Authoritarian Practices as Accountability Sabotage

Abstract

Abstract This chapter introduces and elucidates a practice-oriented concept of authoritarianism. It opens with a brief history of authoritarianism as a political science concept, concluding that its evolution has culminated in an exclusively state-centred, negative, and election-focused usage that produces blind spots in empirical observation. Two conceptual moves are made to get to a redefinition. First, the chapter identifies authoritarian practices, rather than authoritarian systems, as the unit of analysis. Second, it introduces the concept of ‘accountability sabotage’. Authoritarian practices are then defined as ‘a pattern of actions, embedded in an organized context, sabotaging accountability to people over whom a configuration of actors exerts a degree of control, or their representatives, by disabling their voice and disabling their access to information’. Each element of this definition is clarified in turn. In the concluding section, a distinction is made between authoritarian practices—the main subject of this book—and illiberal practices.