Contesting Autocracy: Repression and Opposition Coordination in Venezuela

Opposition coordination varies widely in electoral autocracies. Sometimes, opposition parties are highly coordinated and create alliances, present joint candidates or common policy platforms. Yet, at other times, oppositions choose to challenge incumbents individually. This article seeks to explain what drives opposition parties to coordinate in non-democratic regimes. It finds that opponents’ decision-making and strategy formation is influenced by the amount of repression they face from the incumbent regime. It argues that repression has a curvilinear relationship with opposition coordination. When repression is low and high, opposition coordination will be informal or clandestine. However, when repression is at intermediate levels, opposition parties will formally coordinate to dislodge authoritarian incumbents. This article illustrates this argument through an analysis of the Venezuelan opposition under Chavismo (1999–2018), combining 129 interviews with party elites, journalists, academics, and regime defectors, along with archival research at key historical moments.

Implementation of Accelerated Policy-Driven Sustainability Transitions: Case of Bharat Stage 4 to 6 Leapfrogs in India

In the face of pressing environmental challenges, governments must pledge to achieve sustainability transitions within an accelerated timeline, faster than leaving these transitions to the market mechanisms alone. This had led to an emergent approach within the sustainability transition research (STR): Accelerated policy-driven sustainability transitions (APDST). Literature on APDST asserts its significance in addressing pressing environmental and development challenges as regime actors like policymakers enact change. It also assumes support from other incumbent regime actors like the industries and businesses. In this study, we identify the reasons for which incumbent industry and business actors might support APDST and whether their support can suffice for implementation. We examine the actor strategies by drawing empirical data from the Indian national government policy of mandatory leapfrog in internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle emission control norms, known as Bharat Stage 4 to 6. This leapfrogging policy was introduced to speed up the reduction of air pollutants produced by the transport sector. A mixed-methods approach, combining multimodal discourse analysis and netnographic research, was deployed for data collection and analysis. The findings show that unlike the status quo assumption in STR, many incumbent industry and business actors aligned with the direction of the enacted policy due to the political landscape and expected gains. However, the degree of support varied throughout the transition timeline and was influenced by challenges during the transitioning process and the response of the government actors. The case suggests we pay more attention to the actors’ changing capacities and needs and consider internal and external influences in adapting the transition timelines. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion on the implementation of APDST, by examining the dynamism of actor strategies, and provides an overview of sustainability transitions in emerging economies.

The Logic of Counterbalancing

This chapter presents the core of the argument. It begins by spelling out how coups d'état progress, from the initial plot to the consolidation of power by a new regime. It then describes how the presence of coercive institutions outside the military might affect the incentives facing relevant actors during each stage of a coup. In addition to considering the constraints facing officers in the regular military, it considers the preferences of those in other coercive state institutions. The discussion generates testable hypotheses about how counterbalancing affects the incidence and outcome of coup attempts, as well as the risk that coups will escalate to civil war. It also describes and addresses potential alternative arguments that focus on the strength of the military or the extent of coup risk faced by the incumbent regime. The chapter closes by discussing the strategies the book will use for testing the theory's predictions empirically, explaining the criteria used to select cases for closer analysis.

A test of the democratic peacekeeping hypothesis: Coups, democracy, and foreign military deployments

While peacekeeping’s effects on receiving states have been studied at length, its effects on sending states have only begun to be explored. This article examines the effects of contributing peacekeepers abroad on democracy at home. Recent qualitative research has divergent findings: some find peacekeeping contributes to democratization among sending states, while others find peacekeeping entrenches illiberal or autocratic rule. To adjudicate, we build on recent quantitative work focused specifically on the incidence of coups. We ask whether sending peacekeepers abroad increases the risk of military intervention in politics at home. Drawing on selectorate theory, we expect the effect of peacekeeping on coup risk to vary by regime type. Peacekeeping brings with it new resources which can be distributed as private goods. In autocracies, often developing states where UN peacekeeping remuneration exceeds per-soldier costs, deployment produces a windfall for militaries. Emboldened by new resources, which can be distributed as private goods among the selectorate, and fearing the loss of them in the future, they may act to depose the incumbent regime. In contrast, peacekeeping will have little effect in developed democracies, which have high per-troop costs, comparatively large selectorates, and low ex-ante coup risk. Anocracies, which typically have growing selectorates, and may face distinctive international pressures to democratize, will likely experience reduced coup risk. We test these claims with data covering peacekeeping deployments, regime type, and coup risk since the end of the Cold War. Our findings confirm our theoretical expectations. These findings have implications both for how we understand the impact of participation in peacekeeping – particularly among those countries that contribute troops disproportionately in the post-Cold War era – and for the potential international determinants of domestic autocracy.

