Browsing by Subject "Authoritarianism"
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Item Open Access "All of My Business": Governmental Social Media and Authoritarian Responsiveness(2017) Liu, ChuanHow would authoritarian regimes react to the emergence of social media compared to traditional media? What role(s) would media play in authoritarianism? This study focuses on China, the largest existing authoritarian regime, to answer the questions above. A formal model first indicates that entering the era of social media would be a challenge for dictators if they still regard social media as a tool for propaganda as traditional media; instead, they would choose other strategies in response to the challenge. The content analysis between Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and People's Daily in China confirms that traditional media and social media serve as different tools: The former are still tools for propaganda, whereas the latter show more responsiveness, especially about the public's daily life, even though this is none of the government's business. This results may indicate a new way by which authoritarian regimes maintain the rule making use of media.
Item Open Access Amicable Contempt: The Strategic Balance between Dictators and International NGOs(2017) Heiss, AndrewOver the past decade, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have become increasingly active in authoritarian regimes as they respond to emergencies, assist with development, or advocate for human rights. Though these services and advocacy can challenge the legitimacy and power of the regime, many autocratic states permit INGO activities, and INGOs continue to work in these countries despite heavy restrictions on their activities. In this dissertation, I theorize that the relationship between INGOs and autocrats creates a state of amicable contempt, where each party is aware that the other both threatens and supports their existence. After outlining the theory, I explore the factors that determine when autocracies will constrict the legal environment for INGOs through de jure anti-NGO laws and the discretionary implementation of those laws. I combine a set of statistical models run on a cross-sectional dataset of 100 autocracies between 1991–2014 with case studies of Egypt, Russia, and China to test the effect of internal risk, external threats, and reputational concerns on the de facto civil society regulatory environment. I find that autocracies constrict civil society regulations in response to domestic instability and as regimes become more stable and cohesive. I also find that autocracies constrict civil society regulations in response to external threats to the regime, including the pressures of globalization. I find no evidence of an effect from reputational concerns. I then use results from a global survey of 641 INGOs to test the determinants of international NGO behavior. I find that the conflict between principles and instrumental concerns shapes INGO behavior and influences its relationship to its host government. Finally, I combine the survey results with case studies of four INGOs—Article 19, AMERA International, Index on Censorship, and the International Republican Institute—to analyze how INGOs respond to two forms of government regulation. When facing gatekeeping restrictions designed limit access to the country, I find that INGOs rely on their programmatic flexibility to creatively work around those restrictions. When facing restrictions aimed at capturing INGO programs, organizations rely on their programmatic flexibility to protect against changes to their core principles and mission.
Item Open Access Behavioral Traits and Political Selection in Authoritarian Ruling Parties: Evidence from the Chinese Communist Party(2018) Lu, FengmingThis dissertation investigates the role of behavioral factors in the personnel selection in authoritarian ruling parties. First, I argue that authoritarian ruling parties increase the weight of dispositional and behavioral criteria in personnel selection as a response to structural changes. Namely, the reasons behind this shift are that an authoritarian ruling party faces similar problems in personnel selection (such as heterogeneities in agents’ tasks and the multitask problem) and the party can no longer observe members’ and cadres’ loyalty based on a single indicator. Subsequently, I argue that risk attitudes, a key dispositional concept in applied psychology and behavioral politics, explain cadres’ propensities to engage in policy innovation and their obedience to the party leadership's authority and orders. I further examine two mechanisms that might explain the relationship between risk attitudes and obedience, namely sensation-seeking and loss aversion. Finally, I contend that authoritarian ruling parties employ a diversified strategy of personnel selection when they assign cadres to different offices. To test the arguments, the author employs a mixed-method approach and utilizes archival evidence, original cadre survey experiments, original survey data, and interviews in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the largest authoritarian ruling party in the world.
Item Open Access Institutionalized Rent Seeking: The Political-business Revolving Door in China(2021) Li, ZerenScholars contend that in a weak institutional context, firms enter the political marketplace primarily through bribery or entrepreneurs running for public office. My dissertation challenges this conventional understanding by arguing that revolving-door channels have become a prevalent means of rent-seeking when within-government career opportunities are rare for public officials and the private sector is profitable. This dissertation proposes a theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of revolving-door officials in authoritarian regimes and tests this framework through a rigorous inquiry of firms in China. The three papers that constitute this work analyze the pattern, formation, and economic outcome of hiring revolving-door officials. I show the distortionary impact of post-government career concerns on public resource allocation, a mixed revolving-door recruitment strategy adopted by firms seeking both political power and regulatory expertise, and the salient signaling effect of revolving-door connections on financial investors.
