Autocratic Regimes Research Articles

The struggle of the gubernatorial Direction of the Independent Corps of Gendarmes of Bessarabia with the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP)

Among the existing institutions in the Russian Empire, responsible for the security of the autocratic regime, the Independent Corps of Gendarmes stood out. Its members were obliged to combat and annihilate various socio-political movements with a pronounced anti-government character. Among such movements and parties was the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which was also active in Bessarabia. From the moment of its emergence until the abolition of the monarchy in February 1917, this party had some influence on the revolutionary movement in the region. Organizationally structured on two levels – legal and illegal (the Combat Organization of the Revolutionary Socialist Party), the party represented a real danger to the autocratic regime. The party’s activity was closely monitored by the Regional Directorate of Gendarmes, which managed to infiltrate inside the organization a number of secret agents, who reached positions of responsibility within the committee and who kept the authorities informed of all party movements and plans. With some rare exceptions, the indigenous population remained outside the Party’s sphere of influence.

THE ROLE OF EMOTIONS IN ANTI-SEXUAL VIOLENCE GROUPS IN EGYPT

How do anti-sexual violence groups form and sustain their activism under autocratic regimes? Using the case of the anti-sexual violence groups that emerged online in Egypt in 2020, I investigate the role of emotions in sustaining the movement in the absence of political opportunities, organizational resources, and frame resonance. Drawing from the literature on emotions and social movements, I apply an analytical framework consisting of three concepts, emotion work, emotional opportunities, and emotional transformation. I show how the emotional work carried out by the online groups, and the emotional opportunities inherited from former movements have played a role in mobilizing survivors of sexual violence and transforming the emotional culture around the issue. The data were collected by carrying out interviews with founders and followers of key online accounts supplemented by a review of the groups’ online posts and the public prosecutors’ statements. The article adds to the existing literature on social movements by demonstrating the mechanisms through which emotions matter and affect movements.

The Caucasus in the 1920s – 1930s: the First Clash of the Democratic World with Russian Bolshevism and Its Consequences

The paper analyzes the historical processes taking place in the Caucasus in the 1920s-1930s, which reflect the destruction of the democratic states of the Caucasus by Rus-sian Bolshevism and the efforts of the political elite of the Caucasus to restore the independence through the unification of the Caucasus. The work highlights the actors of these dramatic events and shows the influence of domestic and foreign factors on the mentioned processes. It is emphasized that the first confrontation between Russian Bolshevism and Western-type democracy took place in the Caucasus, which ended with the defeat of the latter. Based on the critical analysis of rich primary sources, emigrant press, and the records of eyewitnesses, the paper explains the reasons for the victory of Russian Bol-shevism, on the one hand, and, of the defeat of the independent democratic states of the Caucasus, on the other hand, the importance of the unification of the Caucasus to achieve common Caucasian goals is highlighted, the indifferent attitude of the West-ern states (with some exceptions) to the ongoing processes in the Caucasus and their negative role in the victory of Russian Bolshevism is shown. It is emphasized that the pursuit of a pragmatic policy, devoid of values, which was carried out by the Western World in relation to Bolshevik Russia/Soviet Union, is disastrous even for pragmatists, that collaboration with totalitarian and autocratic regimes threatens the democracy and world order based on the basic principles of the international law. Based on the reconciliation of historical events, the paper draws parallels between the political processes going on in the period under investigation and the modern world, it is demonstrated the psycho type of Russia, which does not change historically, on one hand, and the mistakes of the Western world, which contribute to its militarization, on the other hand.

Technology adoption in autocratic economies: The role of fiscal capacity

AbstractWhat determines technology in autocratic regimes? In this paper, I assume that a rent‐extracting regime can adopt technology from the global technology frontier, tax‐paying citizens can oust the regime, and technology can decrease the ousting cost. I show that a lack of fiscal capacity can increase technology by preventing the ousting constraint from binding. Consistent with this prediction, tax collections and total factor productivity are negatively related in autocratic regimes. Extensions show that natural resources can divorce fiscal revenues from technology, which can encourage technology blocking. However, if technology adoption is socially costly, autocratic regimes can adopt too much technology.

