Navigating the Waters of Authoritarianism Studies – Changing Notions of Authoritarian Regimes in Comparative Politics

The study of non-democratic forms of political rule in Comparative Politics has occurred in two distinct waves that each developed their own conceptual tools in relation to the dominant research paradigms of the day. ‘First-wave’ conceptions of autocracy stemming from the 1960s and 1970s are thus greatly influenced by perspectives of political modernization and development and focus on the relationship between political rule and the broader cultural and socio-economic context. More recent ‘second-wave’ studies, by contrast, tend to more narrowly focus on the formal and informal institutional structures that are usually referred to as political regimes, pointing to the prominence of neo institutionalist approaches from the 1980s onwards. Despite their common subject matter, communication between these two major waves of literature on authoritarian rule has been minimal. In this paper, we trace the changing conceptions and typologies of authoritarian rule over the two waves of scholarship, arguing that the current conceptual status quo can be improved by combining the neo institutionalist regime perspective with perspectives on the social and economic embeddedness of authoritarian rule prominent in first-wave scholarship. We specifically focus our attention on two dimensions of authoritarian rule that have been neglected by recent neo institutionalist scholarship: the (functional and spatial) scope of authoritarian control, as well as the problem of political support. We show that although different debates in the literature touched on both dimensions, the results were not systematically integrated in existing typological frameworks that continue to exclusively focus on procedural aspects of political regimes. We propose a conception of authoritarian regimes that systematically integrates the scope and support dimensions and briefly illustrate the consequences of such a framework.