Winning Hearts and Minds with Economic Sanctions? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Venezuela

Previous research contends that economic sanctions must benefit opposition groups relative to the incumbent regime in order to generate policy change. However, studies have found that sanctions often backfire and increase regime support. While this rally-around-the-flag effect is well known, it is currently unclear how senders can prevent it. In this article, I use individual-level data from a targeted state to examine whether a sender's framing of the sanctions may play a role in preventing the rally-around-the-flag effect. A survey experiment conducted among respondents in Venezuela demonstrates that the public attitude toward sanctions is shaped by the framing of the sanctions. Specifically, people adopt more favorable views when interpreting sanctions as targeted measures against regime members with the explicit goal of protecting fundamental human rights. The effects are evident among moderates, which is significant as they are otherwise the group most likely to rally behind the regime.

2 The Authority Entitled to Extend an Invitation for Direct Military Assistance

This chapter determines the authority that is required to extend an invitation for direct military assistance by forces of land, air, or sea. In so doing, it departs from the well-established principle in international law that the competence to request either direct military assistance or indirect military assistance rests with the de jure government. This is the authority whose representatives are accepted in international organizations, that accredits ambassadors, can legally enter into treaties, and can legally dispose of the state’s assets and natural resources. The chapter then identifies the criteria for the recognition of the de jure government. These criteria include in particular the traditional requirement of effective control as well as that of democratic legitimacy. In the post-Cold War era the latter has gained prominence in particular within the OAS and the AU. Once an authority is recognized as the de jure government, this triggers a strong presumption of continued de jure status. The fact that the de jure government would subsequently be confronted with an insurgency, and/or be embroiled in a sustained armed conflict with opposition groups, would not in and of itself lead to a loss of its de jure status. However, the question arises as to whether the presumption of continued recognition has any relevance in situations where the incumbent regime no longer is identifiable, or where it is challenged by an authority that claims to be democratically legitimated.

The fall of the Constitution’s political insurance: How the Morales regime eliminated the insurance of the 2009 Bolivian Constitution

Some scholars argue that constitutions may include an insurance that aims to protect the political rights of prospective electoral losers and prevents a dominant ruling coalition from undermining the competitiveness of the political system. Although some insurance scholars have recently paid more attention to the conditions that make an insurance more likely to be effective, the scholarship seeking to identify the limits of the insurance is still scarce. The literature on courts and democratization may help us to understand those limits by exploring successful and failed experiences. In this article, I argue that after constitution-makers agree to including an insurance, the incumbent regime may delay its implementation or, if the insurance is implemented, the regime may employ different political and legal strategies to eliminate it. I identify some of these strategies using examples from the Bolivian constitutional system. I argue that the Bolivian 2009 Constitution included an insurance and that the Evo Morales regime eliminated it with the help of the Constitutional Court. Although insurance theory expects constitutional courts to guarantee key institutional arrangements, the Bolivian experience shows that constitutional courts may in fact execute the opposite task, and that after constitution makers negotiate and approve an insurance, the challenge is to secure its implementation and survival.

The Politics of Selection: Towards a Transformative Model of Environmental Innovation

As a purposive sustainability transition requires environmental innovation and innovation policy, we discuss potentials and limitations of three dominant strands of literature in this field, namely the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions (MLP), the innovation systems approach (IS), and the long-wave theory of techno-economic paradigm shifts (LWT). All three are epistemologically rooted in an evolutionary understanding of socio-technical change. While these approaches are appropriate to understand market-driven processes of change, they may be deficient as analytical tools for exploring and designing processes of purposive societal transformation. In particular, we argue that the evolutionary mechanism of selection is the key to introducing the strong directionality required for purposive transformative change. In all three innovation theories, we find that the prime selection environment is constituted by the market and, thus, normative societal goals like sustainability are sidelined. Consequently, selection is depoliticised and neither strong directionality nor incumbent regime destabilisation are societally steered. Finally, we offer an analytical framework that builds upon a more political conception of selection and retention and calls for new political institutions to make normatively guided selections. Institutions for transformative innovation need to improve the capacities of complex societies to make binding decisions in politically contested fields.

Mass Resettlement and Political Violence

This article examines the relationship between mass resettlement and political conflict. The author theorizes that states can use mass resettlement to extend control over contested frontiers. Settlers whose land rights are politically contested will disproportionately participate in violence to defend the incumbent regime. The theory is tested using data on resettlement and violence in postcolonial Rwanda. The author shows that the Hutu revolutionary regime resettled some 450,000 Hutus after independence to frontier and Tutsi-dominated areas to defend itself against external Tutsi militias. The author contends that the invasion of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in the 1990s threatened the Hutu settler population because the RPF sought the repatriation of Tutsis onto redistributed land and that consequent land insecurity incentivized violence against Tutsis in 1994. The article identifies the positive effect of resettlement on locality violence during the genocide via a geographic regression discontinuity design. A process tracing of one notoriously violent resettled commune supports the theorized causal sequence. In light of these findings, the author suggests that research should refocus on the way that conflict shapes ethnic demography and that, to understand participation in state-sponsored violence, scholars should attend to the threat posed by regime change to individual livelihoods.