African Union, Promotion of Democracy and Anti-Corruption Initiatives in Africa

The African Union (AU) has been pursuing one of its primary objectives of promoting democratic principles and institutions by ensuring good governance through the curbing of corruption. It is uncertain whether the democratic approach has rubbed off on its anti-corruption initiatives, given the recent performance of most AU member states on many global surveys of corruption, development and governance evaluation indexes. The paper, therefore, examined the extent to which the AU’s stance on democratic promotion has impacted on its anti-corruption initiatives in Africa. The study is qualitative and relied on data sourced from secondary sources, while content analysis was adopted for data analysis. The findings acknowledge AU's committed advancement of democracy in Africa through its different anti-corruption frameworks. But in spite of the slight improvements of some African counties on different corruption perception indexes, corruption persists in the governance of many AU member states. The study further shows inter alia that the AU’s anti-corruption initiatives have not effectively reflected the adopted measures due to uncommon democratic ideals, legitimisation of autocratic regimes, and the fact that many African states fail to uphold their obligations under the AU's anti-corruption convention. The study contends that AU’s anti-corruption bodies should ensure and encourage member states to internalise and uphold existing governance norms and accountability measures, while implementation mechanisms should be strengthened.

Sri Lanka’s political-economic crisis; corruption, abuse of power and economic crime

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the present Sri Lankan political-economic crisis and its connection to corruption. The paper will discuss the autocratic rule, elite domination of state extractive systems, which have been moulded and configured by Sri Lanka’s political environment over decades. Elite capture has become a significant factor. Sri Lanka’s authoritarian model exercised by Gotabaya Rajapaksa reduced competitive mode and shifted towards a monopolistic corruption structure, centralising on the first family and military rule where powerful elites supported the model. The paper attempts to find the connection between dysfunctional political model and economic crimes committed through several case studies.Design/methodology/approachThe paper discusses five case studies using qualitative analysis using secondary data. The insider trading case study is discussed with quantitative data. Several political and social analyses were carried out with primary data captured from field research by the author.FindingsSri Lankan economic crisis was triggered because of high-level corruption. The autocratic model introduced by the political authority failed to fight corruption. Transnational mechanisms will fail if there is no credibility and commitment in their own respective nations such as in the USA. External factors such as China in Sri Lanka did have an impact for elite capture.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is limited only to five case studies. Transnational mechanism and recommendations require a lengthy study. Only one external factor was assessed because of its significance; there could be other external factors for elite capture.Practical implicationsThis study has limited access to capture primary data because of sensitivity during a heavy autocratic regime. Because of state and self-censorship, secondary data had to be tested.Social implicationsEconomic crisis in Sri Lanka is an example to many developing nations fighting corruption. The autocratic family rule supported by external forces crippled the state anti-corruption processes. Economic crime is a key driver for poverty and economic crisis.Originality/valueThis is a unique paper that examines Sri Lanka’s present economic crisis and its political model and economic crime. The paper will discuss transnational mechanisms for anti-corruption and attempt to apply to the Sri Lankan crisis.

Disease and democracy: Political regimes and countries responsiveness to COVID-19

A widely held belief is that autocratic governments have been more effective in reducing the movement of people to curb the spread of COVID-19. Using daily information on lockdown measures and geographic mobility across more than 130 countries, we find that autocratic regimes have indeed imposed more stringent lockdowns and relied more on contact tracing. However, we find no evidence that autocratic governments were more effective in reducing travel, and evidence to the contrary: compliance with the lockdown measures taken was higher in countries with democratically accountable governments. Exploring a host of potential mechanisms, we provide suggestive evidence that democratic institutions are associated with attitudes that support collective action, such as mounting a coordinated response to a pandemic.

The European Green Deal: a gateway to strategic energy autonomy?

