The durability of governance reform: A two-wave audit of notice and comment policymaking in China

The notice and comment process, in which government organizations make public draft laws and regulations and solicit feedback on these proposals, is a prominent governance reform in contemporary China. This article examines the durability of notice and comment policymaking by conducting a pair of audits of the practices of dozens of central government ministries and provincial governments. There are a number of reasons to expect that it is difficult to sustain governance reforms in China. Nevertheless, the audits—which the authors carried out in 2014 and 2021—demonstrate that, subject to a number of constraints, notice and comment policymaking was routinely implemented by government organizations throughout the period under analysis. Although the notice and comment process is a durable governance reform, additional research is needed before it can be concluded that the procedure brings more than a veneer of transparency to Chinese policymaking.     

How post-imperial democracies die: A comparison of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia

While socioeconomic crisis – like in Germany after World War I and in Russia after the Cold War – is a necessary precondition for democratic erosion resulting in a breakdown of democracy, it is not a sufficient condition. We identify, in the cases of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia, a post-imperial syndrome that includes nationalist irredentism and an ambition to return to the status quo ante of a “great power” as a main reason why democratization faces specific and enormous challenges for former “great powers.” A slide back to authoritarianism in post-imperial democracies takes a high toll. It is facilitated by international political conflicts, including annexation and wars, with new neighbouring states that harbor territories perceived as external national homelands like the Sudetenland or Crimea.     

Crises and critical junctures in authoritarian regimes: addressing uprisings’ temporalities and discontinuities

Abstract

In this article, we aim at sharpening common understandings of the notion of political crisis to better explain the trajectories of authoritarian transformations during popular uprisings. We make three major claims. First, we propose a definition of crisis as brief moments of institutional fluidity and openness in which a process can take different directions. We delineate the crisis concept from the concept of critical junctures and outline how our approach contributes to the methodological debate on ‘near misses’. Second, we indicate how the de-institutionalisation processes leading up to a crisis are to be analytically distinguished from within-crisis moments. We argue in favour of a discontinuity approach that takes into account the different temporalities of gradual lead-up processes and rapid within-crisis dynamics. Finally, we illustrate our theoretical and analytical reasoning with concrete cases from the authoritarian crises of the Arab uprisings, whilst suggesting that our argument can travel to other areas of research in which crisis narratives have gained prominence.     

Political competition and de facto judicial independence in non‐democracies

This article investigates the role of political competition in explaining de facto judicial independence in non‐democratic regimes. It argues that the electoral, political insurance explanation popular in the study of courts in democracies also offers explanatory power in the autocratic context, despite popular wisdom otherwise: due to the relatively greater risks of losing power in non‐democracies, electoral competition is highly salient when present. This is examined via hierarchical and fixed effects models that show competition strongly associated with increased levels of independence. This relationship is robust to alternative model and data specification, and has strong out‐of‐sample predictive accuracy.     

Rethinking Chile’s ‘Chicago Boys’: neoliberal technocrats or revolutionary vanguard?

The term ‘Chicago Boys’ remains closely associated with the orthodox neoliberal adjustment implemented in Chile by the Pinochet dictatorship. The conventional portrayal of the Chicago Boys is of a group of US-trained, technocratic economists who institutionalised neoliberal principles and technocratic prerogatives in public policymaking in Chile. This article will contend the Chicago Boys were much more than neoliberal technocrats: they were a revolutionary vanguard that designed and led a capitalist revolution and radically altered the material and ideological foundations of the nation.     

From the web to the streets: internet and protests under authoritarian regimes

This article systematically investigates the relationship between internet use and protests in authoritarian states and democracies. It argues that unlike in democracies, internet use has facilitated the occurrence of protests in authoritarian regimes, developing a theoretical rationale for this claim and substantiating it with robust empirical evidence. The article argues that whereas information could already flow relatively freely in democracies, the use of the internet has increased access to information in authoritarian regimes despite authoritarian attempts to control cyberspace. The article suggests this increased access to information positively affects protesting in authoritarian states via four complementary causal pathways: (1) by reducing the communication costs for oppositional movements; (2) by instigating attitudinal change; (3) decreasing the informational uncertainty for potential protesters; and (4) through the mobilizing effect of the spread of dramatic videos and images. These causal pathways are illustrated using anecdotal evidence from the Tunisian revolution (2010–2011). The general claim that internet use has facilitated the occurrence of protests under authoritarian rule is systematically tested in a global quantitative study using country-year data from 1990 to 2013. Internet use increases the expected number of protests in authoritarian states as hypothesized. This effect remains robust across a number of model specifications.     

