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This research explores the origins of the variation in the prevalence and nature of political institutions across globe. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that variation in the inherent diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of Homo sapiens from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, shaped the nature of political institutions across regions and societies. The study establishes that, while human diversity has amplified the beneficial e.ects of institutions, mitigating the adverse e.ects of non-cohesiveness, its simultaneous contribution to heterogeneity in cognitive and physical traits has fostered the scope for domination, leading to the formation and persistence of autocratic institutions. A larger degree of human diversity within societies diminished cohesiveness and therefore stimulated the emergence of institutions that have mitigated the adverse e.ects of non-cohesiveness on productivity. However, the dual impact of human diversity on the emergence of inequality and class stratification have diverted the nature of the emerging institutions towards extractive, autocratic ones. Developing a novel geo-referenced dataset of genetic diversity and ethnographic characteristics among ethnic groups across the globe, the analysis establishes that genetic diversity contributed to the emergence of autocratic pre-colonial institutions. Moreover, the findings suggest that the contribution of diversity to these pre-colonial autocratic institutions has plausibly operated through its dual e.ect on the formation of institutions and class stratification. Furthermore, reflecting the persistence of institutional, cultural, and genetic characteristics, the spatial distribution of genetic diversity across the globe has contributed to the contemporary variation in the degree of autocracy across countries.

This paper analyzes the causes of the existing Russian autocratic management system. The analysis is based on a Marxist materialist conception of history, expressed postulates "politics is the concentrated expression of economics" and "social existence determines the consciousness of men". The social existence of stable autocratic form of government in modern Russia is due corresponding to this form of government economic base.

Recent scholarship has increasingly focused on the international dimensions of authoritarian rule, and the idea of autocracy promotion has gained considerable academic currency. While the literature on autocracy promotion has identified some clear patterns of external support for autocratic incumbents, it has so far failed to demonstrate that these efforts can best be understood as a unified, coherent set of foreign policies that constitute intentional efforts to promote a particular regime type abroad. This article identifies the key deficiencies of existing treatments of the concept and identifies a roadmap to establish some conceptual clarity on the topic. It advances a "strict" definition of autocracy promotion that requires a clear intent on the part of an external actor to bolster autocracy as a form of political regime as well as an underlying motivation that rests in significant part on an ideological commitment to autocracy itself. It also introduces a new typology that places autocracy promotion within the wider context of the international politics of authoritarian rule.

Proponents of deliberative democracy argue that it enhances procedural democracy by bringing policymakers and the public closer together and by generating new alternatives rather than just choices. But what role does deliberation play under autocracy, where basic democratic institutions are absent? In China, citizens cannot elect their governments but are regularly consulted on matters of governance and policymaking. For example, all national and many sub-national policy initiatives in China currently proceed through at least one round of public consultation prior to adoption. Why do non-democratic regimes consult their citizens? One explanation is that consultation is simply "window dressing" for an otherwise authoritarian decision-making process. Indeed, no new political actors are empowered, the outcomes are non- binding, and critical comments can be kept private. But why then is the Chinese regime investing resources into a politically inconsequential activity? Similarly, why are hundreds of thousands of citizens voicing comments and criticisms if they have no effect? I argue that consultative autocracy is more than window dressing. In particular, I argue that public consultation helps inform and legitimate the policymaking process, contributing to more durable and legitimate policy outcomes. Testing these arguments required overcoming several empirical challenges. For example, public consultation is not randomly distributed, and policy outcomes are issue- specific, making them difficult to generalize. To address non-random selection, I created an extensive sub-national policy database that allows me to identify the effects of consultation across unique policy initiatives implemented in different parts of the country. To proxy for policy outcomes, I measured amendment and repeal rates, which should be lower among more effective policies. I find that no policies adopted with consultation have yet been repealed and that their amendment rates are significantly lower as well. To measure the legitimizing effects of consultation, I took advantage of a budget deliberation experiment in Zeguo, China, where participants are randomly selected to participate in annual budget deliberations. In January 2012, after multiple interviews with political leaders and legislative delegates in Zeguo, I organized a survey of the participant cohort along with a representative sample of non-participants. Survey results demonstrate that approval for local government and its policies is significantly higher among participants than non-participants but that consultation has no positive effect on views towards the central leadership

Governance system of any country let it clear to the other nations about the socio-economic culture and economic development of it. In the world, there are two major governance systems are under the practice: democracy and autocracy. Pakistan is one among very few countries who came into being on the name of religion. And according to its constitution it is a democratic country but unfortunately it remains governed by army or civil autocratic. Keeping in mind the same context, this study was designed. In addition, Pakistan is the second biggest country whose more than 60% population is based on the youth. So, study's major focus is on youth's and especially the youth which is the part of universities and with their perception, it was determined whether they percept Pakistan as a democratic country or autocratic? To achieve the aim of the study, quantitative research design was adopted, and survey technique was used. The study is delimited to southern Punjab region of Pakistan. All public sector universities of this region were the population of the study. By adopting multistage sampling technique, from each university 10 departments and from each department 10 (05 male and 05 female) students were targeted. A self-developed questionnaire was used for data collection. Questionnaire have three parts and each part is analyzed separately. Collected data was analyzed by using SPSS (Version 21). The study has meaningful results and findings.

