Authoritarian Politics Research Articles

Authoritarianism and Social Policy

Authoritarianism seems to be emerging as the default mode of global capitalism. In the absence of reliable economic growth, and with working-class incomes in long-term stagnation, both liberal and social democratic parties have lost support in many countries, and authoritarian regimes have come to power in several. But poor people in the USA, UK and Europe have long experienced coercion, being forced to accept low-paid, insecure work or face benefits sanctions. As a growing proportion of workers have come to rely on supplements such as tax credits, the working class has been divided, and opportunistic authoritarian politicians have mobilised the anxiety and resentment of those on the margins of poverty. This article argues that only an active civil society, with voluntary agencies uncompromised by involvement in coercive policies, along with universal, unconditional Basic Incomes for all citizens, can reverse these trends.

Contentious Politics in China: Causes, Dynamics, and Consequences

AbstractChina has become a land of social protests. Yet the Chinese state possesses considerable capacity and is rising on the world stage day by day. Why and how do Chinese people take to the streets? Where does their activism lead? This paper draws on a rich body of existing literature to provide an overview of the broad landscape of Chinese contentious politics and to dig deeper into a few common or emerging forms of social conflict. It then explores the various structural and political opportunity-based explanations for why protest occurs in China, before describing the ways in which different organizations and different framings of issues by citizens affect how protests play out. Shifting to where protests lead, the paper briefly surveys a variety of coercive and conciliatory institutions China possesses for social control and then documents distinct patterns in the state’s handling of different types of resistance—repressive, tolerant, concessionary, and mixed approaches—followed by an examination of the multifaceted impact of unrest. The conclusion offers suggestions for future researchers. Reviewing major concepts, debates, perspectives, and emerging research directions in studies of contentious politics in the world’s most populous country, this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of authoritarian politics and authoritarian resilience more generally.

The aporia of promises of liberal democracy and the rise of authoritarian politics

ABSTRACT In light of the current crisis of democracy, political theory faces the crucial question if the democracy in crisis can bring about a severe transformation of democracy and pave the way to replacing democracy with authoritarian government. Political theory is not only called upon to analyze the multiple processes of de-democratization but also to conceptualize the relationship between democracy and the rise of authoritarian politics. In this paper, I argue that to address these pressing questions, it is neither sufficient to solely focus on the state and state politics nor to solely focus on right-wing actors. Rather, it is necessary to address the current crises of democracy as a fundamental and comprehensive de-democratization of the state and society, which correlates with a far-reaching yet subtle de-democratization of everyday forms of living and subjectification. Furthermore, drawing on hegemony theory, I argue that the current de-democratization of the state and society along with the recent authorization of politics cannot only be viewed as having been forced upon the people. Instead, I argue that despite its anti-democratic and authoritarian character, current politics are also situated within a broader consensus. Focusing on gender and sexual politics, the paper scrutinizes how gender and sexual politics of the libertarian era of neoliberalism have contributed to a de-democratizing society, albeit in a subtle way, and by doing so the related discourses have helped to enable the current increase of authoritarian politics.

Between 'Greatness' and 'Ignorance'

Focusing on Turkey’s nuclearisation process, which has accelerated over the past decade, this article examines the historical and contemporary relationships that the country’s political decision-makers maintain with risk, the environment and health and ecological disasters. While the transition to nuclear power in the post-Fukushima period is not a dynamic specific to Turkey, it nevertheless operates, in the Turkish case, in a particular geographic, energy and political context. On the one hand, Turkey is a highly seismic country that heavily depends on its neighbours for energy and, on the other, is experiencing a creeping political authoritarianism. This article focuses on the dynamics and specificities of this post-disaster nuclear transition, which will be analysed here as ‘serene nuclearism’, positioned as the polar opposite of ‘reflexive modernisation’, as theorised by Ulrich Beck.

