Diffusion of Authoritarian Regimes

• In Event: Digital Authoritarianism, Regime Survival, and Authoritarian Diffusion

Abstract

In its latest report on the worldwide state of democracy, the project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) warns about the strengthening of a general trend of autocratization. While these findings are debatable, scholars have long been worrying about the rise of illiberal right-wing parties in the Western world and the general end to the period of excitement and triumph of democracies that the late 90s and the early 2000s represented. In the last decade, researchers have produced a sizable literature on democratic backsliding, linking it to economic challenges, polarized societies, or illiberal tendencies of the electorate to name a few. While these studies have significantly advanced our knowledge of the local factors that help illiberal leaders to take over democracies, they miss an international link that can explain why democracies are failing worldwide in such a short period of time.In this paper, I will try to address this issue by claiming that authoritarian regimes spread in waves following the logic of diffusion. The main argument is that both the elite and the people perceive a specific authoritarian regime as particularly successful in dealing with society and personal level issues and thus demand the political leaders to adopt such a regime. In order to verify if the diffusion of authoritarian regimes truly occurs, I will adopt a similar methodology to widely known studies on the diffusion of democracies, using econometrics to measure if proximity is an important factor in determining a country’s regime. To capture diffusion, this paper will adopt a new way to classify political regimes. The most used classifications are democracy-centered and ill-suited to study changes toward very specific authoritarian regimes. Equally, the most commonly used classifications for authoritarian regimes, based on the leaders of the executive, only partially justify the mechanism of emulation, since they group together dictatorships with very different ideological backgrounds. All this considered, I used the economic ideology of each country to classify authoritarian regimes. Early findings show that proximity heavily correlates with regime type, suggesting diffusion of authoritarian regimes is indeed present.

Author

• Bruno Della Sala, Universität Witten/Herdecke