Models of Authoritarian Regimes: A Critique

Modeling authoritarian regimes

In the past few years, a body of ideas based on political economy theory has been built up by North and Weingast, Olson, Przeworski, and Acemoglu and Robinson. One theme that emerges from this literature concerns the transition to democracy: why would dominant elites give up oligarchic power? This article addresses this question by considering a formal model of an authoritarian regime, and then...

Judicial Empowerment in Authoritarian Regimes

Sources of Corruption in Authoritarian Regimes

Objectives. We seek to investigate the determinants of corruption in authoritarian polities. We hypothesize that corruption in nondemocratic settings will be greater where the ruling group is personalistic rather than a political party or a military clique and that it will be greater where rulers expect to remain in power longer. We construct a new operationalization of the selectorate theory a...

Common Pool Regimes: A Critique

As environmental degradation increases around the globe, especially in relation to open access resources, new policies to augment sustainability have to be invented. The purpose of this paper is to provide a most concrete example of some of the difficulties involved, by means of examining recent data about the so-called Helcom regime for the Baltic Sea. The findings include that the heralded th...

Information Manipulation and Reform in Authoritarian Regimes*

We develop a theory of how an authoritarian regime interactively uses information manipulation, such as propaganda or censorship, and policy improvement to maintain social stability. The government can depict the status quo policy more popularly supported than it actually is, while at the same time please citizens directly by enacting a costly reform. We show that the government’s ability of ma...