Authoritarian System Research Articles

Social Identities in the Policy Process of Authoritarian Systems

The integration of the social–psychological social identity approach to policy process research has recently generated new insights on policy-making. Empirical applications for established democracies and multilevel settings such as the European Union have identified five general types of social identities that are relevant for the preferences and behavior of policy actors and their stability and change over time. Social identities are based on joint memberships in social groups, such as organizations, demographic/biographical identities, sectors, locations, and informal opportunities for exchange (which may result in programmatic groups and identities). Some of these social groups, above all pluralistic interest associations and political parties, are directly related to the settings of embedded democracies. This article sheds light on the traveling capacity of the Social Identities in the Policy Process (SIPP) perspective by applying it to the Russian political system. An analysis of policy actors’ social identities in two federal ministries shows that in autocracies, interest intermediation, legitimacy, and influence on policy processes run through professional and informal groups when competing organizations and democratic institutions are absent. The results indicate that the SIPP perspective is adaptable to policy processes in different contexts but that the importance of identity types varies.

Propaganda and authority in José Ricardo Morales’ play Los culpables (1964): a connection with the Chilean context

ABSTRACT Throughout recent history, Chilean society has suffered severe socio-political events, such as the advent of authoritarian regimes like Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1989) disseminating propaganda to defend political power and control citizens. This article critically analyzes and discusses the issue of military regimes performing authoritarian power and political repression against their citizens, which, in turn, is connected with the Chilean context of the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. Using a discourse analysis approach, this study examines José Ricardo Morales’ play Los culpables to critique the emergence of an authoritarian political-military system disseminating political montage against innocent citizens throughout the twentieth century. The analysis of the play reveals an avant la lettre discourse on authoritarianism, which is relevant to shed light on a new interpretation of the current use of propaganda and violence as a form of political action by the Chilean government.

How to Train Your Dragon

This article examines the issue of democratic breakthroughs in highly geopoliticized, fractured regions in the post-Soviet space. While recognizing the political challenges of democratic transitions in such regions, it investigates specific conditions conducive to effective democratic openings in such regions. Using a case study method, it focuses on Armenia’s Velvet Revolution in 2018, which successfully challenged the previously-entrenched authoritarian regime in the country. This was particularly significant as it occurred in Russia’s security orbit. Armenia has been firmly wedged in Russia-centric regional organizations, in parallel to the deep bilateral ties between the two countries developed since the Soviet collapse. This article argues, first, that the efficacy of nonviolent civil disobedience campaign played a key role in ushering a peaceful democratic breakthrough. This strategy is also credited for explaining Russian restraint as the events unfolded throughout the year. Second, it also highlights the specific form of Armenia’s authoritarianism and the institutionalization of the state that it had produced. It posits an autocrat’s dilemma: greater state institutionalization to defend the “soft” authoritarian system at some point becomes a liability. This dual-track approach to the study of Armenia’s Velvet Revolution, the civil society and the state, is also used to explain Russian restraint as a factor in this case. The article concludes with a brief application of this dual-track transition model to the unyielding mass protests in Belarus, also occurring in Russia’s security orbit.

People-Powered and Non-Violent Social Movements: Forcing Gradualist Democratic Reforms in Authoritarian Societies

Not all successful unarmed civil insurrections against dictatorships take place in a dramatic mass uprising with hundreds of thousands occupying central squares in the capital city. There have also been cases of nonviolent struggles against autocratic regimes that failed to topple the dictatorship in a revolutionary wave, but did succeed in forcing a series of legal, constitutional and institutional reforms over a period of several years that eventually evolved into a liberal democratic order. These more gradualist transitions have taken place across different regions and against different kinds of authoritarian systems. This webinar will tell the story of pro-democracy movements in three of these countries—Brazil, South Korea and Kenya—and how they were able to force, over time, autocratic governments to agree to substantive democratic reforms. By focusing on the role of civil society, this presentation challenges dominant, top-down, institution- and elite-based approaches to democratization.

