Over the past decade, students of international and comparative politics have raised the specter of “autocracy promotion” - the willingness of non-democratic states to lend their support to authoritarian rule abroad. The emerging literature on autocracy promotion analyzes whether such an agenda actually exists, how it is implemented, and what its consequences might be. Regarding the first question, different hypotheses have been proposed with some scholars arguing that autocracies indeed pursue a strategy of autocracy promotion, while others question the validity of this finding. So far, the field lacks an understanding under which conditions autocracy promotion becomes more or less likely. In this paper, we propose a preliminary framework that addresses this question, using the “Arab Spring” as an explorative case study.
Displaying considerable empirical variance and challenging conventional wisdom, recent developments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) provide an excellent opportunity to investigate when authoritarian rulers attempt to prop up political systems of a similar kind in other countries. Intuitively, we should have expected Arab autocrats to act very decisively to stem the rising tide of a democratic wave that threatens to reach their own shores. The prediction of an active involvement would also be in line with research by Bader et al. (2010), who argue that autocracies promote non-democratic rule in cases of instability within neighboring countries. Yet as even a cursory glance reveals, Arab dictatorships pursue such a policy only selectively. In some cases, they deliberately refrain from intervention or even support anti-regime uprisings.
The aim of this paper is twofold: at a theoretical level, we first identify a general set of factors and mechanisms that can account for the occurrence of autocracy (non-)promotion. The MENA region then offers an initial test which of these variables may actually be more relevant than others.
