Download or read book Surviving Autocracy written by Masha Gessen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times “A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.
Download or read book Democrats and Autocrats written by Agustina Giraudy and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book advances a new explanation to account for the continuity of undemocratic subnational regimes (SURs) in democratic countries.
Download or read book How Autocrats Rise written by Ali Riaz and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-13 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past decade and a half, the world has witnessed a precipitous decline of democratic countries and the consequent rise of autocrats. How Autocrats Rise: Sequences of Democratic Backsliding challenges the conventional wisdom and offers an institutional-ideological approach to understand the phenomenon, examines the steps of emergent autocrats, and analyzes the methods of legitimizing their rules. Employing the new framework, the book provides incisive analyses of four countries located in four different regions with dissimilar national features – Bangladesh, Bolivia, Hungary, and Turkey, and demonstrates that political developments in these countries have followed a similar, specific pattern resulting in various shades of autocracy. Theoretically enriched and empirically grounded, this exceptionally timely book makes significant contribution to the democratic backsliding literature while offering insights on how to forestall an autocratic era.
Download or read book Twilight of Democracy written by Anne Applebaum and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document ... is Applebaum's answer." —Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism. From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.
Download or read book Citizen Support for Democratic and Autocratic Regimes written by Marlene Mauk and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-04-29 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citizen Support for Democratic and Autocratic Regimes takes a political-culture perspective on the struggle between democracy and autocracy by examining how these regimes fare in the eyes of their citizens. Taking a globally comparative approach, it studies both the levels as well as the individual- and system-level sources of political support in democracies and autocracies worldwide. The book develops an explanatory model of regime support which includes both individual- and system level determinants and specifies not only the general causal mechanisms and pathways through which these determinants affect regime support but also spells out how these effects might vary between the two types of regimes. It empirically tests its propositions using multi-level structural equation modeling and a comprehensive dataset that combines recent public-opinion data from six cross-national survey projects with aggregate data from various sources for more than 100 democracies and autocracies. It finds that both the levels and individual-level sources of regime support are the same in democracies and autocracies, but that the way in which system-level context factors affect regime support differs between the two types of regimes. The results enhance our understanding of what determines citizen support for fundamentally different regimes, help assessing the present and future stability of democracies and autocracies, and provide clear policy implications to those interested in strengthening support for democracy and/or fostering democratic change in autocracies. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston, and Jonathan Slapin, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich
Download or read book Dictators and Autocrats written by Klaus Larres and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-31 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In order to truly understand the emergence, endurance, and legacy of autocracy, this volume of engaging essays explores how autocratic power is acquired, exercised, and transferred or abruptly ended through the careers and politics of influential figures in more than 20 countries and six regions. The book looks at both traditional "hard" dictators, such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and more modern "soft" or populist autocrats, who are in the process of transforming once fully democratic countries into autocratic states, including Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The authors touch on a wide range of autocratic and dictatorial figures in the past and present, including present-day autocrats, such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, military leaders, and democratic leaders with authoritarian aspirations. They analyze the transition of selected autocrats from democratic or benign semi-democratic systems to harsher forms of autocracy, with either quite disastrous or more successful outcomes. An ideal reader for students and scholars, as well as the general public, interested in international affairs, leadership studies, contemporary history and politics, global studies, security studies, economics, psychology, and behavioral studies.
Download or read book Laboratories of Autocracy written by David Pepper and published by St. Helena Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It’s the statehouses, stupid.” Laboratories of Autocracy shows that far more than the high-profile antics of politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jim Jordan—and yes, even bigger than Donald Trump’s "Big Lie”—it’s anonymous, often corrupt politicians in statehouses across the country who pose the greatest dangers to American democracy. Because these statehouses no longer operate as functioning democracies, these unknown politicians have all the incentive to keep doing greater damage, and can not be held accountable however extreme they get. This has driven steep declines in states like Ohio and others across the country. And collectively, it’s placed American democracy in its greatest peril since the dawn of the Jim Crow era. But Pepper doesn’t stop there. He lays out a robust pro-democracy agenda outlining how everyone from elected officials to business leaders to everyday citizens can fight back.
