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Authoritarianism

This article is about authoritarianism in political science and organizational studies. For authoritarianism in psychology, see Authoritarian personality. For a form of government where power is held by a single individual, see Autocracy.

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Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law.[1][2] Political scientists have created typologies describing variations of authoritarian forms of government.[2] Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military.[3][4] States that have a blurred boundary between democracy and authoritarianism have some times been characterized as "hybrid democracies", "hybrid regimes" or "competitive authoritarian" states.[5][6][7]

The political scientist Juan Linz, in an influential[8] 1964 work, An Authoritarian Regime: Spain, defined authoritarianism as possessing four qualities:

  1. Limited political pluralism, which is achieved with constraints on the legislature, political parties and interest groups.
  2. Political legitimacy based on appeals to emotion and identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems, such as underdevelopment or insurgency."
  3. Minimal political mobilization, and suppression of anti-regime activities.
  4. Ill-defined executive powers, often vague and shifting, used to extend the power of the executive.[9][10]

Minimally defined, an authoritarian government lacks free and competitive direct elections to legislatures, free and competitive direct or indirect elections for executives, or both.[11][12][13][14] Broadly defined, authoritarian states include countries that lack human rights such as freedom of religion, or countries in which the government and the opposition do not alternate in power at least once following free elections.[15] Authoritarian states might contain nominally democratic institutions such as political parties, legislatures and elections which are managed to entrench authoritarian rule and can feature fraudulent, non-competitive elections.[16]

Since 1946, the share of authoritarian states in the international political system increased until the mid-1970s but declined from then until the year 2000.[17] Prior to 2000, dictatorships typically began with a coup and replaced a pre-existing authoritarian regime.[18] Since 2000, dictatorships are most likely to begin through democratic backsliding whereby a democratically elected leader established an authoritarian regime.[18]

  1. ^ Kalu, Kalu N. (2019). A Functional Theory of Government, Law, and Institutions. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 161–. ISBN 978-1-4985-8703-7. OCLC 1105988740.
  2. ^ a b Cerutti, Furio (2017). Conceptualizing Politics: An Introduction to Political Philosophy. Routledge. p. 17. Political scientists have outlined elaborated typologies of authoritarianism, from which it is not easy to draw a generally accepted definition; it seems that its main features are the non-acceptance of conflict and plurality as normal elements of politics, the will to preserve the status quo and prevent change by keeping all political dynamics under close control by a strong central power, and lastly, the erosion of the rule of law, the division of powers, and democratic voting procedures.
  3. ^ Ezrow, Natasha M.; Frantz, Erica (2011). Dictators and Dictatorships: Understanding Authoritarian Regimes and Their Leaders. Continuum. p. 17.
  4. ^ Lai, Brian; Slater, Dan (2006). "Institutions of the Offensive: Domestic Sources of Dispute Initiation in Authoritarian Regimes, 1950–1992". American Journal of Political Science. 50 (1): 113–126. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006.00173.x. JSTOR 3694260.
  5. ^ Levitsky, Steven; Way, Lucan A. (2010). Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. Problems of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511781353. ISBN 978-0-521-88252-1.
  6. ^ Diamond, Larry (2002). "Elections Without Democracy: Thinking About Hybrid Regimes". Journal of Democracy. 13 (2): 21–35. doi:10.1353/jod.2002.0025. ISSN 1086-3214. S2CID 154815836.
  7. ^ Gunitsky, Seva (2015). "Lost in the Gray Zone: Competing Measures of Democracy in the Former Soviet Republics". Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance. Cambridge University Press: 112–150. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316161555.006. ISBN 978-1-107-09813-8. SSRN 2506195.
  8. ^ Richard Shorten, Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present Archived 2020-01-09 at the Wayback Machine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 256 (note 67): "For a long time the authoritative definition of authoritarianism was that of Juan J. Linz."
  9. ^ Juan J. Linz, "An Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Spain," in Erik Allardt and Yrjö Littunen, eds., Cleavages, Ideologies, and Party Systems: Contributions to Comparative Political Sociology (Helsinki: Transactions of the Westermarck Society), pp. 291–342. Reprinted in Erik Allardt & Stine Rokkan, eds., Mas Politics: Studies in Political Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1970), pp. 251–283, 374–381.[ISBN missing]
  10. ^ Gretchen Casper, Fragile Democracies: The Legacies of Authoritarian Rule. Archived 2020-01-09 at the Wayback Machine (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), pp. 40–50 (citing Linz 1964).[ISBN missing]
  11. ^ Svolik, Milan W. (2012). The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge University Press. pp. 22–23. Archived from the original on 21 October 2019. Retrieved 21 October 2019. I follow Przeworski et al. (2000), Boix (2003), and Cheibub et al. (2010) in defining a dictatorship as an independent country that fails to satisfy at least one of the following two criteria for democracy: (1) free and competitive legislative elections and (2) an executive that is elected either directly in free and competitive presidential elections or indirectly by a legislature in parliamentary systems. Throughout this book, I use the terms dictatorship and authoritarian regime interchangeably and refer to the heads of these regimes' governments as simply dictators or authoritarian leaders, regardless of their formal title.
  12. ^ Geddes, Barbara; Wright, Joseph; Frantz, Erica (2014). "Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set". Perspectives on Politics. 12 (2): 313–331. doi:10.1017/S1537592714000851. ISSN 1537-5927. S2CID 145784357.
  13. ^ Gehlbach, Scott; Sonin, Konstantin; Svolik, Milan W. (2016). "Formal Models of Nondemocratic Politics". Annual Review of Political Science. 19 (1): 565–584. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-042114-014927. ISSN 1094-2939. S2CID 143064525.
  14. ^ Cheibub, José Antonio; Gandhi, Jennifer; Vreeland, James Raymond (2010). "Democracy and dictatorship revisited". Public Choice. 143 (1/2): 67–101. doi:10.1007/s11127-009-9491-2. ISSN 0048-5829. JSTOR 40661005. S2CID 45234838.
  15. ^ Svolik, Milan W. (2012). The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge University Press. p. 20. Archived from the original on 21 October 2019. Retrieved 21 October 2019. More demanding criteria may require that governments respect certain civil liberties – such as the freedom of religion (Schmitter and Karl 1991; Zakaria 1997) – or that the incumbent government and the opposition alternate in power at least once after the first seemingly free election (Huntington 1993; Przeworski et al. 2000; Cheibib et al. 2010).
  16. ^ Svolik, Milan W. (2012). The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge University Press. pp. 8, 12, 22, 25, 88, 117. Archived from the original on 21 October 2019. Retrieved 21 October 2019.
  17. ^ Svolik, Milan W. (2012). The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge University Press. p. 25. Archived from the original on 21 October 2019. Retrieved 21 October 2019.
  18. ^ a b Geddes, Barbara (2024), Wolf, Anne (ed.), "How New Dictatorships Begin", The Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics, Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198871996.013.3, ISBN 978-0-19-887199-6
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