Abstract
This article highlights three main problems with current conceptualizations of authoritarianism: they constitute a negative or residual category, focus excessively on elections and assume that authoritarianism is necessarily a state-level phenomenon. Such ‘regime classifications’ cannot help us comment intelligently on public concerns that politicians like President Rodrigo Duterte, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Prime Minister Viktor Orban or President Donald Trump are essentially ‘authoritarian’ leaders. This article proposes that, in order to provide political scientists with better tools to distinguish between contemporary threats to democracy and interpretations imbued by left-liberal prejudice, authoritarianism studies must be reoriented towards studying authoritarian as well as illiberal practices rather than the fairness of national elections alone. The article defines and illustrates such practices, which exist in authoritarian, democratic and transnational contexts. Comparative analysis of authoritarian and illiberal practices will help us understand conditions in which they thrive and how they are best countered.
Highlights
UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam Download date: 05 Oct 2020
I end with a few words on what needs to be done in order that political scientists can better detect and analyse authoritarian and illiberal practices, and better advise their societies when their democratic foundations appear to be under threat
Let us consider a less obvious case, a policy rather than a country: the policy of rendition. By this I refer to the secret detention and inter rogation of so-called enemy combatants, led by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) but implemented by a variety of national military, police and secret service agencies, in a variety of countries, from 2002 to 2008.11 It is generally acknowledged that the rendition programme violated the human rights of the prisoners involved, who were almost without exception non-Americans
Summary
No reader of political commentary in recent years could fail to notice a concern, perhaps even a panic, about a global tide of authoritarianism that may be affecting even established democracies. Marlies Glasius whether there are such things as ‘everyday acts of authoritarianism’ or ‘autocratic leadership’ in a democratic society, and if so what they would look like They have developed sophisticated analyses of the quality of democracy, and some warning signals of ‘democratic backsliding’ into authoritarian rule.[5] But they— we—lack the vocabulary and the tools to provide a clear, research-based analysis of these apparent phenomena of authoritarianism and illiberalism within established democracies. They have much to say on why leaders like Duterte, Modi, Orbán or Trump get elected, but very little on how to evaluate what they do once in office. I end with a few words on what needs to be done in order that political scientists can better detect and analyse authoritarian and illiberal practices, and better advise their societies when their democratic foundations appear to be under threat
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