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Authoritarian Statecraft 2.0

Thu, September 5, 8:00 to 9:30am, Marriott Philadelphia Downtown, Franklin 11

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Traditional approaches to the study of authoritarian politics tend to focus on the role of the regime, dominating and, if needed, manipulating the population at a whim. At the same time, the all-powerful authoritarian regime is deemed constantly on the verge of collapse, having to fight for its longevity and survival. Authoritarian politics is considered a mere tool that the autocrat can deploy to prevent the regime’s collapse. While suggestions of a post-institutionalist turn of authoritarianism studies opened the field to study questions of authoritarian legitimation beyond repression and co-optation as main pillars of authoritarian politics, the research focus on top-down strategies has remained unchanged, adding legitimation to the autocrat’s “tool kit” to be deployed when needed to ensure regime survival. Indeed, this research stream has significantly contributed to a better understanding of authoritarian politics by re-introducing ideational factors and acknowledging the existence of populations under authoritarian rule. Yet, while there is a growing body of literature introducing the role of the population, popular support and dissent to the study of authoritarian politics (e.g., Weiss 2014), this is still under-theorized and empirically under-studied. To intervene in this debate, this panel focuses on authoritarian statecraft with a comparative lens. The aim is to better understand what types of popular support matter under authoritarianism, how to theorize popular support for authoritarian regimes, and why and how some legitimation attempts are successful while others fail (Gerschewski 2013; Przeworski 2022; Ding 2022). To do so, the papers empirically study how to observe legitimation and genuine popular support (or the lack thereof) for authoritarian regimes as well as the mobilization of popular pro-regime support.



By drawing on insights from China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, this panel studies authoritarian statecraft in a comparative approach across forms of governance, the Chinese Communist Party, Russia’s Presidential system, and the Saudi monarchy. Two papers focus on the role of the legal system, the perception of democratic participation in it and the rule of law in China. Conducting a survey experiment, Yingjie Fan and Yutian An study whether the jury-like institution of the lay assessor’s system enhances the judicial legitimacy. Gary Ziwen Zu explores the influence of lawyers on the relationship between courts and the public through a survey experiment among both Chinese lawyers and citizens. Grigore Pop-Eleches et al. draw on daily surveys in Russia to explore the extent to which results of authoritarian elections – focusing on Russia’s upcoming presidential election in mid-March 2024 – are a product of outright fraud or genuine support. The remaining two papers evaluate original data from Saudi Arabia. Conducting a survey experiment, Azim Wazeer explores in how far international economic activity mobilizes nationalist sentiment and legitimize the government domestically. Finally, Bruno Schmidt-Feuerheerd draws on extensive fieldwork in Saudi Arabia to explain how nationalism contributes to the mobilization of grassroots intellectuals and social media influencers to defend nation, state, and monarchy, while pushing the demands beyond the officials’ desires. By putting these diverse cases in conversation with each other, this panel will attempt to generalize the findings and reflect on the limitations of the comparison. Thereby, this panel is relevant for the study of authoritarian politics beyond the present cases.

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