Authoritarian Liberalism in Contemporary Europe: methodological approaches and conceptual models

Abstract The author conducts a comparative analysis of authoritarian liberalism’s concepts in contemporary political theory. The paper deals with the main directions of interpretation of authoritarian liberalism in the framework of methodological approaches and conceptual models of neoliberalism, ordoliberalism, political liberalism, J.-W. Mueller’s ‘restrained democracy’, J. Habermas’ ‘legitimation crisis’, C. Crouch’s ‘post-democracy’, C. Macpherson’s ‘participatory democracy’, M. Wilkinson’s ‘dedemocratisation and delegalisation’, W. Streeck’s ‘democratic capitalism crisis’ and G. Majone’s ‘crypto-federalism’. The basic analytical concept is the idea of authoritarian economic liberalism, first proposed by H. Heller and K. Polanyi. This paper will sub-stantiate that in crisis and transformational periods the actualisation of authoritarian liberalism corresponds to the fundamental tension between market capitalism and representative democracy. The author conceptualises authoritarian liberalism as the practice of dedemocratisation and restrained democracy, which results in the regionalisation of radical protest against the supranational regime of political integration in Europe. Latent political authoritarianism strengthens economic liberalism, which, in turn, reinforces the further EU’s ‘liberal authoritarian transformation’. Authoritarian liberalism restricts traditional forms of representative democracy, contributing to the reanimation of populism and political radicalism. The authoritarian restriction of representative democracy can lead not only to the strengthening of market capitalism, but also to the revival of reactionary forms of ‘new nationalism’ and illiberalism. Today, the EU’s regime is transformed from a nominally rule-based structure supported by market discipline into a ‘discretionary order’ reinforced by bureaucratic power. The EU’s transnational solidarity can become a democratically legitimate tool for a de-escalation of tensions between market capitalism and representative democracy.

Digital media, political authoritarianism, and Internet controls in Southeast Asia

A sharp rise in the use of digital media in Southeast Asia in recent years has raised questions about the impact of these digitally networked technologies on the prospect for democratization in a region known for its authoritarian resilience. In the absence of a regional uprising as witnessed in the Middle East through the Arab Spring, Southeast Asian authoritarian states have maintained their durability despite a massive surge in online political activities and in some cases, digitally mediated large-scale mobilization of opposition groups. What explains authoritarian resilience in Southeast Asia in the face of rising opportunities for online political opposition? This article argues that while digital media has emerged as an important repertoire of activism, particularly for political opposition groups, a deft combination of political authoritarianism and increasing Internet controls have stunted democratic pressure in society and hampered future prospect for democratization. It also offers a comparative analysis of how the Internet more generally and digital media in particular has affected state-society relations in Southeast Asia in recent years. In order for digitally mediated political opposition to meaningfully challenge the existing authoritarian incumbents, sufficient opening in the political system is needed. This means, authoritarian states with competitive, routinized elections which have recently experienced large-scale or sustained mobilization by opposition groups are most likely to be susceptible to breakdown than closed regimes.

Hollowed out Heartland, USA: How capital sacrificed communities and paved the way for authoritarian populism

Communities prosper when they are able to appropriate the wealth they produce and their institutions make peoples’ lives meaningful. They wither when the institutions that permit this weaken or vanish. Sacrifice zones — abandoned, economically shattered places, with growing social and health problems — are spreading in historically white rural areas and small towns across the United States. Rural decline, rooted in economic restructuring and financialization, causes severe stress, exacerbates racial resentment, and creates a breeding ground for regressive authoritarian politics. A multidimensional approach must analytically connect long-term and recent trends affecting economy and livelihoods, institutions, health, and community life. The “racial resentment” and “economic distress” explanations for authoritarian populism are inextricably connected. Since the 1980s, and in intensified form after the 2008 financial crisis, capital has systematically undermined the institutions — mutually-owned banks, credit unions, mom-and-pop businesses, family farms — that fostered reinvestment of locally-produced wealth, especially but not only in rural areas. While many Trump voters were affluent suburbanites, another important sector of supporters consists of downwardly mobile inhabitants of zones where financialization and austerity destroyed the institutions that earlier allowed people to appropriate the wealth that they produced and where the social safety net, always fragile, is increasingly in tatters. The United States now has a poor and near-poor majority. Scholars and the media have underestimated the human toll of this crisis and the interconnectedness of the multiple processes of social decomposition affecting rural zones.

