article sets out to do just that.
