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PONARS Eurasia
PONARS Eurasia
  • About
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    • Ukraine Experts
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RECOMMENDED
  • Will Ukraine Wind Up Making Territorial Concessions to Russia? Foreign Affairs Asks the Experts

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  • Pro-Kremlin Propaganda’s Failure in Ukraine | New Voices on Eurasia with Aaron Erlich (Jan. 19)

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  • Kyiv-Washington Relations in Times of Colossal War: The Ultimate Test of a Strategic Partnership

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  • Russia’s war in Ukraine threatens students daily and forces teachers to improvise

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  • Prevailing Soviet Legacies

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RSS PONARS Eurasia Podcast
  • The Putin-Xi Summit: What's New In Their Joint Communique ? February 23, 2022
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman speaks with Russian China experts Vita Spivak and Alexander Gabuev about the February meeting between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and what it may tell us about where the Russian-Chinese relationship is headed.
  • Exploring the Russian Courts' Ruling to Liquidate the Memorial Society January 28, 2022
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with scholars Kelly Smith and Benjamin Nathans about the history, achievements, and impending shutdown of the Memorial Society, Russia's oldest and most venerable civic organization, and what its imminent liquidation portends for the Russian civil society.
  • Russia's 2021 census and the Kremlin's nationalities policy [Lipman Series 2021] December 9, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with social scientist Andrey Shcherbak about the quality of the data collected in the recent population census and the goals of Vladimir Putin's government's nationalities policy
  • Active citizens of any kind are under threat [Lipman Series 2021] November 5, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Alexander Verkhovsky about the Kremlin's ever expanding toolkit against political and civic activists, journalists, and other dissidents.
  • Russia's Legislative Elections followup [Lipman Series 2021] October 4, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Tanya Lokot and Nikolay Petrov about the results of Russia’s legislative elections and about what comes next.
  • Why Is the Kremlin Nervous? [Lipman Series 2021] September 14, 2021
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Ben Noble and Nikolay Petrov about Russia’s September 17-19 legislative elections, repressive measures against electoral challengers, and whether to expect anything other than preordained results.
  • Vaccine Hesitancy in Russia, France, and the United States [Lipman Series 2021] August 31, 2021
    In this week's PONARS Eurasia Podcast episode, Maria Lipman chats with Denis Volkov, Naira Davlashyan, and Peter Slevin about why COVID-19 vaccination rates are still so low across the globe, comparing vaccine hesitant constituencies across Russia, France, and the United States.  
  • Is Russia Becoming More Soviet? [Lipman Series 2021] July 26, 2021
      In a new PONARS Eurasia Podcast episode, Maria Lipman chats with Maxim Trudolyubov about the current tightening of the Russian political sphere, asking whether or not it’s helpful to draw comparisons to the late Soviet period.
  • The Evolution of Russia's Political Regime [Lipman Series 2021] June 21, 2021
    In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Grigory Golosov and Henry Hale about the evolution of Russia's political regime, and what to expect in the lead-up to September's Duma elections.
  • Volodymyr Zelensky: Year Two [Lipman Series 2021] May 24, 2021
    In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Sergiy Kudelia and Georgiy Kasianov about Ukrainian President Zelensky's second year in office, and how he has handled the political turbulence of the past year.
  • Commentary | Комментарии

Why Do Eurasia’s Authoritarians Stay in Power?

  • November 18, 2013
  • Henry Hale

Why have non-democratic regimes in the post-Soviet space been so durable? Some leaders whose human rights records are regularly criticized, from Belarus in the west to Kazakhstan in the east, have been in power now for close to two decades if not more. The formative experience of a whole new generation in Eurasia has thus been more of authoritarianism than democracy, dashing the hopes of many of their parents in the late Soviet period who thought they were experiencing the dawn of political freedom.

New research recently published by Milan Svolik, a political science professor at the University of Illinois, provides some fresh insights into why this is the case. He built a gigantic database of all authoritarian countries in the world for the period from World War II to 2008, collecting data on their various features for each of these years in order to identify factors associated with why some survive and some fall.

One finding that stands out is that dictatorships with legislatures are more stable than those that eschew them. This calls attention to a fact that is often overlooked regarding post-Soviet countries: None of them, even bizarrocratic Turkmenistan, have gone so far as to completely abolish legislatures as have dictatorships in many countries of the world over the years. While observers often consider these post-Soviet legislatures to be meaningless, nothing more than rubber stamps and window dressing, Svolik finds that behind the scenes they serve important purposes for rulers. In particular, they enhance dictators’ ability to monitor their society’s elites and facilitate their buy-in to the regime. This concurs with important earlier research by Jennifer Gandhi, an Emory University political scientist, who finds that authoritarian parliaments—even when they may on the surface appear to be merely clubs of rulers’ supporters—facilitate coalition-building that can help the autocrat stay in power.

Svolik’s research also shows that authoritarian regimes tend to be stronger when they rule through a dominant party. Of course, post-Soviet experience shows that parties are not absolutely necessary: Aleksandr Lukashenka has long dominated politics in Belarus without needing a party of his own. But many post-Soviet leaders have used them, and this appears to be to their advantage. This finding, of course, is not so surprising to those steeped in the study of Communist regimes, where the Party was always central to autocratic practice. But the evidence is new and powerfully demonstrates the validity of this belief.

These findings are part of an important ongoing research agenda in political science that is shedding new light on the sources of authoritarian endurance. This research bears watching for all who are interested in politics in and policy on Eurasia.

More on Svolik’s book, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge, 2012), awarded a prize earlier this year by the American Political Science Association, can be found on the publisher’s website.

Related Topics
  • Hale
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Отравление оппозиционеров в России превратилось в регулярную практику

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