Download or read book Autocracy Rising written by Javier Corrales and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2023-02-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Nicolás Maduro reinvented authoritarianism for the twenty-first centurVenezuela, which once enjoyed periods of democratically elected governments in the latter half of the twentieth century, has descended into autocratic rule, coupled with economic collapse. In his new book, Autocracy Rising, veteran scholar of Latin American politics Javier Corrales explores how and why this happened. Corrales focuses on two themes: party systems and institutional capacity. He argues that Venezuela’s democratic backsliding advanced when the ruling party obtained far too much electoral clout while the opposition fragmented. The state then took control of formerly independent agencies of the state. This allowed the ruling party to use and abuse of the law to favor the president—which in turn generated a permanent economic crisis. After succeeding Hugo Chávez in 2013, Nicolás Maduro confronted, unexpectedly, another change in the party system: a rising opposition. This triggered deeper autocratization. To survive, the state was compelled to modernize autocratic practices and seek alliances with sinister partners. In short, Maduro concentrated power, paradoxically, by sharing power. Autocracy Rising compares what occurred in Venezuela to twenty other cases throughout Latin America where presidents were forced out of office. Corrales illuminates the depressing cycle in which semi-authoritarian regimes become increasingly autocratic in response to crisis, only to cause new crises that lead to even greater authoritarianism.
Download or read book The Autocratic Middle Class written by Bryn Rosenfeld and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The conventional wisdom is that a growing middle class will give rise to democracy. Yet the middle classes of the developing world have grown at a remarkable pace over the past two decades, and much of this growth has taken place in countries that remain nondemocratic. Rosenfeld explains this phenomenon by showing how modern autocracies secure support from key middle-class constituencies. Drawing on original surveys, interviews, archival documents, and secondary sources collected from nine months in the field, she compares the experiences of recent post-communist countries, including Russia, the Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, to show that under autocracy, state efforts weaken support for democracy, especially among the middle class. When autocratic states engage extensively in their economies - by offering state employment, offering perks to those to those who are loyal, and threatening dismissal to those who are disloyal - the middle classes become dependent on the state for economic opportunities and career advancement, and, ultimately, do not support a shift toward democratization. Her argument explains why popular support for Ukraine's Orange Revolution unraveled or why Russians did not protest evidence of massive electoral fraud. The author's research questions the assumption that a rising share of educated, white-collar workers always makes the conditions for democracy more favorable, and why dependence on the state has such pernicious consequences for democratization"--
Download or read book Backsliding written by Stephan Haggard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assaults on democracy are increasingly coming from the actions of duly elected governments, rather than coups. Backsliding examines the processes through which elected rulers weaken checks on executive power, curtail political and civil liberties, and undermine the integrity of the electoral system. Drawing on detailed case studies, including the United States and countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa, the book focuses on three, inter-related causal mechanisms: the pernicious effects of polarization; realignments of party systems that enable elected autocrats to gain legislative power; and the incremental nature of derogations, which divides oppositions and keeps them off balance. A concluding chapter looks at the international context of backsliding and the role of new technologies in these processes. An online appendix provides detailed accounts of backsliding in 16 countries, which can be found at www.cambridge.org/backsliding.
