Lee Morgenbesser

The study of authoritarian politics is in the midst of a renaissance. A particular concern amongst practitioners and scholars has been how the use of “nominally” democratic institutions, such as courts, legislatures and parties, actually aids the survival of dictators and ruling parties. Despite notable breakthroughs, however, the question of why a...

Authoritarian regime datasets are an important tool for research in both comparative politics and international relations. Despite widespread use of these categorization schemes, very little attention has been paid to the quality of the judgments contained within them. Using the unambiguous case of Cambodia, this article demonstrates how leading da...

Autocratic regimes have developed a new strategy to overcome the high costs of either fully complying or not complying with the international norm of external election observation. This paper explains how many dictators and dominant parties deploy “shadow” election observation groups over professional observation groups as part of a mock compliance...

This article questions the explanatory power of the theory of democratisation by elections. This approach to democratisation argues that elections in authoritarian regimes constitute part of a metagame between ruling elites and opponents, which involves a competition for votes inside a larger competition over the nature of political power. The cumu...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Why do some countries make the costly decision to relocate their capital city? Existing research offers four general explanations for this momentous action: administrative functionality, economic development, environmental degradation, and national integration. We offer a less sanguine, political explanation: capital relocations offer autocratic le...

In 2021, Cambodia confronted the full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid a surge in case numbers and total deaths, the virus brought new and profound consequences for the Southeast Asian nation. A spate of decrees, laws, and provisions provided Hun Sen’s government ways to contain the outbreak, along with an opportunity to further stifle politic...

What explains election turnout in authoritarian regimes? Despite the significant energy, resources, and time ruling parties devote to improving the participation rates of citizens, there exists extraordinary variation both within and across authoritarian regimes. This paper hypothesizes that election turnout is explained by contestation, coercion a...

This book offers a way to understand the evolution of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia by scrutinizing its very quality. The theoretical framework is based on a set of indicators (judged for their known advantages and mimicry of democratic attributes) as well as a typology (conceptualized as two discreet categories of “retrograde” and “sophisti...

This article develops the menu of autocratic innovation to account for a perceived transformation in the nature of autocratic rule. Drawing from an original list of 20 techniques intended to cultivate the pretence of accountability without permitting the actual practice of it, the article describes how autocratic innovation takes different forms (i...

For over a decade, the Australian Political Studies Association (APSA) has maintained a list ranking journals into A*, A, B and C bands. However, we know little about how Politics scholars use and view the list. In this study, we firstly discuss the history of the APSA list, before then presenting the results of an original survey conducted in Marc...

Tragedy is a consistent narrative of Cambodian politics. Since 1953, when the country gained its independence from France, it has suffered no less than four coups, three invasions, one civil war, and a cataclysmic genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge. The last few years have witnessed yet another iteration of this narrative. This came in the for...

The theory of democratization by elections holds that elections—even when flawed—can, over time, have an independent causal effect on democratic transitions. Despite the recent growth of this literature, questions remain about the global scope of the argument and its structural preconditions. We show that, in Southeast Asia, elections are almost al...

The literature on field research methods has focused almost exclusively on the strategies available to scholars working in democracies. By comparison, there has been scant guidance for those working in authoritarian regimes. This is despite the distinct set of challenges that arise where civil liberties and political rights are not consistently or...

This paper explains how authoritarian regimes employ flawed elections to obtain both short-term legitimacy and long-term stability. In conjunction with the use of co-optation and repression, it argues that ruling parties hold de jure competitive elections to claim what is termed autonomous legitimation. This denotes the feigning of conformity to th...

This article accounts for how authoritarian regimes use elections to achieve stability (and, thus, longevity). At the domestic level, elections are deployed to either feign conformity to established rules and/or shared beliefs about how political power should be maintained or mobilise citizens in a unanimous show of manufactured support for the rul...

This article challenges the use of diminished subtypes as a strategy for avoiding conceptual stretching in the conceptual construction of hybrid regimes. The popular adoption of this strategy is based on its perceived ability to increase analytical differentiation and, more relevantly, avoid conceptual stretching by making a more modest claim about...

This article analyses the results of the first exclusive survey of politics and international relations PhD students in Australia. The survey was completed by 186 students from 22 universities. Students were asked 54 questions covering five areas: candidate choices, degree structure, research interests, workload pressures and the role of the Austra...

This article analyses the results of the most recent and largest cross-national survey on the international relations discipline. Completed by scholars in 20 countries, the survey covered the areas of teaching, research, foreign policy, the profession, and the relationship between policy and academia. From an Australian perspective, the key finding...