Determinants of health and education equality: evidence from post-Soviet states

PurposeThis article examines the determinants of social equality in the education and healthcare sectors in the 15 post-Soviet states. Focussing on regime type and civil society organisations (CSOs), it argues that countries where liberal principles of democracy are achieved or have a stronger civil society deliver a more equitable social policy.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical analysis rests upon a time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) analysis from 1992 to 2019. Data are collected from the Quality of Government (QoG) Dataset 2020 and the Variates of Democracy (V-DEM) Dataset 2020.FindingsThe findings demonstrate that while regime type only partially accounts for social equality, as electoral autocracies do not have more equitable social policy than close regime types and democracy weakly explains equality levels, the strength of CSOs is associated with more equality.Originality/valueThe article challenges dominant approaches that consider electoral democracy to be related to more equal social policy and demonstrates that de-facto free and fair elections do not impinge on social equality, while the strength of liberal and civil liberties and CSOs correlate with more equitable social policy.

Policing Protest in Russia

As Russia’s post-communist regime descends deeper into authoritarianism, protest politics has become a regular feature of the political landscape. As such, President Putin increasingly faces the “dictator’s dilemma”: How much coercion to deploy against protesters without incurring a social backlash against the regime? That question more generally is now part of analytical consideration in comparative scholarship on social movements and contentious politics. This article contributes to the comparative discussion, first, through an elaboration of an original conceptual typology of protest-policing strategies, applicable to democratic and authoritarian regime types. Second, the article applies this conceptual scheme to Russia to illustrate the variant protest-policing strategies employed during the post-communist period. The research explains how Putin’s authoritarian regime responded to the challenge of the dictator’s dilemma by enacting protest-policing reforms. Inspired by policing trends in the Western democracies, these reforms entail a shift from confrontation-based to containment-based tactics. The article shows variation and adaptation in the way protesters were policed across Russia’s transition from unconsolidated democracy to consolidated authoritarianism. Finally, the article suggests the consequences of protest-policing reform for the ruling regime.

Political Control

Political leaders use different tactics to ensure widespread compliance with state policies and to minimize resistance. Scholarship tends to treat different tactics individually, suggesting fundamental dissimilarities in underpinning logic and goals. We introduce political control as a concept that unifies these different tactics within a single framework and demonstrate the analytical utility of considering seemingly disparate strategies in conversation rather than in isolation. We synthesize a growing recent literature on political control, including innovative approaches to repression as well as studies of indoctrination, distribution, and infiltration. We argue that tactics of political control can be understood to vary along two primary dimensions: the level of violence and the materiality of rewards. We highlight recent inquiry into the downstream effects of political control. We conclude with a call for more research on political control that considers combinations of different tactics, across regime types, in a world where tolerance of violent repression is diminishing. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The sources of military dissent: Why and how the US military contests civilian decisions about the use of force

How do militaries push back when they oppose civilian initiatives? This article analyses the sources and character of military dissent, focusing on the United States. It details the sources of military preferences over policy and strategy outcomes, emphasising the interplay of role conceptions with other material and ideational factors. It then presents a repertoire of means – tactics of dissent – through which military leaders can exert pressure, constraining and shaping civilians’ decision-making calculus and the implementation of policy and strategy choices. Empirically, it traces military dissent in the 1990s-era humanitarian interventions; the US's ‘War on Drugs’ beginning in the 1980s; and the Afghanistan surge debate in 2009. In so doing, the article contributes to a broader research programme on military dissent across regime types. It also expands scholars’ understandings of preference formation within militaries and illuminates the various pathways through which military dissent operates and potentially undermines civilian control.

Bridling Dictators

Authoritarian regimes are usually seen as being run by arbitrary and often violent dictators. However, this is a misreading of most dictatorial regimes. Based on a wide comparative analysis of communist single-party, military, electoral authoritarian, personal dictatorial and dynastic monarchical regimes, this book argues that such leaderships actually function on the basis of a set of accepted rules. These rules are outlined, their operation in different regime types described, and their differential application across those regimes explained. This provides a new understanding of how these different types of regime function and recasts our understanding of the way leadership in authoritarian regimes works.

On Authoritarian Leadership

This chapter outlines the established view of the way leadership in an authoritarian regime operates, emphasizing its arbitrary and violent dimensions. It criticizes this literature in terms of both its assumptions and its empirical accuracy. The chapter then discusses the key concepts used in the following analysis. It identifies five regime types: single party, electoral authoritarian, military, monarchy and personal dictatorship. It then discusses the nature of authoritarian leadership, conceived in terms of an oligarchy, including the bases upon which personal power can rest. The chapter discusses the nature of rules, introducing the three types of rules identified as central to the conduct of oligarch politics: operational, relational and constitutive rules. An explanation of the structure and a chapter summary of the book follows. An appendix to this chapter lists the twenty-nine rules identified as structuring leadership politics in authoritarian regimes.

Rules, and Personal and Monarchical Regimes

This chapter analyses the way the rules work in two different types of authoritarian system, the personal dictatorship and the dynastic monarchy. These regime types are represented by Belarus under Lukashenka and Russia under Putin, and by the Gulf monarchies. The key characteristic of the personal regime is the dominant leader, and of the dynastic monarchy the ruling family. These institutions (dictator and family) profoundly affect the way the rules function. There is a strong imperative in both regime types to emphasize the insulation of the oligarchy from the elite, although this is achieved in different ways.

Regime and Sociology: A Comparative History of Sociology in Postwar Europe with Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, this article presents a systematic comparison of differences in the institutional success of sociology in 25 European countries during the academic expansion from 1945 until the late 1960s. Combining context-sensitive national histories of sociology, concept formation, and formal analyses of necessary and sufficient conditions, the article searches for historical explanations for both successful and inhibited processes of the institutionalization of sociology. Concretely, it assesses the interplay of political regime types, the continuous presence of sociological prewar traditions, political Catholicism, and the effects of sociological communities in neighboring countries and how their various combinations are related to more or less well-established sociologies. The results can help explain adversary effects under democratic conditions as well as supportive factors under nondemocratic conditions.