Navigating Extinction: Zen Buddhism and Eco-Anarchism

What can esoteric knowledge and spiritual practices from the East teach us about the deep psychological roots of domination and hierarchy? In what ways have ancient Buddhist sages acted as anarchist exemplars and deep ecologists long before these traditions began in the West? How might these anarchistic spiritual traditions inform our approaches to work in education, expand our notions of community, help us navigate ecological collapse, and contribute to our efforts to sustain living systems and rekindle our connection to the myriad sentient inhabitants of the places we live beyond the reaches of capital and the State? This paper will examine the anti-doctrine doctrine of Zen Buddhism as a concrete and embodied system of thought and practice for seeing through the delusions of the ego and the psychological and cultural conditioning these delusions engender. What will also be acknowledged is the general lack of attention this spiritual tradition has given to the capitalistic, authoritarian, and anti-ecological systems that tap into and flow from these delusions. It will be argued that these experiential approaches to overcoming the tyranny of the ego have significant implications for loosening the grip of hierarchical thinking, capitalist hyper-consumption, centralized systems of obedience and command, and human destruction of the biosphere.

What types of political regimes subsidize fuel consumption?

Recent studies suggest that political institutions have little impact on the size of consumer fossil fuel subsidies, concluding instead that subsidies reflect country-specific and slowly changing economic factors. Such findings bode poorly for reforming these costly policies. I argue that this conclusion stems from an overly narrow view of the kinds of non-democratic regimes that exist. I introduce a large literature from political science that distinguishes “electoral authoritarian” regimes from other non-democracies and develop a theoretical argument connecting the former's reliance on broad-based public support to higher levels of fossil fuel subsidies. I test the argument using a price-gap measure of domestic consumer gasoline subsides for more than 160 countries for most years between 1990 and 2014. The results demonstrate that the emergence of electoral authoritarianism is associated with larger fuel subsidies, and that an increase in hydrocarbon production revenue has a larger impact on the size of subsidies within electoral authoritarian systems than in other regime types. Reform efforts must acknowledge this political logic while focusing on how to offset subsidies with less environmentally harmful measures.

Resisting the Tide: The Roles of Ideology in Sustaining Alternative Organizing at a Self-managed Cooperative

This paper examines how organizational ideology can be collectively mobilized to sustain an alternative organizational form—a self-managed cooperative—in resistance to institutional prescriptions perceived as hostile. Based on an ethnographic study of the Venezuelan cooperative Cecosesola, we identify three roles through which ideology enables the reproduction of the alternative form over time: ideology as a mobilizing normative framework to justify resistance; as a cultural-cognitive framework to engage members and integrate them into the resistance project; and as a regulatory framework ensuring member compliance. However, we find that in parallel with sustaining self-management as an alternative form, mobilizing ideology may also paradoxically entail costs in terms of individual sacrifices, exclusion of members and reduction of group heterogeneity, leading to the creation of an authoritarian system. These findings shed light on the ideological drivers of institutional resistance and bring new insights to understand the challenge of sustaining self-management and other alternative organizational forms within a hostile institutional context.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note

The aging leader: Approaching age as a factor in international relations

This article goes against the grain of traditional approaches in international relations by claiming that a leader’s biological age is a factor in this individual’s execution of foreign policy. The traditional logic of political science that has generally been diminishing the impact of a leader’s individual features on policy for the sake of institutional procedures needs to be reassessed. A common assumption is that an aging king or president, especially those entering the eighth or ninth decade of their lives, are likely to make prudent, balanced, and wise political decisions due to their rich experience. However, this notion lacks sufficient empirical support from history. The physical “wear and tear” of the aging leader, along with their declining psychological functions, are likely to negatively impact their foreign-policy decisions that may fall under the influence of the leader’s information overload, cognitive narcissism, profound stubbornness, as well as their irrational sense of urgency, and their tendency to overcompensate. In democracies, the political tenure of top politicians is limited by constitutional terms or scheduled elections. In authoritarian systems, only the top figure’s death or incapacitation become actual “schedulers” of their political tenure. Although a person’s advanced age should not disqualify him or her from public office, without institutional checks on the leader’s judgements and behavior as well as the critical power of public opinion and the press, the aging authoritarian leader can become unpredictably risky.