Download or read book How Democracies Die written by Steven Levitsky and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Time • Foreign Affairs • WBUR • Paste Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved. Praise for How Democracies Die “What we desperately need is a sober, dispassionate look at the current state of affairs. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two of the most respected scholars in the field of democracy studies, offer just that.”—The Washington Post “Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.”—Ezra Klein, Vox “If you only read one book for the rest of the year, read How Democracies Die. . . .This is not a book for just Democrats or Republicans. It is a book for all Americans. It is nonpartisan. It is fact based. It is deeply rooted in history. . . . The best commentary on our politics, no contest.”—Michael Morrell, former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (via Twitter) “A smart and deeply informed book about the ways in which democracy is being undermined in dozens of countries around the world, and in ways that are perfectly legal.”—Fareed Zakaria, CNN
Download or read book Shock to the System written by Michael K. Miller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How violent events and autocratic parties trigger democratic change How do democracies emerge? Shock to the System presents a novel theory of democratization that focuses on how events like coups, wars, and elections disrupt autocratic regimes and trigger democratic change. Employing the broadest qualitative and quantitative analyses of democratization to date, Michael Miller demonstrates that more than nine in ten transitions since 1800 occur in one of two ways: countries democratize following a major violent shock or an established ruling party democratizes through elections and regains power within democracy. This framework fundamentally reorients theories on democratization by showing that violent upheavals and the preservation of autocrats in power—events typically viewed as antithetical to democracy—are in fact central to its foundation. Through in-depth examinations of 139 democratic transitions, Miller shows how democratization frequently follows both domestic shocks (coups, civil wars, and assassinations) and international shocks (defeat in war and withdrawal of an autocratic hegemon) due to autocratic insecurity and openings for opposition actors. He also shows how transitions guided by ruling parties spring from their electoral confidence in democracy. Both contexts limit the power autocrats sacrifice by accepting democratization, smoothing along the transition. Miller provides new insights into democratization’s predictors, the limited gains from events like the Arab Spring, the best routes to democratization for long-term stability, and the future of global democracy. Disputing commonly held ideas about violent events and their effects on democracy, Shock to the System offers new perspectives on how regimes are transformed.
Download or read book Autocracy and Democracy written by Ralph K. White and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1972 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Competitive Authoritarianism written by Steven Levitsky and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-16 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized.
Download or read book How Autocrats Compete written by Yonatan L. Morse and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how autocrats compete in unfair elections in Africa and highlights the strengths and weaknesses of modern authoritarianism.
Download or read book The Return of Great Power Rivalry written by Matthew Kroenig and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to answer to a central international politics: why do great powers rise and fall? It provides an innovative argument about how domestic political institutions are the key to a state's ability to amass power and influence in the international system. This text also offers a sweeping historical analysis of democratic and autocratic competitors from ancient Greece through the Cold War. This book employs a unique framework to understand and analyze the state of today's competition between the democratic United States and its autocratic competitors, Russia and China.
Download or read book The Return of Great Power Rivalry written by Matthew Kroenig and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States of America has been the most powerful country in the world for over seventy years, but recently the U.S. National Security Strategy declared that the return of great power competition with Russia and China is the greatest threat to U.S. national security. Further, many analysts predict that America's autocratic rivals will have at least some success in disrupting-and, in the longer term, possibly even displacing-U.S. global leadership. Brilliant and engagingly written, The Return of Great Power Rivalry argues that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Drawing on an extraordinary range of historical evidence and the works of figures like Herodotus, Machiavelli, and Montesquieu and combining it with cutting-edge social science research, Matthew Kroenig advances the riveting argument that democracies tend to excel in great power rivalries. He contends that democracies actually have unique economic, diplomatic, and military advantages in long-run geopolitical competitions. He considers autocratic advantages as well, but shows that these are more than outweighed by their vulnerabilities.Kroenig then shows these arguments through the seven most important cases of democratic-versus-autocratic rivalries throughout history, from the ancient world to the Cold War. Finally, he analyzes the new era of great power rivalry among the United States, Russia, and China through the lens of the democratic advantage argument. By advancing a "hard-power" argument for democracy, Kroenig demonstrates that despite its many problems, the U.S. is better positioned to maintain a global leadership role than either Russia or China. A vitally important book for anyone concerned about the future of global geopolitics, The Return of Great Power Rivalry provides both an innovative way of thinking about power in international politics and an optimistic assessment of the future of American global leadership.
