This workshop focuses on the politics, practices, and institutions of contemporary hybrid and hard authoritarian regimes. Recent autocratic regimes formed incrementally through incumbents chipping away at democratic institutions. Others emerged or re-emerged through sudden overthrows, as in the ongoing surge of military coups. New research started to shed more light on the ‘black box’ of autocratic rule, but many approaches still center democratic attributes in handling these regimes. Welcoming papers on broadly non-democratic institutions, electoral and party systems, as well as concepts or data, the goal of this workshop is to advance research on autocratic governance in its own right.
The majority of countries worldwide today has some form of autocratic rule. Newer datasets, including Geddes, Frantz, and Wright’s data on autocratic regimes and breakdowns (2014) and Cheibub et al.’s Democracy-Dictatorship Data (2010), and advanced methods enabled scholars to track this apparent reversal of the Third Wave of Democratization (Lührmann & Lindberg, 2018). But as autocracies increasingly emulate democratic practices to evade international scrutiny while democracies adopt authoritarian attributes to counter domestic crises, these newer hybrid forms of governance push existing regime nomenclatures and commonly held assumptions about dictatorships to their limit. Especially because holding periodic elections has become more rule than exception in autocracies, rethinking how authoritarian regimes need to be conceptualized and measured beyond the absence of competitive elections will be imperative to advance the discipline.
As such, the workshop offers a space to study autocratic politics in their own right, rather than through the lenses of backsliding or democratization. Ongoing discourses, such as the written scholarly exchange in ‘Autocracies with Adjectives’ on ECPR’s political science blog (Ali, 2022), the Roundtable on Democratic Backsliding at APSA’s 2023 annual convention, and subsequent exchanges between scholars (e.g. Munck, 2023) further underline both urgency and challenges going forward.
Ali, Hager. (2022). Autocracies with Adjectives: We Need Better Typologies for Authoritarian Regimes. The Loop - ECPR's Political Science Blog. https://theloop.ecpr.eu/autocracies-with-adjectives-we-need-better-typologies-of-authoritarian-regimes/
Cheibub, José A., Gandhi, Jennifer., & Vreeland, James R. (2010). Democracy and dictatorship revisited. Public Choice, 143, 67-101.
Frantz, Erica., Kendall-Taylor, Andrea, Li, Jia, & Wright, Joseph. (2022). Personalist ruling parties in democracies. Democratization, 29(5), 918-938.
Geddes, Barbara, Wright, Joseph, & Frantz, Erica. (2014). Autocratic breakdown and Regime Transitions: A new data set. Perspectives on Politics, 12(2), 313-331.
Lührmann, Anna & Staffan I. Lindberg (2019) A third wave of autocratization is here: what is new about it?, Democratization, 26:7.
Little, Andrew and Meng, Anne, Measuring Democratic Backsliding (July 18, 2023). Little, Andrew and Meng, Anne. Forthcoming in PS: Political Science & Politics.
Methods Colloquium (06.09.2023). APSA 2023: Democratic Backsliding Roundtable, online recording. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJwSChvaoWQ
Munck, Gerardo [@GerardoMunck]. (08.09.2023). We are seeing the start of a debate about the validity and reliability of global democracy indices. [Tweet] X. https://twitter.com/GerardoMunck/status/1700109225282658792
1: How can we improve measurements and concepts for non-democratic regimes?
2: How do non-democratic regimes manipulate electoral and party politics?
3: Which role do various institutions play in the stability and survival of non-democratic regimes?
4: Which attributes, other than non-competitive elections, characterize non-democratic governance?
5: What characterizes emerging or instable non-democracies?
| Title |
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| Are advanced liberal democracies also more advanced at authoritarian practices? The abuse of metapolitics in the UK |
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| De-Democratization is Not Democratization Backwards |
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| Audience-Sensitivity of Political Discourse in the Legitimation of Repression |
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| A Tow-Level Game: The Security Determinants of the Libyan Transition |
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| Propaganda and Disinformation in Competitive Autocracies: The Case of Turkey |
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| Military Coups and Post-Coup Electoral Outcomes. A Global Assessment Since the End of the Cold War |
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| Who Leaves a Dominant Party? Elite Defection Under Competitive Authoritarianism |
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| A New Dataset for the Study of Elite Defections in Electoral Autocracies |
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| The role of courts in susta |
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| Before the purge: support coalitions and elite rivalry in authoritarian regimes |
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| Cost of electoral manipulation and elections in electoral authoritarian regimes |
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