The concept of “strategic autonomy” embeds the political idea of “independence” and the legal notion of “sovereignty”. As the EU largely depends for energy on foreign resources, particularly from autocratic regimes, difficult governance situations, notably wars, can deeply disrupt the Union’s energy supply. Specifically, war in Ukraine has been convincingly explained as an affirmation of the opposed development of Russia’s “sphere of influence”, whereby energy supply is used as a “weapon” to create dependency across sovereign State borders. Whereas scholars have advanced a dichotomy for the EU and its Member States to escape Russia’s sphere of influence, either diversifying energy sources or accelerating the green transition, it is argued in this paper that the two approaches should be considered complementary rather than alternative. It is therefore suggested that, at least in the short term, the EU and its Member States should seek to diversify their energy sources, whilst at the same time trying to accelerate the green transition under the Green Deal as a longer-term strategy. As the EU and its Member States should qualify as “non-belligerent” vis-à-vis Russia, necessity seems the most suitable legal justification to relinquish already contracted energy supply obligations and move to a newly balanced energy policy.
 Received: 26 October 2022Accepted: 27 January 2023

Content still matters. A machine learning model for predicting news longevity from textual and context features

There is an ongoing debate about what is more important in the modern online media newsroom, whether it is the news content and worthiness, or the audience clicks. Using a dataset of over one million articles from five countries (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine) and a novel machine learning methodology, I demonstrate that the content of news articles has a significant impact on their lifespan. My findings show that articles with positive sentiment tend to be displayed longer, and that high fear emotion scores can extend the lifespan of news articles in autocratic regimes, and the impact is substantial in magnitude. This paper proposes four new methods for improving information management methodology: a flexible version of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a technique for performing relative sentiment analysis, a method for determining semantic similarity between a news article and a newspaper's dominant narrative, and a novel approach to unsupervised model validation based on inter-feature consistency.

Tunisian democratisation: dashed hopes between 2010 and 2022

ABSTRACT Beyond the euphoria of the early revolutionary moments, in 2010-2011, muted counter-revolutionary setbacks followed elite-led ‘democratisation'. For those who construed the political developments in the aftermath of the popular uprisings in Tunisia, in the wake of Ben Ali's autocratic regime dismantlement, as a first step in the direction of a ‘democratic transition', disappointments were on the horizon. By the summer of 2021, the sudden re-emergence of a powerful presidency in the name of ‘returning sovereignty to the people', while the ghost of the oligarchic state and the spectre of the authoritarian elites still hung about, opened the door for the return of a bureaucratic police state. Meanwhile, the effects of lingering economic and health crises were compounded by politico-constitutional wrangling. These further clouded an already polarised social environment and created the political conditions for the ‘restoration' of the ‘presidentialist regime’.

Failed Intelligence Reform, State Capture, and Authoritarian Turn in Serbia

Two decades after the overthrow of the autocratic regime of Slobodan Milosevic, security intelligence agencies in Serbia are not only far from being reformed, but they play a central role in democracy decline and what many academics and policy officials describe as state capture. Intelligence agencies are among the first victims of state capture and among the major instruments in further capturing state institutions. This process has been a product of the agreed transition from autocracy to democracy that prevented bloodshed but maintained a clientelist relationship between (new) democratic leadership and the (old) security apparatus. Consequently, thorough intelligence reform never happened, resulting in the survival of agencies’ strongholds of power, which facilitated the return to old secret police practice. It is not uncommon today that among important tasks of security intelligence are regime protection through suppression of political opposition and critical voices, as well as making sure that suspicious deals of those close to the ruling party run smoothly. This article aims to map and analyze events and processes that have led to these outcomes and describe how security intelligence is being instrumentalized by the ruling political party and its leader, Aleksandar Vucic.

