Crisis Response and Regime Transformation: How Autocracies Adapt to Threats from Below

Comparative authoritarianism literature suggests that authoritarian regimes face two primary threats to their stability: protest mobilisation from below and coups d'état from above. Existing scholarship has extensively examined how autocracies maintain regime resilience through the combination of repression, cooptation, and legitimation. However, it is unclear how the combination of these resilience strategies contributes to the regime transformation after a stability-threatening event. Building on this influential literature, the paper offers a new perspective for regime transformation studies. I argue that while the strategic toolkit of autocrats may be similar, the outcomes of crisis responses depend on regime-specific configurations, which ultimately shape the trajectory of regime transformation. To advance this claim conceptually, I combine sociological, elite, and procedural dimensions of regime. Hence, regime change is understood in this paper as the product of elite responses to societal pressures, constrained by institutional and procedural structures. Empirically, the paper employs a comparative case study of Russia, China, and Turkey: three enduring autocracies with distinct institutional models. In detail, I compare three critical episodes of protest that met a significant response from the government in these countries: the 2018 Navalny protests in Russia, the 2019 Hong Kong protests in China, and the 2025 protests following the arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu in Turkey. Through these cases, I demonstrate how similar authoritarian strategies of response can lead to different pathways of regime transformation, depending on the elite cooptation and the country's procedural environment. The findings contribute to the literature on authoritarian resilience, regime studies, and the evolving logic of autocratization in hybrid and consolidated autocracies.