Authoritarianism: Change and Continuity in the Global Perspective

The article analyzes the specificity and distinctiveness of authoritarian regimes operating in a global network of complex and multidimensional international relations. The author of the article asks the question: to what extent the dynamically changing paradigm of authoritarian ideology is responsible for the occurrence of various types of tensions, rivalries, and antagonisms caused by authoritarian regimes, the effects and consequences of which affect not only national and regional political conditions but also cause severe international repercussions? The applied research method allows exposing the complex particularity of authoritarian regimes in the context of the multidimensional dynamics of recent geopolitical changes. It is crucial when a number of modern ideological trends often downplay the brutal nature of many authoritarian systems and even treat the “authoritarian model” – especially in the form of socialist autocracies – as a “specific historical phenomenon” trying to resolve many complex and multiple political and economic issues.

Appealing. The Biden Doctrine in the “Cold Democracy” Age

Western democracies have lost their compass. They are cold and with no appeal; not looked upon as an efficient and effective model of governance. The Biden Doctrine might be defined as Joe Biden’s worldview divided between democracy and authoritarianism, as well as his attempt to make democracy attractive by having it deliver effectively on people’s concerns and needs. The Doctrine is also characterized by a commitment to the respect of human rights: its concern is not spreading democracy, but to show that liberal democracy can effectively deliver at home and abroad more efficiently than authoritarian systems. The Biden Doctrine must not only focus on the revival of democracy but also face the challenge posed by authoritarianism’s appeal. The Doctrine must stand up against the authoritarian rule, to promote liberal democratic government and respect for human rights as a solution to the distrust of democracy, in the era of cold democracies.

Eine handlungsfähigere EU für eine sicherere (östliche) Nachbarschaft – die EU-Belarus-Beziehungen

Since the fraudulent presidential elections in Belarus in August 2020, the country has been in the midpoint of a geopolitical stand-off. Unprecedented violence against peaceful protesters, economic and political sanctions against the regime in Minsk and an orchestrated migration crisis at the European Union’s (EU) external borders have shaped EU-Belarus relations in recent months. In the wake of the crises, the EU stepped up its measures against the Lukashenko regime to be more resilient to hybrid attacks by an authoritarian system and to support the Belarusian democracy movement. The contributions fundament is based on the EU’s Global Strategy, which underpins and provides a framework for the EU-Belarus relations. Furthermore, the article discusses whether the objectives of the strategy have been achieved and if the EU as an international actor can generate security in their Eastern Neighbourhood.

Политические режимы и режимные изменения в пене популистской волны

The article studies populist regimes, their relationship with authoritarianism and democracy and modes of their transformation. First, the approaches to conceptualizing populism are critically analyzed; second, the concepts are systematized through the maneuvering on the ladder of abstraction; third, the ways of classifying populist regimes are studied, and fourth, the influence of populism on political regime change is assessed. The authors made an attempt of radial categorization of populism having distinguished its central and peripheral features. On the basis of the minimalist definition of populism by C. Mudde “the idea” revealing itself in the antiestablishment and will of the people discourse, was taken as a central category. Such approach allowed to distinguish three species of populism including ideational, personalist and charismatic, thus making the categorization applicable for comparative research. The conceptualization of populist regimes was reviewed. It is noted that populist regime is rarely conceptualized as a separate type of political regime and is more often associated with personalist regime or as a sub-type of democratic regime. The further development of the B.G. Peters and J. Pierre’s approach led to conclude that populism is a regime modification, inherent in all types if political regimes. Democratic and hybrid regimes are more inclined to such regime modification, that is why the populist regimes evolve multidirectionally. The study concludes that the establishment of populist regime in polities at different levels of political development – from consolidated democracies to premobilized authoritarian and democratic systems – leads to differentiation of functions. In the former cases populist regimes foster the redetermination of the effectiveness criteria for ruling elites and democratic governance in general, and in the latter – populist regimes support the general framework of the in-country political process by filling the institutional gaps.

