What Can Comparative Authoritarianism Tell Us About China Under Xi Jinping (and Vice Versa)?

This paper evaluates the progress and impact of the literature on comparative authoritarianism, showing not only how its development over the previous two decades can help us understand China’s authoritarian politics better, but also how the latter can move the former forward. We focus on two important topic areas in the literature: authoritarian power-sharing and autocratic politics of information (e.g., partial media freedom and government censorship). For the first topic, we shall review the literature on the authoritarian power-sharing between dictators and their allies and explicate how this conceptual innovation helps us understand the institutional foundation of China’s regime stability and phenomenal economic performance before Xi Jinping. The analysis then provides us a baseline for assessing China’s economic and political future under Xi Jinping given his clear departure from the pre-existing power-sharing framework. Finally, this paper also assesses the relevance of the literature on authoritarian politics of information to the Chinese context. In sum, we not only emphasize the conceptual contributions of the literature of comparative authoritarianism to the field of Chinese politics, but also identify lacunae in the current literature and avenues for future research that post-Xi political developments have made visible to us.

Illiberalism and the democratic paradox: The infernal dialectic of neoliberal emancipation

The main trust of this article unfolds around the impasse of democratic politics today, marked by the fading belief in the presumably superior architecture of liberal democratic institutions to nurture emancipation on the one hand, and the seemingly inexorable rise of a variety of populist political movements on the other. The first part of the article focuses on the lure of autocratic populism. The second part considers how transforming neoliberal governance arrangements pioneered post-truth autocratic politics/policies in articulation with the imposition of market rule and, in doing so, cleared the way for contemporary illiberal populisms. The third part considers the institutional configuration through which the democratic has been fundamentally transformed over the past few decades in the direction of a post-democratic constellation. The article concludes by arguing for the need to re-script emancipation as a process of political subjectivation unfolding trough a political act.

How Dictators Control the Internet: A Review Essay

A growing body of research has studied how autocratic regimes interfere with internet communication to contain challenges to their rule. In this review article, we survey the literature and identify the most important directions and challenges for future research. We structure our review along different network layers, each of which provides particular ways of governmental influence and control. While current research has made much progress in understanding individual digital tactics, we argue that there is still a need for theoretical development and empirical progress. First, we need a more comprehensive understanding of how particular tactics fit into an overall digital strategy, but also how they interact with traditional, “offline” means of autocratic politics, such as cooptation or repression. Second, we discuss a number of challenges that empirical research needs to address, such as the effectiveness of digital tactics, the problem of attribution, and the tool dependence of existing research.

The Autocratic Ruling Parties Dataset: Origins, Durability, and Death

How do autocratic ruling parties gain power? What predicts their durability and how they fall? This article introduces the Autocratic Ruling Parties Dataset, the first comprehensive data set on the founding origins, modes of gaining and losing power, ruling tenures, and other characteristics of autocratic ruling parties. It covers all ruling parties in the world from 1940 to 2015. Contrary to common assumptions, most ruling parties are not created by sitting dictators, but follow a range of paths to power that influence their style and duration of rule. To illustrate the data’s uses, the article confirms that ruling parties stabilize autocracies. Further, parties’ origins and histories matter, with revolutionary and foreign-imposed parties the most durable and parties empowered through elections the least durable. By recognizing ruling parties’ heterogeneity, histories, and potential autonomy from individual dictators, the data can contribute to open questions on autocratic politics, regime stability, and democratization.

Conclusion

The final chapter concludes the book with a summary of the key findings and a discussion of their academic and policy implications. The main insight is that increasing Internet penetration helps to keep the occurrence of protest low, but catalyzes ongoing dissent once it has started. This shows that the introduction and expansion of the Internet is a double-edged sword for autocratic governments. The book also shows, however, that violent repression against public protest continues to be an effective tactic employed by autocratic governments. At the same time, autocrats seem to be substituting these traditional forms of political control with digital ones, where the Internet can help reduce levels of popular mobilization when there are fewer institutional channels. This is an important insight for policy-makers, as it shows that seeming improvements in autocratic politics could simply be due to shifts in the ways by which political control is exerted.

