POLI107 - Week 3 Lecture Notes - Authoritarian Regimes

Flashcards about authoritarian regimes, their characteristics, and methods of maintaining power, including legitimation, repression, and co-optation.

Authoritarian Regime

A regime where the executive achieved power through undemocratic means or limited electoral competition

Types of Authoritarian Regimes

Military regimes, personalist regimes, monarchies, dominant-party regimes

The Authoritarian Setting

The absence of an independent authority to enforce agreements, leading to violence as the ultimate arbiter

Problem of Authoritarian Control

Conflicts between those who rule and those who are ruled

Problem of Authoritarian Power-Sharing

Conflicts within the ruling coalition

Three Pillars of Stability (Gerschewski 2013)

Legitimation, repression, and co-operation

Legitimation

The process of gaining support, aiming for active consent, compliance, passive obedience, or mere toleration

Extreme Examples of Legitimation

Ideology-based regimes like North Korea, religion-based regimes like Iran

More Common Forms of Legitimation

Performance legitimation like China and Vietnam, charismatic leadership like Turkey, procedure-based like Singapore

Methods of Legitimation

Education systems, textbooks, hard propaganda, soft propaganda, and zombie election observers (election monitors used to create artificial legitimacy)

Repression

The actual or threatened use of physical sanctions against an individual or organization to impose a cost and deter specific activities

High-Intensity Repression

Violent repression of mass demonstrations, violent campaigns against parties, and attempted assassination or imprisonment of opposition leaders

Low-Intensity Repression

Use of surveillance apparatus, low-intensity physical harassment and intimidation, denial of job and education opportunities, curtailment of political rights

Ways Autocrats Engage in Repression

Surveillance, censorship, political imprisonment, denial of service attacks, internet control, journalist killings, emigration restrictions

Co-optation

The capacity to tie strategically relevant actors to the regime elite, turning potential enemies into supporters and allies

Who is Co-opted

Opposition actors, military, business elites, civil society, religious actors

How Co-optation Works

Giving influence over policies, important positions, access to state resources/corruption, and building up state employment

Opposition Parties (Co-optation) under Putin

Exist, but pose no challenge to ruling party ‘United Russia’

Corruption (Co-optation) under Putin

Shown for MPs, making them more likely to be regime-royal

State-Employment (Co-optation) under Putin

Bloated public sector where people employed are more likely to be regime-critical

Repression under Putin

Murders of opposition figures, foreign agent law, repression against LGBTQ community, harsher measures since the invasion of Ukraine, ongoing censorship

Legitimation in Russia (Putin's Popularity)

Understood in the context of censorship, disinformation, and bans on alternative media