Kamuzu Banda’s memory and negotiation of power in Malawi

This article explores how the competing narratives about Kamuzu Banda’s memory took place between 1964 and 2009 in Malawi, a period during which monuments and commemorative public holidays became the sites on which Kamuzu Banda’s memory was either reconstructed and inscribed or contested as national heritage and identity to yield legitimacy in a political struggle of negotiation of power. Drawing on archival and documentary sources, interviews and critical analysis of monuments, statues and public commemorations associated with Banda the article contends that although there were remarkable changes in reconstruction, re-interpretation and re/appropriation of Kamuzu Banda’s memory as national heritage, the utility, function and instrumentalisation of his memory remained the same for each government. Thus, just like in the autocratic government of Kamuzu Banda the re-interpretation of his memory during the democratic government of Bakili Muluzi and the re-inscription of his memory by his successor Bingu Wa Mutharika served the same particular political interests of legitimizing and supporting the government in power even though the rhetoric was made to sound and appear as serving the ideals of democracy in Malawi. Ultimately, the article shows that Banda’s memory became a site for the negotiation of power. The article contributes to our understanding of how public memory is mobilized by political elites to support and legitimize a government in power. It also points to the fact that meanings of heritage change with changing political situations.

Leader Turnover, Regime Type, and Growth Volatility

AbstractHow do leaders influence national-level economic outcomes? We address this question by considering how leadership turnover influences volatility in economic growth. In doing so, we theorize that leaders from mixed regimes will reduce economic volatility due to domestic political incentives to create stable economic outcomes. Furthermore, we decompose the influence of leaders in non-democratic regimes and argue that leaders in party-based authoritarian regimes will also reduce economic volatility. To test our hypotheses, we focus on the effect of leadership turnover due to natural leader death to control for issues of endogeneity. We find that leaders in mixed regimes reduce volatility more than leaders in autocratic and democratic regimes and that leaders in party-based authoritarian regimes reduce volatility more than those in military or monarchy-based regimes. We conclude by explaining the implications of our findings for the study of leaders in international politics and their impact on economic growth and development.

Contesting the integration narrative: Shifting perceptions of EUrope

The European Union (EU) has long projected the vision of an integrating Europe, centred on successful regional integration, as a better geopolitical model in comparison to ‘others’, such as the Cold War superpowers, US neoconservativism or diverse autocratic regimes. The purported superiority of the ‘European model’ is thereby linked to credibly advancing the story of successful regional integration – internally as well as externally. This article suggests a narrative continuum between EU-optimism and EU-scepticism and argues that perceptions about the ‘success’ of the EU as a model for regional integration have changed between the first and the second decade of the new millennium. As part of this shift, EU-scepticism has gained in prominence over EU-optimism. This is related to a series of geopolitical ruptures since the late 2000s, in particular, the financial crisis, disputes on human mobility and border management, rising nationalism, Brexit and other right-wing populist movements across the continent. Focussing on the divisions within the EU as regards financial and migration policy, this article highlights three interrelated simultaneities. It argues (a) that process and discourse of (b) integration and disintegration have (c) internal and external dimensions. Empirically, it builds on interviews with African and European geopolitical elites that have been conducted as part of two research projects on external perceptions of the EU in East Africa between 2010 and 2018. It thus offers a snapshot on the shift of both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ perceptions of the EU against the context of wider geopolitical transformations over the course of this decisive decade.

News and narratives: A cointegration analysis of Russian economic policy uncertainty

Russia has become more integrated and dependent on global developments over the last decades, despite being ruled by an increasingly autocratic regime. We perform a cointegration analysis on a monthly dataset spanning from 2001 to 2021, with a limited set of variables reflecting both domestic and international developments. Results point to significant interactions between these two dimensions, mostly over the short-term. Kremlin may employ media control as a discretionary policy instrument to influence popular support for the incumbent, but this works slowly and is hardly sustainable in the long-term.

