Authoritarianism

This article examines why secret police units are staffed by surprisingly mediocre agents, arguing that career incentives in hierarchical security bureaucracies push underperforming officers toward clandestine work. Using biographic records for 4,287 Argentine officers (1975–83), the authors show that low-achieving officials, stuck in lower ranks and facing discharge risk, were more likely to join the secret police—an association tied to career preservation rather than ideology.

Using four nationally representative U.S. surveys (2006–2011), this article shows about half of Americans consistently endorse at least one political conspiracy theory. Support for conspiracism varies across specific theories and is not concentrated among authoritarians, the politically conservative, or the uninformed. Instead, endorsement is strongly associated with receptivity to other unseen intentional forces and with attraction to Manichean, black‑and‑white narratives.

This research asks how authoritarian rulers choose which local elites to co-opt with rents. The core argument is that elites who occupy central positions in their locality’s family network exert greater social influence over community members and are therefore more likely to be targeted with distributive benefits as a tool of social control.

Authoritarian regimes may adopt meritocratic political selection not to expand redistribution but to co-opt large numbers of ordinary citizens by offering a credible path to socioeconomic advancement. This argument depends on the selection process being seen as inclusive and rule-based rather than arbitrary.

This study asks whether people living under authoritarianism form stable, constrained preferences across multiple policy domains and whether autocratic incentives to suppress preference formation prevent such stability. Using three surveys—two longitudinal—conducted in China, the authors examine intertemporal stability in a range of policy and value areas and report that many preferences show substantial stability over month-long and year-long intervals. The paper preserves caveats about measurement and context and offers recommendations for measuring preference configuration in authoritarian settings.

Primary education is often seen as a pro-poor redistributive policy tied to democratization. However, this study reveals that autocrats also frequently pursued such goals historically.

Does state repression itself — even without deliberate information manipulation — change public attitudes so that citizens come to endorse the punished behaviors' condemnation and support further repression? The paper introduces the "authoritarian cue effect," where citizens interpret acts of repression as signals of the regime's disapproval and update their beliefs and attitudes accordingly.

This paper asks how foreign donors respond when recipient governments pass restrictive laws targeting NGOs: do donors push back by increasing democracy support or back down by cutting it? Using dyadic aid-flow data, an original cross-national data set of NGO laws, and multiple research designs, the authors examine whether and how donors change democracy-promotion funding after such laws are enacted. Their central contribution is empirical evidence on donor behavior in the aftermath of restrictive NGO legislation and its potential incentives for governments considering curbs on civil society.

Autocratic environments give regime-linked candidates informal access to power, while opposition legislators lack those backdoor channels. The argument presented is that formal, institutional authorities tailored to constituency service allow opposition politicians to supply the goods voters expect — leveling the playing field in competition for public support.

The post-d democratization era saw some autocratic ruling parties not only survive but also thrive. This piece examines 41 transitions since 1940, including cases from Mexico, Taiwan, Bulgaria, and Ghana, revealing how these parties maintained influence despite the shift to democracy.

Nationwide mass protests in electoral authoritarian regimes like Russia often spark localized activism. This study examines the conditions under which such protest waves produce lasting social movement organizations using comparative analysis across four Russian regions during and after the 2011-2012 "For Fair Elections" (FFE) protests. The research argues that sustained local SMOs emerge when veteran activists perceive opportunities to leverage national-level mobilization for ongoing regional political goals.

Many studies claim that Regime Type (democracy vs. nondemocracy) influences states' decisions to pursue nuclear weapons.

This article argues that economic sanctions often undermine democracy in targeted states. Economic hardship produced by sanctions can be leveraged by incumbent leaders to consolidate authoritarian rule, weaken opposition forces, and justify restrictions on political liberties by portraying sanctions as an external threat to regime survival.

Recent work argues that democracies are generally more vulnerable to economic coercion than authoritarian regimes, yet most sanctions target nondemocratic states. This article reconciles that puzzle by arguing that authoritarians are resilient to sanctions most of the time—but become unusually vulnerable during specific "windows of opportunity" created by domestic instability.

This paper asks whether and how state actors in autocracies use messages about problems in established democracies to make democracy itself seem less attractive. Rex Weiye Deng studies a tactic he terms "propaganda of democratic flaws," combining large-scale text analysis of official posts on Chinese social media with two original survey experiments in China to examine whether amplifying foreign democratic problems affects people’s evaluations of democratic systems and of their own regime.