Între nostalgia restauratoare şi muzeul fantomelor utopiei. Practici nostalgice în spaţiul cultural (post)sovietic

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, particularly during the hard transition of the 90s, the highly polarized Russian society revealed two main forms of remembering and coping with recent past. This past was either idealized as a time of imperial glory, national pride, and relative welfare, even if it also included periods of anomie (the late Stalin era) or stagnation (the Brejnev era), either treated as a period of significant traumas that necessitated persistent recognition and working through. As for the official memory regimes, if the first post-Soviet decade was dominated by the totalitarian anticommunist (and antinostalgic) paradigm, the 2000s brought a radical turn, with the rise of victimhood nationalism and “redemptive” authoritarianism of the Putin era. The new mnemonic regime is shaped by an official, “patriotic” restorative nostalgia that is also placed in the centre of the presidential cultural programe designed to legitimize the authoritarian system and to support the restoration of a great, mythical Russia. Against this background, new forms of counter-memory and counter-nostalgia began to manifest within both the social and cultural field. One of the most remarkable exemples is offered within the “new realities” created by the young photographer Danila Tkachenko, who’s compositions marked by a “second-hand nostalgia” challenge both the Soviet utopia and its official nostalgic-populist recostructions. By means of a special nostalgic technique based on reframing the remnants and the “trukhliashechkas” of the Soviet past – (re)interpreted as the symbols of “the perfect technocratic future that never came” –, the young artist also deconstruct the imagined “sovietness” embedded in the cultural-political products shaped by the statist patriotic nostalgia. His representations of the post-Soviet landscape are those of “a ghost of utopia”, a land of ruins, of abandoned cities, of ecological disasters, and of millions unburied deads of the GULAG.

LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORK IN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM OF UKRAINE

The article examines the role of leadership in the modernization of the educational system of Ukraine. It is proved that educational leadership as a management paradigm acquires special importance in the conditions of military aggression of the Russian Federation and will contribute to the restoration and development of the education system after the war. One of the main issues of Ukrainian education is that after the country gained independence, the system developed by inertia which lead to increased distance from the real needs of democratic development of society, state and economy. This author used qualitative methods to collect data in order to prepare list of recommendations which will allow transform from authoritarian system of teaching to modern, western orientated system where teacher is a leader not just a source of information flow. Teacher-leader has to have charisma, developed emotional intelligence, service motives to his followers. To achieve success, modern Ukrainian educational system has to be student-centered where student is not inactive object of pedagogical influence of a teacher, on opposite, he become an equal contributor in the learning course. The author discovered that students found more important competencies that are formed during the course then teacher’s professionalism and knowledge of the subject. Given recommendation prevent any intolerance or discrimination against students and create space for students to cultivate personal development that can be used in future careers. However, in order to achieve best results the educational institution must consider the recommendation as general and adapt them to their environment instead of just implementing them.

Kyrgyzstan’s New Kingpin

This article analyzes Sadyr Japarov's first year in power as the newly elected President of the Kyrgyz Republic. In learning from the mistakes of his governing predecessors, Japarov is attempting to construct and consolidate an authoritarian system. Japarov may ultimately succeed in this endeavor, but Kyrgyzstan will likely forfeit much of its sovereignty to Russia along with its quasi-democratic institutions in exchange for a strongman-style government.

Authoritarianism: Is There a Future?

