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Publications
Publications (47)
Against widespread perceptions, the authors argue that democracy has proven remarkably resilient in the twenty-first century. Fears of a "reverse wave" or a global "authoritarian resurgence" have yet to be borne out. The vast majority of "third wave" democracies—those that adopted democratic institutions between 1975 and 2000—have long outlived the...
Militaries play dramatically different roles in different autocracies. At one extreme, the military remains the supreme political actor for generations. At the other extreme, militaries long remain subordinate to authoritarian leaders. We argue that the roots of this variation—from military supremacy to subordination—lie in military origins. Where...
What is the impact of repression on opposition to authoritarian rule? Studies of repression and dissent have yielded contradictory results. Some research suggests that repression reduces popular resistance while others show that it creates backlash and more dissent. In this article, we present an informational theory of repression to account for su...
This article explores the causes of authoritarian durability. Why do some authoritarian regimes survive for decades, often despite severe crises, while others collapse quickly, even absent significant challenges? Based on an analysis of all authoritarian regimes between 1900 and 2015, the authors argue that regimes founded in violent social revolut...
This article explores the causes of authoritarian durability. Why do some authoritarian regimes survive for decades, often despite severe crises, while others collapse quickly, even absent significant challenges? Based on an analysis of all authoritarian regimes between 1900 and 2015, the authors argue that regimes founded in violent social revolut...
Why have some post-Cold War autocrats consistently been able to sideline opposition and avoid debilitating elite defections while others have faced repeated challenges? Drawing on interviews, the media, and the academic literature, this article focuses on two sets of factors affecting the extent of incumbent control over opposition: the degree of s...
Two American specialists on Russia report the results of two nationwide surveys conducted in that country in 1992 (N = 1,393) and 1993 (N = 1,598). Focus was on rates and types of political activism and their correlation with attitudes toward economic and political reform. Conclusions are that different types of political activism attract different...
We explore the sources of durability of party-based authoritarian regimes in the face of crisis. Recent scholarship on authoritarianism suggests that ruling parties enhance elite cohesion—and consequently, regime durability—by providing institutionalized access the spoils of power. We argue, by contrast, that while elite access to power and spoils...
Based on a detailed analysis of Belarusian politics and the rise of Aliaksandar Lukashenka in the early 1990s, this article explores the sources, character, and impact of authoritarian incompetence and skill on regime outcomes after the Cold War. One type of incompetence—deer in headlights—emerges out of the disorientation and persistence of older...
Since it began, the Arab spring has been subject to a proliferation of comparisons with 1989, and rightly so. Two decades after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, we have learned a great deal about regime transitions—lessons that can improve our understanding of events in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) today. Unfortunately, the c...
Dan Slater offers thoughtful and incisive comments. We respond here to three of his points. The first is that by limiting our study to the post–Cold War period, we convert it into a “period piece,” akin to studies of fascist and communist regimes. Although this may be true, a historically bounded analysis is essential because of the changing charac...
It is not easy to offer a critical review of Dan Slater's book. Ordering Power makes several major contributions to the study of both state building and authoritarian durability. The book's analysis converges with ours in many areas; in some of these areas, it takes important steps beyond it.
This piece combines parts of Chapter 1 (Introduction) with Chapter 2 (theoretical framework) of an early draft of our book manuscript. The chapters that will eventually follow cover each of five regions: the Americas, Central Europe, former Soviet Union, East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
In some countries, democratic competition is undermined less by electoral fraud or repression than by a skewed playing field—unequal access to state institutions, resources, and the media.
The debate on the color revolutions is principally about the relative importance ascribed to diffusion versus certain key structural factors. Among these factors is the extent and impact of Western pressure, which varies depending on the degree of linkage to Western Europe and the United States. In the low-linkage former Soviet states, domestic for...
Analysis of the second wave of democratic transition in Eastern and Central Europe’s “color revolutions” has tended to focus on causal variables such as regional diffusion, leadership strategy, and popular protest. Yet it may be inaccurate to describe the postcommunist authoritarian turnovers the region has witnessed as part of a “wave”; longer-ter...
This article examines coercive capacity and its impact on autocratic regime stability in the context of post-Soviet Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine. In the post-Cold War era, different types of coercive acts require different types of state power. First, high intensity and risky measures – such as firing on large crowds or stealing elections...