Reappraisal of the Developmental Welfare State Theory on the Underdevelopment of State Welfare in East Asian Growth Economies: The Case of South Korea

The purpose of this article is to re-examine the perspective on the relationship between East Asia’s growth economy and its underdevelopment of state welfare, by analyzing the Korean case between the 1960s and the 1980s, when active governmental intervention in the economy led to rapid economic growth. This article aims to answer the questions ‘Was state welfare genuinely underdeveloped under the growth economy of East Asia?’ and ‘If so, which factors hindered its development?’ To this end, this article first refutes the perspective regarding the underdevelopment of state welfare in East Asian growth economies, through an empirical analysis of the following: overlooking diverse indices in measuring the level of state welfare, a comparison without considering different budget systems, negligence of output aspects, giving undue value to quantitative methods and paying little attention to welfare beneficiary aspect. The article traces the reasons why the growth economy experienced the underdevelopment of state welfare using comprehensive frameworks: large-scale resource distribution to defense and education, low level of electoral competition, underdevelopment of socialist political parties, political authoritarianism and weak opposition, lack of social citizenship and preservation of family values, underdevelopment of trade unionism, and inactivation of civil society.

Veiled memories: an ethnography of the single-party regime in Turkey

Under the omnipresence of surveillance, control and fear of the state as ontological signifiers, not only agency but also subjective and collective memories of people become unspeakable, hidden and veiled. This paper aims to underline the difficulties of doing ethnographic research on the secular Turkish state formation and its diverse apparatuses with a particular focus on the single-party regime that started in 1923 and ended in 1950. This work claims that fear of the state, inaccessibility of the state archives, the inscription of protective laws such as lèse-majesté for founding figures of the state, and the senility of survivors result in muteness, the emergence of politics of forgetting and remembering that diminish the possibility of studying relations between the authoritarian secular state and its Muslim subjects. It is argued that the hegemony of emotions of fear of the state and insecurity have turned historical and ethnographic research on the subject matter into a difficult one. Based on a recently conducted large-scale oral history study in different parts of Turkey, this paper also analyzes the resistance, resilience, and silence of mass Muslim population towards diverse forms of state-sponsored authoritarian secular politics along with western and Turkish nationalist top-down regulations of the new regime.

Political leaders, media and authoritarianism in Croatia: the media strikes back?

ABSTRACTThis study focuses on the media representation of political leaders in Croatia, the newest Member State of the European Union, with an aim to capture the ways in which political leaders have been portrayed in the media in periods characterised with varying degrees of illiberalism. A longitudinal content analysis of three daily newspapers from 1990 to 2018 reveals that in spite of the fact that media freedom decreased in the last decade, and the society became more authoritarian, there is little evidence to suggest that the press is increasingly demonstrating illiberal tendencies in the era of illiberal drift.

Civil Society Capture by Early Stage Autocrats in Well-Developed Democracies – The Case of Austria

AbstractThe article presents the results of an empirical study on the current framework conditions for civil society organizations in Austria. The results are linked to findings on how authoritarian governments deal with civil society. The research shows that along with the current government’s gradual process towards right-wing populism and authoritarianism, the general political climate has changed with regard to civil society, possibilities of political participation, and the public financing of civil society organizations. The findings are linked to the concept of civil society capture and reflect the overall wave of autocratization discussed by other authors. The analysis of the gradual process of the development of authoritarian politics in a relatively stable and developed democracy reveals the relevance of the findings for current tendencies in many other countries.