Item Open Access Re-membering Identities: Terror, Exile and Rebirth in Hispanic Film and Literature(2010) Barros, Joanna M.This dissertation examines fictional representations of Argentine and Spanish authoritarianism from the position of exiled, traumatized and/or marginalized subjects. Though the primary texts and films engage questions of terror, trauma and repression from the 1930s to 80s in Spain and Argentina they stand out from works made within these contexts (that is, works lacking spatial and/or temporal distance) by focusing on how and to what extent individual and collective rebirth can arise from the ashes of terror, exile and oblivion. On the one hand, these works explore the ways in which authoritarian terror and repression maintain and are maintained psychologically, historically and ideologically in these cultures by a series of artificial separations between self and other, fantasy and reality, history and fiction, female and male, desire and responsibility, the spiritual and material, plurality and unity, the past and the future. On the other hand, these works suggest that it is by confronting the repressed authoritarian past through pluralistic, fictional, "exilic" retellings that these binaries may be transcended and that identity, history and reality itself may be radically re-membered.
In effect, the capacity to "re-member", which is revealed to be essentially synonymous with the act of "rebirth", demands a confrontation with the past that is every bit as dependent on "fantastic retellings" of both reality and fiction as it is on history or reality--to the same degree, in fact, that the realization of the self is contingent on an encounter with radical alterity. The various forms of monstrosity, exile and ambiguity that coalesce within these films and texts not only enable this to happen, but they imply that the creation of the primary work depends as much on its audience as it does on its author. Accordingly, the ethical processes these works establish, through narrative layering, ambiguity and other techniques, occur not only within the films and texts but in the outer relationships and responses they elicit from their readers or viewers.
Thus, the processes of exile and rebirth that these works establish can only be fully appreciated in dialogue with their audiences (via a "narrative ethics"), with history and with theories ranging from feminism to mysticism to psychoanalysis (drawing on Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud) to ethical philosophers, in particular, Emmanuel Levinas. In my endeavor to stimulate this dialogue, in which I both build on and depart from these theories, I reveal how and why "exile" fiction has become such a crucial medium for refiguring "identity"--a term which itself becomes inseparable from spirituality. Accordingly, spirituality is not detached from reality or fantasy, but rather buried in the repressed identities and memories that, when exposed through the "monstrous ambiguities" of fiction, reveal an indestructible bond between self and other, desire and responsibility, fantasy and reality, among other dichotomies.
At the same time that these works offer positive models of spirituality, rebirth, and re-membering, they incisively critique the repressive ways in which religion and specifically, Christianity, have been manipulated, in conjunction with authoritarian paradigms, to terrifying, repressive, "sacrificial" ends. More generally, all of these works, notwithstanding their "timeless" and exilic dimensions, represent pivotal moments in Spanish and Argentine history while at the same time revealing innate links or analogies between authoritarianism and religious doctrine. On the other hand, the timeless, placeless, exilic nature of these works helps shed light on the growing and global importance of exile film and literature as well as the correspondingly great and ever-growing need to re-examine the lost, buried and terrifying past that they re-member.
Item Open Access Refocusing on Repression: Institutions of Everyday Social Control in China(2023) Rothschild, ViolaRecent literature on comparative authoritarianism emphasizes the evolution from fear-based rule rooted in violence and indoctrination to a softer, savvier brand of dictatorship that trades on democratic-looking institutions and manipulation of the information environment. The case of contemporary China---where leaders have incorporated a range of old and new repressive tactics to exert control over society---complicates this trajectory. Leveraging novel data sources and a variety of empirical methods, this dissertation assesses the everyday mechanics of repression in China. In three papers that each examine a distinct coercive institution---the communal canteens of the Great Famine era (1958-1961), and neighborhood policing and digital surveillance in contemporary China---this project returns our focus to repression, and provides new insights into how a strong, authoritarian state has synthesized a range of repressive strategies to maintain order and power in the world’s most populous autocracy.
Item Open Access Rethinking Judicial Independence in Democracy and Autocracy(2020) Cho, MoohyungBuilding independent courts is a commitment by political leaders that they are willing to tie their hands, restrain their (often arbitrary) power, and respect judicial decisions even if the courts rule against them. But if political leaders are rational, why do they persist in their respectful behavior towards independent courts even when such courts may prove adverse to themselves? In other words, how can judicial independence be credibly maintained without being eroded by political leaders? In this dissertation, I seek to answer this important but underexplored question in comparative judicial politics by examining the political and economic conditions necessary to maintain judicial independence in autocracies and democracies.
