Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy Under Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism seems to be everywhere in the political world. Even the definition of authoritarianism, now most commonly treated as a residual category for "non-democracy," has evolved to be so broad that it has subsumed the vast majority of all political systems that have existed in human: dictatorship, tyranny, monarchy, oligarchy, autocracy, totalitarianism, sultanism, and so on. Despite these very many differences across distinct forms of "authoritarianism," or different sub-types depending upon one’s frame of reference, the dominant approach in the literature is consistently to explain the operation and outcomes of authoritarian politics in diverse contexts from the top-down: as a function of the strategic interests or needs of a ruler or regime. We argue that this top-down approach to analyzing authoritarian politics is often incomplete, and in many cases, outright misleading. Our analysis of how authoritarianism from the inside-out develops an alternative to the top-down approach, one that is just as often complementary to that approach as it conflictual. We argue that to understand how authoritarian systems work, we need to look not only at the interests and intentions of those at the top, but also at the inner-workings of the various parts of the state apparatus. We develop this argument by scrutinizing three types of authoritarian institutions: constitutional courts, legislatures, and religious establishments. And we do so in historical-institutionalist perspective across a wide range of cases: Egypt, Palestine, Russia, Kuwait, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand. By focusing in on these distinctive institutional structures in their own unique socio-political contexts, we find that state institutions can—and in many cases, do—achieve meaningful autonomy even within authoritarian systems of rule. And more specifically, we show that authoritarian institutions are most likely to wield autonomy over policymaking as well as their own internal affairs when: (1) those institutions enjoy strong linkages to supportive constituencies within society or different parts of the state apparatus; and (2) they are thoroughly institutionalized, in the sense that their internal structures are hierarchic, cohesive, and adaptable. Our analysis aims to push scholarship farther beyond viewing authoritarian governance as something that reduces politics to rulers’ whims and strategic calculations. By appreciating how much what we now have come to call "authoritarianism" varies in practice, we hope to encourage a doubling of efforts to explore authoritarian politics in a way that shines the spotlight on the interests and infrastructures of the middle- and lower-rungs of the authoritarian state apparatus: those of its institutions and administrative personnel, not just autocrats and regime elites.