Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want
21 August 2024
State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism
Figure (Book Cover): Brown, N. J. (2024). Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want [...]. University of Michigan. https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/n870zt44s#description
Bucerius Fellow Julian G. Waller is Researcher Analyst at the Center Naval Analyses and Professorial Lecturer in Political Science at George Washington University. Together with Nathan J. Brown, Steven D. Schaaf and Samer Anabtawi, he has published a book entitled "Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism". The publication makes it clear that autocratic rulers do not have comprehensive control or power per se.
Description:
"Authoritarianism seems to be everywhere in the political world—even the definition of authoritarianism as any form of non-democratic governance has grown very broad. Attempts to explain authoritarian rule as a function of the interests or needs of the ruler or regime can be misleading. Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want argues that to understand how authoritarian systems work we need to look not only at the interests and intentions of those at the top, but also at the inner workings of the various parts of the state. Courts, elections, security force structure, and intelligence gathering are seen as structured and geared toward helping maintain the regime. Yet authoritarian regimes do not all operate the same way in the day-to-day and year-to-year tumble of politics.
In Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want, the authors find that when state bodies form strong institutional patterns and forge links with key allies both inside the state and outside of it, they can define interests and missions that are different from those at the top of the regime. By focusing on three such structures (parliaments, constitutional courts, and official religious institutions), the book shows that the degree of autonomy realized by a particular part of the state rests on how thoroughly it is institutionalized and how strong its links are with constituencies. Instead of viewing authoritarian governance as something that reduces politics to rulers' whims and opposition movements, the authors show how it operates—and how much what we call "authoritarianism" varies."
The book can be downloaded free of charge at the following link:
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