The Prescience and Ongoing Relevance Found in Thorstein Veblen’s Political Economy

This inquiry advances the thesis that selected ideas of Thorstein Veblen should be appreciated, not only for their prescience but also for their ongoing relevance. To this end our inquiry considers selected chapters of Veblen’s The Theory of Business Enterprise, especially Chapters II, IX and X. In this 1904 publication Veblen introduced the idea that a “social problem” would emerge as pecuniary ambitions of businessmen exerted influence over “media,” the variable that he singled out for its ability to carry into the future a distinct culture that underpinned the rise and achievements of the bourgeois-liberal western world. Veblen’s notion of the “social problem” is reconsidered and relied upon to explain developments in the contemporary political economy of the United States, especially the emergence of forms of patriotism and nationalism that endorse the rise of autocratic regimes, replacing what has been known and appreciated as representative democracy rooted in civil society.

Selective inclusion under competitive autocratic regimes: An example from the Turkish educational civil society

ABSTRACT This article attempts to explain the role of the educational civil society in Turkey from 2003 to 2012, where the regime excessively co-opts and controls associational life while maintaining a veneer of nominal compliance with democratic values. While existing studies fail to explain how the state interacts with these organizations during regime transitions, this research addresses this gap by adopting two educational policy periods as a case study. Thus, it shows the role of civil society under competitive autocratic regimes and which mechanisms the state uses in its shifting approach to civil society organizations in policymaking. This article claims that the state co-opts government-friendly civil society organizations and alters existing laws and regulations of educational institutions to keep the facade of democracy. Competitive autocratic state structure and its limited capacity, however, compel the regime to include different civil society organizations into the policymaking. Additionally, these organizations’ extensive knowledge and expertise are indispensable and invaluable resources the state needs to implement policies. Based on elite interviews of state officials and civil society organizations, and extensive document research, this article presents crucial insights on how competitive autocratic regimes adapt their approach to civil society.

Closing The Gap: The Politics of Property Rights in Kenya

Politicians and scholars alike have advocated for land reform as a tool to address political instability and poverty. Yet in many cases of land reform, governments provide land but withhold property rights. Why do leaders withhold these rights, and when do they grant previously withheld rights? The authors argue that land rights are a distributive good that leaders relinquish conservatively and selectively to build popular support. Using microlevel data from Kenya—a country in which successive governments have distributed most of the country’s arable land through land reform—the article finds that leaders under democratic regimes are more willing to formalize rights than those under autocratic regimes. Further, the logic of land formalization changes with regime type. Whereas autocrats prioritize land formalization among core supporters, elites facing elections prioritize pivotal swing voters. The article demonstrates how the provision of property rights is primarily a function of political calculations rather than state capacity.

Zeitenwende für die Außenwirtschaftspolitik

Abstract There is currently a geopoliticisation of foreign policy, which is primarily driven by dependencies on autocratic systems. Autocracies are constantly on the rise, especially when measured by the percentage distribution of the world population. Even though the EU still trades with significantly more democracies than autocracies, trade relations with autocracies are often characterised by strong dependencies, especially with regard to critical raw materials such as lithium or magnesium. This also applies to the market for medical products, where China in particular uses its position as the main supplier to expand its geopolitical influence. This, together with the fact that autocracies are generally more likely to impose trade restrictions than democracies, means that the EU needs a strategy for how to handle trade with autocratic regimes in the future.

Democracy and Military Oversight in Crisis: The Failed Civilianisation of Indonesia’s Ministry of Defence

In 1998, Indonesia endeavoured to civilianise its defence department after decades of military-dominated rule. This civilianisation project was widely seen as a crucial element of democratisation itself. But the initiative ended in disillusionment: by 2014, the ministry was again placed under a conservative former general, and in 2019, it came under the control of Prabowo Subianto, an ambitious ex-military leader with strong ties to the pre-1998 autocratic regime. As a result, the reform drive in the ministry came to a halt, and civilians were marginalised again. This article argues that several factors account for this reform failure: first, the ministry’s long subordination to the military prior to 1998; second, the lack of will and power on the part of civilian ministers between 1999 and 2014 to pursue meaningful reforms; and third, a larger roll-back of democratic reforms beginning in the 2010s. Embedding these latest developments in a larger historical context, the article demonstrates that the defence ministry has been a barometer of Indonesia’s fluctuating democratic quality over time.