Author analyzes the role of authoritarian regimes in the contemporary world, he characterizes their specific features in the first place determined by their historical traditions and political culture. The author pays attention to post-communist, post-soviet as well as Muslim authoritarian models. Also, he estimates perspectives of authoritarianism for the future, its capacities for the survival in conditions of the modern world. How great is the potential of authoritarianism, how limited is it by its conservatism, and how open is it to innovation? What is the effectiveness of an authoritarian system in the context of global changes taking place in the world, which are largely determined by scientific and technological progress, communication technologies? The author tries to consider these issues on the example of the countries of the East. On the one hand, some authoritarian regimes are ready to adapt to ongoing transformations, including in the political sphere, for the sake of their survival. In their practice, they use democratic norms, allow the activities of parliament, opposition parties, while striving, however, to fully maintain their own control over the state. They are aware that the softening, liberalization of the authoritarian system can lead to its elimination. And therefore, on the other hand, authoritarians use any situation, especially its aggravation, to tighten their rule. Authoritarianism has existed in various forms at almost all times. It was formed on the basis of the political culture in which the title role belonged to the state, and therefore to those who were currently in power. In this context, current authoritarianisms have direct analogies with their predecessors. Some analysts tend to view each variant of illiberal government as a unique, "competitive" democracy, as a "hybrid" authoritarianism. Whatever definitions are offered, the essence of authoritarianism does not change from this. Taking into account the national specifics in each individual country, authoritarianism remains a global, one might say, inevitable phenomenon that will continue to exist in different versions, and may even strengthen its position, which is the case today.

Institution of the plenipotentiary ombudsman for human rights in Tajikistan in the normative and practical dimension

The office of the Plenipotentiary Ombudsman for Human Rights was established in Tajikistan on the basis of a relevant bill adopted on March 20, 2008. Statutory regulations normalize every important issue concerning the organization and modes of operation of the ombudsman. Fundamentally they generally meet the standards of analogous acts in force in democratic states. In the normative dimension, one can only object to the method of selecting the Ombudsman, dependent on the President of Tajikistan, which, in turn, questions his independence from the presidential center of power. On the other hand, in the practical dimension, within the reality of the authoritarian system functioning in Tajikistan, the Ombudsman's institution is a façade and is not able to fulfill the functions for which it was appointed. This is evidenced by the Ombudsman's reports, clearly lacking cases relating to first-generation human rights.

Missed Constitutional Moments and Real Constitutional Conflicts in Hungary 1989 v. 2011

This paper, examining the Hungarian example argues that that the price is high if a constitutional moment to adopt a constitution based on wide societal compromise has been missed. The constitution-making process might then be completed either by activist courts or by activist political forces. Hungary experienced two major constitutional reforms, both missing a consensual constitutional momentum. The first transformation in 1989–90, which replaced the socialist authoritarian system by democracy, was brought about by political elites, lacking democratic legitimacy, keeping the formal legal framework of the socialist constitution. The second reform in 2011 brought a formally new constitution (Fundamental Law of Hungary), initiated and adopted solely by the governing party (FIDESZ) with a constitutional majority, without consensus. The Constitutional Court both times attempted to play an active, corrective role in the aftermath of the constitution-making.

Pozycja ustrojowa prezydenta w konstytucjach Litwy z 1922, 1928 i 1992 r.

The aim of this article is to compare the political position of the president in the parliamentary and authoritarian system of interwar Lithuania and the semi-presidential system of contemporary Lithuania. The analysis covers the regulations of three Lithuanian constitutions – those of 1922, 1928 and 1992. Such a strategy seems to be of great cognitive value, as it allows to show the differences and similarities, as well as the evolution of the role of the President in different periods of the Republic of Lithuania. The article assesses the most important legal provisions concerning the political position of the Head of State. The subject under study is still relevant, since Lithuania, as in the period of its first independence until 1926, adopted the same political system, restoring its pre-war solutions (including reactivating the institution of the Head of State). Both the current semi-presidential model of the Second Republic of Lithuania and the parliamentary model of the First Republic of Lithuania until 1926 represent the same type of democracy as a parliamentary system (with the superior role of the Sejm in the system of power).