This article applies insights from cultural anthropology to the study of politics, nationalism and Islam in Turkey, with particular focus on group formation and competitive networks. It develops a model for understanding political fragmentation and inter-group hostility.

Reprinted from Political Science Quarterly, v.21, no.4. ; Mode of access: Internet.

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.

Productive public good investment allocations, and group discriminatory redistributions are conflicting resource use options between which every government must choose irrespective of its political make up. This paper is the first to derive an incisive explanation of how governments combine political and economic calculation to balance these competing choices. The political logic of these economic decisions will lie on a spectrum between two polar extremes. At one extremes is an idealized, utopian, consensual democracy. At the other extreme is perfect autocracy ruled by a dictator who taxes and spends solely to satisfy his own selfish desires. Realistic societies can be analyzed as a mixture -- a weighted sum -- of these two polar cases. Thus, in making the choice between social investment and redistributive taxation from the powerless to the powerful, every government behaves somewhat like an pure democracy and somewhat like a selfish dictatorship

The history of the Russian autocracy, as well as the question of its character and historical significance, rests on the events of the Great Russian Revolution of 1917, which turned out to be an insurmountably fatal obstacle for it. A contemporary of the last Romanovs, the great Russian historian V.O. Kliuchevskii could observe and analyze the agony of the Russian autocracy, drawing on the experience of his academic knowledge of the history of Russian power and society. This part of his creative heritage should be considered as historical elitology, which directly follows from an analysis of the essence of the subjects of the highest power (elite), and in particular the ruling tsar's dynasty in Russia.

by Arthur Bullard ; Volltext // Exemplar mit der Signatur: München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- Russ. 274

This book describes the Russian presidency between 1990 and 1996, its society, and its politics in the "Second Russian Republic" between 1993 and 1996. Exam- ining one of the most dramatic periods in the history of Russia, Nichols begins with Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to pull down the old authoritarian system and to push Russia onto a democratic path of development.

openAccessArticle: False ; Page Range: 51-51 ; doi:10.1016/S0313-5926(12)50004-4 ; Harvest Date: 2016-01-12 15:10:43 ; issueName: ; cover date: 2012-03-01 ; pubType:

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the effect of natural resource rents on the process of economic liberalization and a potential moderating effect of the level of democracy. A simple political-economic model is developed in which the government in an autocratic country faces a trade-off between liberalizing the economy to broaden the tax base on the one hand and consolidating its political power by preventing the rise of an economically independent middle class striving for political participation on the other hand. Whilst the theoretical model predicts that rents from natural resources lead to economic liberalization in both autocratic and democratic countries, the empirical analysis finds evidence that increasing resource abundance may lead to deliberalization in autocracies but may promote liberalization in democracies. The empirical evidence is robust to using both static panel data methods that control for unobserved country heterogeneity as well as a dynamic GMM estimator that further controls for potential endogeneity issues.

This project will explore the analogies between Russian foreign and domestic policies from contemporary times and from the late Russian Empire of the early 20th century. Both Czar Nicholas II and Vladimir Putin are leaders committed to autocratic rule and repression of internal dissent. Both leaders have a track record of intensifying repression as their time in power progresses. A further link is the impact that foreign policy plays on the internal politics of Russia, with success or failure in foreign conflict providing either solidification of power or the spark for popular unrest. We will explore topics such as the similarities between the crackdowns on socialist and Jewish dissidents in Imperial Russia and Putin's expansion of the surveillance state and increased attack on political dissidents such as Alexie Navalny's democratic reformers. The progression of Nicholas II's rule and the impact of failed foreign policy tied with a disregard for dissatisfaction at home could give us insight into how Putin's future decisions and outcomes may play out, as well as provide a warning for the instability and suffering that may come with said endgame. We will also take into consideration key differences between the two rulers, such as personal political aptitude or competence, an empire trying to maintain its power versus a country trying to reassert lost prestige, and a Russia that is interconnected with the wider world versus one retreating further into isolation.