In Chapter 2, I build a theory regarding the methods by which autocrats credibly still maintain judicial independence, given the lack of formal institutions capable of constraining their ever-present chance of reneging. I develop a causal mechanism by which a regime’s economic reliance on foreign direct investment (FDI) and autocrats’ concern about their reputation interact to create strong and ongoing incentives to maintain judicial independence as a property rights assurance for foreign investors. Using panel data covering a large sample of authoritarian countries during the post-Cold War period, I find quantitative evidence of my theoretical expectation in Chapter 3, and demonstrate that a regime’s past reliance on FDI is positively and significantly associated with the current level of judicial independence. My empirical analysis further indicates that the theorized effect is restricted to the economic dimension of judicial independence, in both the medium term and the long term, and that the effect is also contingent on the type of authoritarian regime that is present in the country.
In Chapter 4, I present a modified version of the so-called insurance theory and claim that the impact of political competition on judicial independence in democracies fits a slight modification I suggest to this theory. Adopting insights from party politics literature, I argue that, beyond mere electoral closeness, the presence of “robust” political competition is conducive to generating the incumbent’s credible perceptions of threats of the loss of his power and thus this form of competition is more relevant for anchoring the logic of the insurance theory. To illustrate the significance of robust political competition and the conditions thereof, I conduct a qualitative case study of South Korea and the Philippines, which differ in the level of judicial independence despite their similar degree of electoral closeness after democratization. Drawing on each country’s political history, descriptive data, and the specific episodes of judicial independence in both countries, I find that the existence of robust political competition, backed by an institutionalized party system and a stable set of robust actors, has allowed South Korea to develop judicial independence consistent with the insurance logic. By contrast, the absence of robust political competition in the Philippines, which is attributable to a fluidic and clientelistic party system with a lack of robust opposition, has discouraged incumbents from taking advantage of judicial independence as a form of political insurance for themselves.
Item Embargo Trajectories of Authoritarian Consolidation(2024) Cheung, Tung Yan GloriaHow do dictators amass personal control to become autocrats? In particular, how do seemingly weak leaders dismantle established power structures to create a centralised authority under their control? My book project, Trajectories of Consolidation explores tactics used by dictators to undercut elite constraints and ultimately concentrate power under their own control. According leading explanations for the emergence of personalist leaders, the success of leaders in consolidating power is a result of the failure of elites to constrain and stop them, ignoring the leader’s strategic choices. Relying on these explanations would suggest that a leader’s unexpected ascent is a product of luck and negligence by his competitors.
But dictators play chess, not blackjack. While there is no doubt that luck has some hand in the murky world of dictatorships, leaders also must continuously wrestle with the strategic puzzle inherent in trying to wrest power from strong elites. The framework proposed in my dissertation suggests an alternative mechanism: rather than being the failure of elites, the successful consolidation of leaders is possible due to a gradual strategy of piecemeal power seizures. As when seeking a checkmate in chess, consolidation of power requires a sequence of strategic moves to achieve one’s goal. Each move serves an immediate purpose and also opens up new strategies. Whether a dictator is carefully advancing his position or merely capitalising on a lucky break, in all cases he is acting in the moment in order to make new and more potent strategic moves available in the future, always trying to enable the final checkmate.
According leading explanations for the emergence of personalist leaders, the success of leaders in consolidating power is a result of the failure of elites to constrain and stop them. However, this fails to account for the emergence of authoritarian leaders even in the face of established power structures and strong elites, and ignores the strategic choices of leaders. I propose an alternative mechanism: rather than being the failure of elites, the successful consolidation of leaders is possible due to a gradual strategy of piecemeal power seizures, a process which I term the logic of strategic path dependence. Dictators utilise sequential strategies, each furthering immediate aims while enabling potent future moves, akin to advancing towards a checkmate in chess. To show evidence of strategic path dependence, I develop a framework of three main strategies of consolidation used by leaders to accumulate and create a novel dataset of 386 authoritarian leaders and their use of consolidation over the time period of 1946 to 2004. Using a Markov transition model, my analysis reveals obvious path dependence between strategies used by leaders, more than can be attributed solely to external contextual factors.