Princeton University Press, 2022. — 342 p. How a new breed of dictators holds power by manipulating information and faking democracy. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world. In place of overt, mass...
Princeton University Press, 2022 — 481 p. Explores why dictatorships born of social revolution — such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam — are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme...
W. W. Norton & Company, 2020 — 346 p. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the "strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin — enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and...
University of Chicago Press, 2019. — 272 p. If the Arab uprisings initially heralded the end of tyrannies and a move toward liberal democratic governments, their defeat not only marked a reversal but was of a piece with emerging forms of authoritarianism worldwide. In Authoritarian Apprehensions , Lisa Wedeen draws on her decades-long engagement with Syria to offer an erudite...
Cambridge University Press, 2010. — 536 p. Competitive authoritarian regimes - in which autocrats submit to meaningful multiparty elections but engage in serious democratic abuse - proliferated in the post-Cold War era. Based on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian...
Cambridge University Press, 2008. — 317 p. China, like many authoritarian regimes, struggles with the tension between the need to foster economic development by empowering local officials and the regime’s imperative to control them politically. Pierre F. Landry explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manages local officials in order to meet these goals and perpetuate an...
Oxford University Press, 2016. — 256 p. Populist Authoritarianism focuses on the Chinese Communist Party, which governs the world's largest population in a single-party authoritarian state. Wenfang Tang attempts to explain the seemingly contradictory trends of the increasing number of protests on the one hand, and the results of public opinion surveys that consistently show...
Cambridge University Press, 2008. — 316 p. This book provides a theory of the logic of survival of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), one of the most resilient autocratic regimes in the twentieth century. An autocratic regime hid behind the facade of elections that were held with clockwise precision. Although their outcome was totally predictable, elections were not...
Cambridge University Pres, 2012. — 250 p. What drives politics in dictatorships? Milan W. Svolik argues that all authoritarian regimes must resolve two fundamental conflicts. First, dictators face threats from the masses over which they rule – this is the problem of authoritarian control. A second, separate, challenge arises from the elites with whom dictators rule – this is...
British Journal of Political Science. — 45 p. Political institutions in authoritarian regimes are important tools through which elites structure political order. But they are also, fundamentally, vulnerable to strategic manipulation by these same elites. This is the central dilemma confronting the new literature on institutions in authoritarian regimes. This institutional turn...
Cambridge University Press, 2011. — 240 p. — ISBN10: 0521189349 ISBN13: 9780521189347 An exciting new series that covers the five Paper 2 topics of the IB 20th Century World History syllabus. This coursebook covers Paper 2, Topic 3, Origins and development of authoritarian and single-party states, in the 20th Century World History syllabus for the IB History programme. It is...