The Internet and Political Protest in Autocracies

In the aftermath of recent popular uprisings in dictatorships, many observers argued that information and communication technologies, notably the Internet, played a key role in the mobilization of political protest. This book unpacks when and under which circumstances Internet technology can benefit opposition activists aiming to mobilize protests, and when the technology plays into the hands of autocratic governments. Since autocratic governments enjoy a high degree of control over the introduction and expansion of Internet technology and over digital communication ows, the book argues that it should help them keep levels of protest low in the long-term. However, once protest has started, short-term government intervention becomes more difficult, which is why Internet technology can catalyze ongoing episodes of unrest. The book presents detailed empirical analyses of the relationship between the use of Internet technology and protest in autocracies. By leveraging new sub-national data on political protest and Internet penetration, these analysis cover more than sixty autocratic countries at the level of cities. The results show that higher levels of Internet penetration in cities reduce the overall occurrence of protest in dictatorships, but once protest has started, the Internet contributes to the continuation of protest in the same city as well as its diffusion to other locations. By examining the use of the Internet by governments in relation to other means of autocratic repression, the book also demonstrates the technological modernization of autocratic politics, where digital repression via the Internet partly substitutes traditional forms of political control.

Oil income and the personalization of autocratic politics

Personalist regimes are more reliant on natural resource rents than other models of autocracy, but the direction of causation is unclear. Resource wealth could finance patronage and allow leaders to skip construction of institutionalized systems of rule, leading to more personalized autocracies. Conversely, personalist leaders may increase resource extraction, since diversifying the economy could increase the power of rivals. I use data on the degree of personalism and level of oil income to disentangle these interpretations. The results show that increases in oil income are associated with subsequent increases in personalism within autocracies. Since personalist regimes are less likely to successfully democratize, the results also provide important evidence as to why oil impedes democracy.

Restraining the Huddled Masses: Migration Policy and Autocratic Survival

What determines citizens’ freedom to exit autocracies? How does this influence global patterns of migration and democratization? Although control over citizen movement has long been central to autocratic power, modern autocracies vary considerably in how much they restrict emigration. This article shows that autocrats strategically choose emigration policy by balancing several motives. Increasing emigration can stabilize regimes by selecting a more loyal population and attracting greater investment, trade and remittances, but exposing their citizens to democracy abroad is potentially dangerous. Using a half-century of bilateral migration data, the study calculates the level and destinations of expected emigration given exogenous geographic and socioeconomic characteristics. It finds that when citizens disproportionately emigrate to democracies, countries are more likely to democratize – and that autocrats restrict emigration freedom in response. In contrast, a larger expected flow of economic emigration predicts autocratic survival and freer emigration policy. These results have important implications for autocratic politics, democratic diffusion and the political sources of migration.

Evolution of a political industry with examples from Chinese history

In explaining the development and operation of states, analysis has focused on economics (e.g. production, and the buying and selling of products) and its relationships with laws, customs, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth; however, researchers have paid less attention to the economic efficiency of the associated “political industry”. This lacuna is puzzling because politics is a form of industry that is born when a state forms, that develops as the state matures, and that flourishes as democracy and globalization become dominant. The state functions as a monopoly that reaps huge profits, and either seeks more profit through military or political intervention in the affairs of other states or uses military or political force to protect itself against such behavior by other states. A growing focus on human rights causes this industry to flourish while giving birth to new political systems that weaken autocratic politics. To reduce the costs of political affairs by increasing their efficiency, states have explored both top-down and bottom-up approaches. To understand the nature and functioning of this industry, I discuss its origins and subsequent development to provide insights into how the functioning of a state can become more effective. I provide specific Chinese examples to show how these approaches work.