In analyzing the international dimension of democratization, there are two sources of international influence: leverage, or governments' vulnerability to western pressure, and linkage, or the density of economic, political, organizational, social, and communication ties between particular countries and the West. Although both leverage and linkage r...
Paper prepared for the Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, August 30-September 2, 2006, Chicago, IL. The end of the Cold War posed a fundamental challenge to authoritarian regimes. Single-party and military dictatorships collapsed throughout Africa and post-communist Eurasia, and in much of Asia and Latin America, during...
The possibilities of transnational influence are explored by considering how multiple and reciprocal interactions between nations may shape the experience of citizens around the world. Focus is on the democratization of competitive authoritarian regimes after the end of the Cold War. It is argued that when competitive authoritarian regimes have suc...
This article examines one reason for the failure of full-scale authoritarianism in Ukraine, 1992–2004. The monopolization of political control in Ukraine was partially thwarted by the disorganization of Ukraine's ex-nomenklatura elite that dominated the country after the Cold War. Elite Ukrainian politics in the 1990s can best be understood as an e...
While most accounts of the orange revolution have focused on the truly remarkable display of mass protest, there is another side to the orange revolution that has received much less attention. The fall of competitive authoritarian rule under Kuchma was first the product of severe weaknesses in the regime and the President's failure to keep his own...
This article explores the sources of regime competitiveness in the post-cold war era through a structured comparison of regime trajectories in Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine, for the period 1992–2004. An examination of these cases suggests the need for a fundamental rethinking of the commonly held view of the transition process—especially in...
En los últimos años, se han puesto en escena nuevas formas de gobiernos no democráticos, la más destacable de ellas es el Autoritarismo Competitivo. Tales regímenes de pensamiento no democrático, protagonizan contiendas en las cuales las fuerzas de la oposición pueden retar e incluso derrocar a los dirigentes del autoritarismo
this paper, inhibited our understanding of why pluralistic and quasi democratic politics appeared and persisted in so many inhospitable environments such as Africa and the former Soviet Union. This paper focuses on regime trajectories and the challenges of authoritarian state building in Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine, which like many other...
This article explores the dilemmas of reform in weak states through an examination of efforts to decentralize the fiscal system in post-Soviet Ukraine in the 1990s. Despite increased attention to the state, many reform efforts still ignore the full implications that state weakness has for institutional transformation. Inattention to the problems of...
Journal of Democracy 13.4 (2002) 127-141
In the 1990s, Moldova, a small country sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine and bereft of a strong civil society, an established rule of law, and any previous democratic experience, nevertheless boasted remarkably competitive and democratic politics. In order to understand the persistence and intensity of...
In recent years,new types of nondemocratic government have come to the fore,notably competitive authoritarianism.Such regimes, though not democratic,feature arenas of contestation in which opposition forces can challenge,and even oust,authoritarian incumbents.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, real revenues at the local level in Ukraine have more than halved. This report examines how fiscal resources are distributed and how managers attempt to preserve basic services in the face of such severe fiscal constraints. We find that - despite the negotiated nature of some expenditure determination - a red...
Governments in Argentina and Poland imposed radical neoliberal reforms with the cooperation of organized labor between 1989 and 1991. After 1991 most Argentine unions continued to support the Peronist government, while the Solidarity unions moved into opposition. Strong social linkages between governing parties and labor facilitated initial coopera...
This paper seeks to explain the diverging fate of Africa’s competitive authoritarian regimes. After showing that standard theoretical approaches cannot account for the observed variation among African cases, we develop an argument that focuses on incumbent organizational power, or specifically, the strength of state and ruling party organizations....
Focusing on Iran in 2009 and Egypt in 2011, this paper examines the role of the coercive apparatus in responding to crises triggered by mass anti-regime protest. We argue that the divergent outcomes of the two crises – authoritarian resilience in Iran and regime breakdown in Egypt – can be traced to the regimes’ distinct origins. On the one hand, t...
While an earlier literature simply equated electoral turnover with democratization (cf. Przeworski et al. 2000), more recent scholarship has highlighted how the defeat of autocrats in elections very often fails to result in the establishment of democracy (Way 2008; Kalanadze and Orenstein 2009; Levitsky and Way 2009). Thus, Kalandadze and Orenstein...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 302-320).