Strategies of Political Control and Regime Survival in Autocracies

• In Event: Perspectives on Authoritarian Durability and Survival

Abstract

Autocratic regimes face the constant challenge of sustaining political control to ensure their survival and use multifaceted strategies to generate support, temper opposition activity, and maintain power. These strategies can be broadly categorized into three main forms: repression, co-optation, and indoctrination, with each having distinct consequences and costs. However, existing studies tend to examine each strategy in isolation, and little work has examined the relationship between these strategies or what combination of strategies are most effective for ensuring regime survival. Furthermore, indoctrination remains relatively understudied as a tool of political control in the literature, partly due to the absence of reliable cross-national data. This paper fills this gap by drawing on the novel Varieties of Indoctrination dataset, which offers a wide range of indices and indicators on indoctrination across 160 post-WWII countries, and existing measures of repression and co-optation. We demonstrate that there is considerable variation in the use of strategies of political control both across regimes and over time. We argue that autocratic regimes tailor their use of these strategies by adapting to the political context, and identify the regime’s time horizon as one particularly important factor that drives the selection of the strategies of political control. We also investigate what mixture of strategies of political control have the strongest implications for regime durability, and whether such strategies have interactive effects for maintaining power. In sum, our work highlights the importance of considering tools of political control in conjunction with one another and the complex influence that they have on regime survival.

Authors

• Anja Neundorf, Unveristy of Glasgow

• Wooseok Kim, University of Glasgow

• Eugenia Nazrullaeva, London School of Economics

• K Northmore-Ball

• Katerina Tertytchnaya, University of Oxford