How to educate an authoritarian society: conflicting views on school reform for a fascist society in interwar Switzerland

ABSTRACT Despite its image as an antifascist stronghold, interwar-Switzerland hosted several fascist movements. So far, research has not remarked upon the extraordinarily strong involvement of educators in these groups. Exploiting Switzerland’s particular situation in this period, this paper aims to shed new light on the relationship between authoritarian politics and education. To this end, we analyse the educational writings by activists of the main Swiss fascist organisation Nationale Front (NF), between 1933 and 1938, asking what role they attributed schooling in bringing their societal vision about, as well as which reforms they proposed for schooling to conform to this role. We argue that Swiss interwar-fascists considered schooling a conservative institution that could not contribute to producing an authoritarian revolution, but had to be reformed thereafter. However, despite sharing a unified vision of the future fascist Volksgemeinschaft, NF activists did not agree on what kind of schools were needed to educate it. Swiss fascists never even came close to attaining the position of power needed to execute their ideas, and thus were never burdened by practical or institutional difficulties of government. Consequently, these results suggest that, despite its totalitarian aspiration, interwar European authoritarianism did not come with a clear educational vision.

Politics of precarity: neoliberal academia under austerity measures and authoritarian threat

In recent years, precarity has become the norm rather than an exception in contemporary European academia. This special issue on politics of precarity examines the economic, social and political crisis‐effects of the neoliberal turn in academia. It analyses how austerity measures and authoritarian politics have led to a proliferation of precarity among, mostly young, scholars.

China's Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927–1949, by Brian Tsui

In Shanghai in 2010, as the city prepared to welcome visitors to its world fair, posters were plastered across the city urging residents not to wear pyjamas in public. ‘Be civilized for the Expo’, the slogan read. Such pleas harked back to an earlier moment in Chinese history: the New Life movement of the 1930s, a mass campaign launched by the Nationalist government to transform the outlook and comportment of the Chinese people. Nationalist leaders tried to reform behaviours that they believed lowered China’s standing in the world. No longer, they hoped, would citizens urinate in the street, spit on the ground and disrespect the national anthem. Scholarship has tended to see the New Life campaign as evidence of the hollow authoritarian politics of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, the Guomindang (GMD). In trying to remould the Chinese people from the top down, historians have argued, the GMD revealed its tendency...

Corvus Corax: medieval rock, the minstrel, and cosmopolitanism as anti-nationalism

AbstractThis article explores the German band Corvus Corax and their reinterpretion of the Middle Ages as a creative answer to Germany's problematic history of nationalism. Invoking the community ideals and ideological values of the 1960s and 1970s, which, in the context of the GDR took on even more significance, Corvus Corax borrowed ‘authentic’ medieval texts and melodies, rendering them in acoustic arrangements inspired by medieval performance practices. In short, German ‘folk’ bands invented ‘medieval’ rock to sidestep Nazi connotations with the word ‘folk’. Besides invoking the semantic shift from ‘folk’ to ‘medieval’, I argue that the band adopts the figure of the medieval minstrel and asserts that his multilingual texts, ‘foreign’ instruments and colourful performance practices speak to an inclusive, diverse and cosmopolitan community. Paradoxically, they do so by first positioning the medieval minstrel as a punked-up, marginalised ‘outcast’. The cultural capital of this outcast status helps medieval rock bands like Corvus Corax carve out a space for marginalised voices who, in their new privileged positions, offer a form of retribution for politics of exclusion, racism and authoritarianism.

Political Corruption, Government Legitimacy and Democracy in Nigeria, 1999 – 2015

The paper examined the effects of corruption among public officials and political leaders on government legitimacy and democracy in Nigeria between 1999 and 2015. The paper, which adopts documentary and qualitative descriptive methods in collecting and analyzing the relevant data, is underpinned by the elite theory. The contention of the paper is that endemic corruption in the polity can be situated among the ruling elites who control political power and resources. In the context of the power relations framework, state powers are manipulated and appropriated to amass resources and sustain networks of relationships core to consolidating elites hold on power as well as perpetuating the subordination of the un-elite majority. The finding from the paper shows that political corruption undermined the ability of government to deliver public goods and services, contributing in part to the decline in popular trust in government, institutions, processes and the attendant dissatisfaction with the political system in Nigeria during the period. The paper recommends that the political leadership in Nigeria needed to reconsider their present kind of politics which focuses more on money and self for a service oriented politics. This will enhance the rule of law, popular participation in governance, governmental accountability and legitimacy; and thereby halt the slide towards political authoritarianism and democratic reversal in Nigeria.