公共服务领域内政府与社会组织的关系构建——基于博弈论研究的视角

国家与社会的现实关系在很大程度上反映着一个国家的治理水平。在公共服务领域,政府与社会组织之间的关系构建是一个重要的研究内容。在我国社会快速转型和变迁的背景下,构建中国式的政府与社会组织之间的关系显得更加迫切。文章运用博弈的视角,梳理了政府与社会组织关系的理论发展脉络,提出了变和博弈理念下我国政府与社会组织的关系——竞争与合作的关系,是中国式政府与社会关系发展的必然。最后,文章总结,在公共服务领域内,竞争与合作的关系模式必须通过构建政府与社会组织之间的信任机制、合作机制,同时,通过一系列制度化的发展才能够得以实现,最终发挥政府与社会组织在公共服务领域内的重要作用。     

Elections,repression and authoritarian survival in post-transition Indonesia and the Philippines

Abstract

This paper compares post-transition Philippines and Indonesia, examining the ways in which authoritarian practices survive and are shaped by regime transition. It examines the transition process in each case, to identify the problems of management and control that regime elites set for themselves in the post-dictatorship period. It is argued that Philippine elites set out to disaggregate and domesticate an already mobilized opposition movement, while the Indonesian authorities strove to keep similar popular politics from mobilizing. The paper then considers how these political objectives find expression in the structuring of two important institutional fields – the electoral and policy making processes – concluding with an examination of how these considerations influence patterns of repression. In particular, the paper also investigates whether repression targets primarily proscribed modes of activity, or sets out to threaten and intimidate proscribed organizations and people. Differences in electoral and policy processes, as well as in patterns of repression, demonstrate the ways in which authoritarianism can survive regime transitions and can undermine the promise of democracy in the post-dictatorship period.     

Unacademic academics: Holocaust deniers and trivializers in post-Communist Romania

The Romanian Academy (and much of the country's historical establishment) is packed with Holocaust deniers and trivializers, many of whom indulge in Holocaust obfuscation against the background of the post-Communist “competitive martyrdom” between the victims of the Holocaust and the Gulag. Quite a few of these deniers and trivializers are also former secret police informers. On closer examination, however, it turns out that explaining the reluctance to face the country's “dark past” as being the independent variable resultant of the post “Romanianization” of the Communist Party and its Securitate is a partial explanation at best. A substantially more convincing one might be provided by scrutinizing the phenomenon as the product of post-mnemonic cultural traumas.     

How can opposition support authoritarianism? Lessons from Egypt

While many observers of politics in the Arab world hold that the emergence of political opposition would be a harbinger of democratization, this article argues that opposition can contribute to the stability and resilience of authoritarian regimes. Based on an empirical analysis of contemporary Egyptian politics, it is shown that, despite the repressive nature of the Egyptian state, political opposition has emerged in various societal contexts: political parties, human rights associations and a popular Islamist current. In order to understand this development, it is important to investigate authoritarian survival strategies ‘beyond coercion’. While militant resistance from radical Islamists has been successfully oppressed during the 1990s, the Egyptian incumbents reacted to the challenge of societal dissent by co-opting opposition forces. As a consequence, political opposition in Egypt serves functions entirely different from those in liberal democracies. It contributes to the legitimacy of the Egyptian state. Moreover, by tolerating controlled opposition, societal dissent can be better observed, channelled and moderated. From a more general perspective, political dissent exists in various settings: it prevails not only among opposition, but also within the political elite leading to a delicate juggling act of competing ideas and interests performed at the helm of the polity.