Author: Javier Corrales
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815738080
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
How Nicolás Maduro reinvented authoritarianism for the twenty-first centurVenezuela, which once enjoyed periods of democratically elected governments in the latter half of the twentieth century, has descended into autocratic rule, coupled with economic collapse. In his new book, Autocracy Rising, veteran scholar of Latin American politics Javier Corrales explores how and why this happened. Corrales focuses on two themes: party systems and institutional capacity. He argues that Venezuela’s democratic backsliding advanced when the ruling party obtained far too much electoral clout while the opposition fragmented. The state then took control of formerly independent agencies of the state. This allowed the ruling party to use and abuse of the law to favor the president—which in turn generated a permanent economic crisis. After succeeding Hugo Chávez in 2013, Nicolás Maduro confronted, unexpectedly, another change in the party system: a rising opposition. This triggered deeper autocratization. To survive, the state was compelled to modernize autocratic practices and seek alliances with sinister partners. In short, Maduro concentrated power, paradoxically, by sharing power. Autocracy Rising compares what occurred in Venezuela to twenty other cases throughout Latin America where presidents were forced out of office. Corrales illuminates the depressing cycle in which semi-authoritarian regimes become increasingly autocratic in response to crisis, only to cause new crises that lead to even greater authoritarianism.
Author: Ali Riaz
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9819975808
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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Book Description
For the past decade and a half, the world has witnessed a precipitous decline of democratic countries and the consequent rise of autocrats. How Autocrats Rise: Sequences of Democratic Backsliding challenges the conventional wisdom and offers an institutional-ideological approach to understand the phenomenon, examines the steps of emergent autocrats, and analyzes the methods of legitimizing their rules. Employing the new framework, the book provides incisive analyses of four countries located in four different regions with dissimilar national features – Bangladesh, Bolivia, Hungary, and Turkey, and demonstrates that political developments in these countries have followed a similar, specific pattern resulting in various shades of autocracy. Theoretically enriched and empirically grounded, this exceptionally timely book makes significant contribution to the democratic backsliding literature while offering insights on how to forestall an autocratic era.
Author: Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324001550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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Book Description
What modern authoritarian leaders have in common (and how they can be stopped). 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 and Europe. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future. For ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They promise law and order, then legitimize lawbreaking by financial, sexual, and other predators. They use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. Taking what you want, and getting away with it, becomes proof of male authority. They use propaganda, corruption, and violence to stay in power. Vladimir Putin and Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocracies, Augusto Pinochet’s torture sites, Benito Mussolini and Muammar Gaddafi’s systems of sexual exploitation, and Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump’s relentless misinformation: all show how authoritarian rule, far from ensuring stability, is marked by destructive chaos. No other type of leader is so transparent about prioritizing self-interest over the public good. As one country after another has discovered, the strongman is at his worst when true guidance is most needed by his country. Recounting the acts of solidarity and dignity that have undone strongmen over the past 100 years, Ben-Ghiat makes vividly clear that only by seeing the strongman for what he is—and by valuing one another as he is unable to do—can we stop him, now and in the future.
Author: Lucan Way
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
ISBN: 1421418134
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
“Pluralism by Default will change the way we understand the emergence of democracies and the consolidation of autocracies.” —Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats Exploring sources of political contestation in the former Soviet Union and beyond, Pluralism by Default proposes that pluralism in “new democracies” is often grounded less in democratic leadership or emerging civil society and more in the failure of authoritarianism. Dynamic competition frequently emerges because autocrats lack the state capacity to steal elections, impose censorship, or repress opposition. In fact, the same institutional failures that facilitate political competition may also thwart the development of stable democracy. “A tour de force brimming with theoretical originality and effective use of in-depth case studies. It will enrich our understanding of post-communist politics and help reshape the way we think about democracy, authoritarianism, and regime change more broadly.” —M. Steven Fish, author of Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics
Author: Masha Gessen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593332245
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
“When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times “A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.
Author: Steven Levitsky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139491482
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
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 regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized.
Author: Steven Levitsky
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1524762946
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Time • Foreign Affairs • WBUR • Paste Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved. Praise for How Democracies Die “What we desperately need is a sober, dispassionate look at the current state of affairs. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two of the most respected scholars in the field of democracy studies, offer just that.”—The Washington Post “Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.”—Ezra Klein, Vox “If you only read one book for the rest of the year, read How Democracies Die. . . .This is not a book for just Democrats or Republicans. It is a book for all Americans. It is nonpartisan. It is fact based. It is deeply rooted in history. . . . The best commentary on our politics, no contest.”—Michael Morrell, former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (via Twitter) “A smart and deeply informed book about the ways in which democracy is being undermined in dozens of countries around the world, and in ways that are perfectly legal.”—Fareed Zakaria, CNN
Author: Stephan Haggard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108962874
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 122
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Book Description
Assaults on democracy are increasingly coming from the actions of duly elected governments, rather than coups. Backsliding examines the processes through which elected rulers weaken checks on executive power, curtail political and civil liberties, and undermine the integrity of the electoral system. Drawing on detailed case studies, including the United States and countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa, the book focuses on three, inter-related causal mechanisms: the pernicious effects of polarization; realignments of party systems that enable elected autocrats to gain legislative power; and the incremental nature of derogations, which divides oppositions and keeps them off balance. A concluding chapter looks at the international context of backsliding and the role of new technologies in these processes. An online appendix provides detailed accounts of backsliding in 16 countries, which can be found at www.cambridge.org/backsliding.
Author: Berch Berberoglu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100017106X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Neoliberal globalization is in deep crisis. This crisis is manifested on a global scale and embodies a number of fundamental contradictions, a central one of which is the global rise of authoritarianism and fascism. This emergent form of authoritarianism is a right-wing reaction to the problems generated by globalization supported and funded by some of the largest and most powerful corporations in their assault against social movements on the left to prevent the emergence of socialism against global capitalism. As the crisis of neoliberal global capitalism unfolds, and as we move to the brink of another economic crisis and the threat of war, global capitalism is once again resorting to authoritarianism and fascism to maintain its power. This book addresses this vital question in comparative-historical perspective and provides a series of case studies around the world that serve as a warning against the impending rise of fascism in the 21st century.
Author: David Stasavage
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691228973
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
"Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer--democratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa. Delving into the prevalence of early democracy throughout the world, David Stasavage makes the case that understanding how and where these democracies flourished--and when and why they declined--can provide crucial information not just about the history of governance, but also about the ways modern democracies work and where they could manifest in the future."--