Resurgent Authoritarianism and the International Rule of Law

Modern rule of law and post-war constitutionalism are both anchored in rights-based limitations on state authority. Rule-of-law norms and principles, at both domestic and international levels, are designed to protect the freedom and dignity of the person. Given this “thick” conception of the rule of law, authoritarian practices that remove constraints on domestic political leaders and weaken mechanisms for holding them accountable necessarily erode both domestic and international rule of law. Drawing on political science research on authoritarian politics, this study identifies three core elements of authoritarian political strategies: subordination of the judiciary, suppression of independent news media and freedom of expression, and restrictions on the ability of civil society groups to organize and participate in public life. According to available data, each of these three practices has become increasingly common in recent years. This study offers a composite measure of the core authoritarian practices and uses it to identify the countries that have shown the most marked increases in authoritarianism. The spread and deepening of these authoritarian practices in diverse regimes around the world diminishes international rule of law. The conclusion argues that resurgent authoritarianism degrades international rule of law even if this is defined as the specifically post-Cold War international legal order.

Dependent development and authoritarian state capitalism: Democratic backsliding and the rise of the accumulative state in Hungary

Democracy is in crisis around the globe. Hungary was long heralded as a champion of political and economic liberalization in postsocialist Eastern Europe. However, the country recently emerged as a striking example of the current wave of autocratization. Starting from the premise that political regimes are the results of class compromises, in this paper, I argue that Hungary’s authoritarian turn is in part rooted in the reconfiguration of the dominant power bloc and the concomitant change in the state’s strategy. The aim of this article is twofold. Firstly, I analyze the socio-economic roots of Hungary’s authoritarian turn and propose a new, theoretically driven causal narrative challenging and extending existing accounts. Relying on macro-statistics and a new dataset on the economic elite, I describe how the collapse of the class compromise that sustained the post-socialist liberal competition state engendered the revolt of the national bourgeoisie and the rise of the new authoritarian regime of accumulation. Secondly, I offer a new conceptualization regarding the political-economic nature of the new regime: the accumulative state. I empirically identify the political instruments through which the accumulative state props up capital accumulation and the ensuing social conflicts. Instead of portraying Hungary as a divergence from liberal capitalist norms based on a textbook view of markets, I situate authoritarian politics in the logic of capital accumulation. However, I stress that the post-2010 accumulative state serves only short-term capital accumulation and fails to enact long-term structural transformation.

Las políticas de Pedro I con respecto a la comunidad Sefardí y la Sinagoga del Tránsito como testimonio político material

King Peter I of Castile, moved by his authoritarian politics and economic ambitions, became a huge benefactor of the Sephardi community. However, this pro-Jewish attitude was used by Henry of Trastámara as a fail-safe propaganda weapon during the First Castilian Civil War. In order to win people over to his cause, count Henry influenced the public consciousness against the Jews; he even attacked some Castilian Jewries. Tránsito Synagogue of Toledo it is a material testimony of these events and a building full of political connotations and purpose.   &nbsp

Protest in electoral autocracies: a new dataset

ABSTRACTA growing literature explores the causes and consequences of dramatic political protests in autocracies. Yet, we know comparatively little about other forms of protests in these regimes. The Lankina Russian Protest-Event Dataset (LAruPED) facilitates the investigation of protest in Russia, a classic example of an electoral authoritarian regime. The data, which are human-coded, identify, in wave one, protests across Russia from March 2007 until 2016. Unlike other datasets, which focus on political protests, LAruPED covers a wide range of social and economic protests and imposes no limitations on the minimum number of protesters involved in events as a prerequisite for inclusion in the dataset. We introduce LAruPED and discuss how it differs from other data. We also present examples from work that leverages the dataset to show how the data could be used to explore questions of authoritarian politics, highlighting variation in the type of suppressed protests in electoral autocracies.