Information Democracy And Autocracy

Increasing economic transparency benefits democracy: it helps elections work. Yet under autocracy, transparency contributes to political instability.

This book explores human polity with respect to its nature, context, and evolution. Specifically, it examines how individual wills translate into political ideologies, investigates what social forces converge to shape governmental operations, and probes whether human polity progresses in focus from individual wills to group interests to social integrations. The book entertains five hypotheses. The first is commonsensical: where there are people there is politics. The second is analogous: humans govern themselves socially in a way that is comparable to how a body regulates itself physically. The third is rational: humans set rules, organize activities, and establish institutions upon facts, following reasons, for the purpose of effectiveness and efficiency. The fourth is random: human affairs take place haphazardly under specific circumstances while they overall exhibit general patterns and trends. The final hypothesis is inevitable: human governance evolves from autocracy to democracy to technocracy. The book presents systematic information about human polity, its form, content, operation, impact, and evolution. It sheds light on multivariate interactions among human wills, rights, and obligations, political thoughts, actions, and mechanisms, and social structures, processes, and order maintenances. Pragmatically, it offers invaluable insights into individuals as agents, groupings as agencies, and polity as structuration across the human sphere.

The inside story of the "people's revolution" that was neither a revolution nor an act of the people. Written by an insider and leading authority, Democracy and Autocracy in Eurasia is a compelling chronicle of the political development of the Republic of Georgia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Politicians default on international debts to please key political supporters, depending on their capacity for voting or revolt.

“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.

Citizen Support for Democratic and Autocratic Regimes takes a political-culture perspective on the struggle between democracy and autocracy by examining how these regimes fare in the eyes of their citizens. Taking a globally comparative approach, it studies both the levels as well as the individual- and system-level sources of political support in democracies and autocracies worldwide. The book develops an explanatory model of regime support which includes both individual- and system level determinants and specifies not only the general causal mechanisms and pathways through which these determinants affect regime support but also spells out how these effects might vary between the two types of regimes. It empirically tests its propositions using multi-level structural equation modeling and a comprehensive dataset that combines recent public-opinion data from six cross-national survey projects with aggregate data from various sources for more than 100 democracies and autocracies. It finds that both the levels and individual-level sources of regime support are the same in democracies and autocracies, but that the way in which system-level context factors affect regime support differs between the two types of regimes. The results enhance our understanding of what determines citizen support for fundamentally different regimes, help assessing the present and future stability of democracies and autocracies, and provide clear policy implications to those interested in strengthening support for democracy and/or fostering democratic change in autocracies. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston, and Jonathan Slapin, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich

Under what conditions are some developing countries able to create stable democracies while others have slid into instability and authoritarianism? To address this classic question at the center of policy and academic debates, The Promise of Power investigates a striking puzzle: why, upon the 1947 Partition of British India, was India able to establish a stable democracy while Pakistan created an unstable autocracy? Drawing on interviews, colonial correspondence, and early government records to document the genesis of two of the twentieth century's most celebrated independence movements, Maya Tudor refutes the prevailing notion that a country's democratization prospects can be directly attributed to its levels of economic development or inequality. Instead, she demonstrates that the differential strengths of India's and Pakistan's independence movements directly account for their divergent democratization trajectories. She also establishes that these movements were initially constructed to pursue historically conditioned class interests. By illuminating the source of this enduring contrast, The Promise of Power offers a broad theory of democracy's origins that will interest scholars and students of comparative politics, democratization, state-building, and South Asian political history.

Social hierarchies exist in democracies as well as in authoritarian societies. However, their nature is different. Democratic hierarchies are built bottom-up through election, while autocratic hierarchies are built top-down through coalition formation and domination. Both have power asymmetries between the weaker citizens and the stronger politicians, which are amplified the stronger the hierarchies are. This thesis introduces a model which combines pro-/anti-social behavior with different degrees of hierarchies which I unite in a model called the Structure-Behavior Diagram (Toelstede, 2020/1). This model has the power to categorize countries according to these criteria, and indicates when and how societies move between democracy and authoritarianism. The movements of societies in the political space of the Structure-Behavior Diagram are marked by certain patterns and dynamics. I use the path dependence theory (Toelstede, 2019/2) and examine how so-called path-creating mechanisms can emerge and influence societies to move from democracy to authoritarianism. I show that path dependency-induced dynamics can put democracies at risk and are more serious in hierarchical societies than in horizontal societies. Institutional punishment is widely seen as more stable then peer punishment. However, in political reality, institutional punishment – here in the form of policing – can be marked by over- and under-punishment as well as changes in sociality (Toelstede, 2019/1 and 2020/2). These findings show, together with hierarchy-sensitive characteristics of the path dependency, that institutional punishment and social hierarchies require more attention. Lastly, I show that most democratic societies are intuitively aware of the power asymmetries and long principal-agent chains between them and their political agents. Together, these features provide increasing benefits for an anti-social descent of the agents, although some societies are prepared to trade personal freedom for higher socio-economic welfare. They therefore strive for higher socio-economic efficiency by embracing strong governmental forms and high conformity levels. I call this efficient statism (Toelstede, 2019/2). In doing so, societies compliantly put their free and democratic order at risk.