The Political Economy of Authoritarian Rule and Regime Transitions

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel explores political dynamics in autocracies, focusing on the strategic interactions between autocratic leaders and their challengers within and outside the regime. In particular, the panel seeks to illuminate when and how autocrats use coercive action to accumulate power or commit to sharing power with the challengers and how the leaders’ such actions have critical implications for autocratic stability and survival, politics of post-authoritarian democracies, and democratic backsliding.

First, Paine investigates the conditions under which autocrats share power with the opposition by presenting a formal model that incorporates the two core elements of power-sharing arrangements: committing to deliver more spoils to the opposition, and reallocating coercive power toward the opposition. His analysis highlights the critical role of how oppositions perceive whether the power-sharing bolsters their offensive and defensive capabilities in predicting power-sharing stability.

Second, Sudduth examines how and when autocrats promote the consolidation of power by highlighting the critical role of the leader's entry manner in shaping the trajectory of power concentration. Her theoretical framework posits that initially-weak leaders are most likely to successfully promote the consolidation of power should they survive the critical first few years, challenging the literature's argument that weak leaders are most likely to share power. Empirical results using novel data on military and civilian elite purges covering 102 authoritarian countries between 1980 and 2010 support her arguments.

Third, Nalepa and Piotrowska study the dynamics of “purges” of security apparatus in post-authoritarian democracies. In particular, the paper explores how the composition and capacity of subnational verification commissions affect the purge decisions. Utilizing archival data and voting and parliament speech data, they examine whether and how high capacity translates into a greater degree of selective purges, while ideological extremity would lead to more thorough purges in the case of Poland.

Finally, Frantz and Wright examine how incumbent governments' actions to undermine democracy would give rise to polarization. While most studies argue that polarization causes democratic backsliding, this paper demonstrates that leaders' actions to degrade democracy lead to polarization and deepen the backsliding's progression. Using survey experiments, survey data from electoral democracies, and expert-coded global macro-data, the paper shows that political polarization is endogenous to democratic backsliding.

Sub Unit

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Chair

• Andrew Little University of California-Berkeley

Discussant

• Andrew Little University of California-Berkeley

Individual Presentations

• A Theory of Institutional and Coercive Power Sharing - Jack Paine, Emory University

• Elite Purges and Consolidation of Power - Jun Koga Sudduth, Indiana University, Bloomington

• Who Verifies?: Effect of Verification Commissions on Purge Decisions - Barbara Maria Piotrowska, King's College London; Monika Nalepa, University of Chicago

• Democratic Backsliding and Endogenous Polarization - Erica Frantz, Michigan State University; Joseph Wright, Pennsylvania State University