Andrea Kendall-Taylor

A dictator’s toolkit Understanding how co-optation affects repression in autocracies

A dictator’s motivation for using repression is fairly clear, but why some repress more than others or favor particular types of repressive strategies is less obvious. Using statistical analysis, this article demonstrates that a dictator’s reliance on co-optation fundamentally alters how repression is used. Specifically, it finds that co-optation through the use of political parties and a legislature creates incentives that lead dictators to decrease empowerment rights restrictions, like censorship, while increasing physical integrity rights violations, like torture and political imprisonment. This occurs because, by creating parties and a legislature, a dictator draws his potential opposition out of the general public and into state institutions, making it easier to identify who these opponents are, to monitor their activities, and to gauge the extent of their popular support. This reduces the need to impose broad types of repressive measures, like empowerment rights restrictions, that breed discontent within the overall population. At the same time, co-optation creates the risk that rivals, once co-opted, will use their positions within the system to build their own bases of support from which to seek the dictator’s overthrow, generating incentives for dictators to increase physical integrity violations to limit the threat posed by these individuals.

How Autocracies Fall

Because autocrats can rarely be voted out of power, most find themselves exiting office in far less conventional ways. Since the 1950s, the coup d’etat—or the illegal seizure of power by the milita...

Mimicking Democracy to Prolong Autocracies

Democracy has suffered eight straight years of global decline. This was the finding Freedom House issued in its 2014 report examining the state of global political rights and civil liberties. This downward slide in political freedom has been the longest continuous decline in political rights and civil liberties since the watch-dog organization began measuring these trends over 40 years ago. Some of this backsliding has occurred in democratic countries like Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban publicly declared the end of liberal democracy as he continued to undermine the media, the judiciary, and other key institutional checks on executive power following his election in 2010. Or in Turkey where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dismantled checks on his power, censured opponents, and limited critical media, particularly in the last two years. However, a good deal of the deterioration globally has occurred within the subset of states we would consider to be non-democracies. From Egypt to Russia to Venezuela to Thailand, autocratic incumbents are expanding their control over the levers of power. Adding to the respite (and perhaps even the reversal) in the steady march toward democracy that occurred under the “Third Wave”—a term coined by Samuel P. Huntington to describe the third major surge of global democracy from 1974 to 2000—is the decelerating pace of political transitions from autocracy to democracy (see Figure 1). In the decade following the end of the Cold War (1990–99), there were approximately 3.2 democratic transitions per year. From 2000–12, however, that

The Global Rise of Personalized Politics: It's Not Just Dictators Anymore

No one would dispute that power in Russia today lies firmly in the hands of President Vladimir Putin. But his command over the political system was not always so sweeping. When Putin assumed power ...

Pathways to democratization in personalist dictatorships

ABSTRACT Personalist dictatorships make up an increasingly large proportion of the worlds dictatorships. Moreover, they tend to be particularly resistant to democratization. Understanding the conditions that increase the likelihood of democratic transitions in personalist contexts, therefore, is critical for the study and practice of democratization in the contemporary era. This study argues that political party creation is a key factor. Though personalist dictators typically create parties to offset immediate threats to their power posed by the elite – and particularly the military – doing so encourages peaceful mass mobilization and a realignment of elite networks. These dynamics, in turn, enhance prospects of democratization. Using cross-national empirical tests that address the potential endogeneity of this relationship, we find support for the argument that personalist dictators who create their own political party are more likely to democratize than those who ally with a pre-existing party or rule without one.

When Dictators Die

Eleven of the world’s 55 dictators are 69 years old or older and are in varying stages of declining health. At first blush, this paints a hopeful picture for democracy scholars who have documented a slow but steady authoritarian resurgence. Yet this article reveals that the advanced age of 20 percent of the world’s autocrats offers little hope for a reversal of this trend. Rather than creating a space for change, the passing of these leaders will likely leave in place the resilient autocratic systems they created and reinforced. While most leadership transitions generate opportunities for regime change, this article demonstrates that death in office is not one of them.

The Evolution of Autocracy: Why Authoritarianism Is Becoming More Formidable

The twenty-first-century autocrat is not the same as his Cold War predecessor.

Development and the State in the 21st Century

1. Setting the Stage: What is Development?.- 2. Theories of Development.- 3. Debates on the State and Development.- 4. Institutions and Development.- 5. Poverty Traps.- 6. Intractable Instability.- 7. Corruption.- 8. Colonialism and Geography.- 9. Debt and Financial Crises.- 10. Natural Disasters and Natural Resources.- 11. Disease Vulnerabilities.- 12. Globalization.- 13. Foreign Aid and NGOs.- 14. Conclusion.