Abstract
Conceptualizing the “three pillars of stability”, Gerschewski (2013) proposes legitimation, cooptation and repression as the fundamental principles of lasting autocratic rule. Recent studies put this so-called WZB model to an empirical test and probe the effects these three factors have on regime survival in light of autocratic elections (Lueders and Croissant 2014). Their finding that the WZB model has only limited explanatory power in competitive autocracies has sparked a broader debate about the empirical application of the model as such (Kailitz and Tanneberg 2015; Lueders and Croissant 2015). Our paper contributes to this debate in several ways: (1) rather than analyzing each pillar’s effect in isolation, we investigate their combined effect; (2) rather than assuming causal symmetry, we expect to find different explanations for autocratic stability and breakdown, respectively; (3) by focusing on configurations of the pillars, we are in the position to identify distinct types – or “worlds” (Gerschewski 2013) – of (un)stable autocracies. Using the data from Lueders and Croissant (2014) on elections in hegemonic and competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2009, we apply fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to empirically investigate which, if any, combination of the dimensions of legitimation, cooptation, and repression lead to the survival of autocratic regimes and which ones to their breakdown. Our findings suggest that single pillars in isolation are causally irrelevant; that the WZB model is, indeed, capable of identifying stable autocracy types but it does not perform well in identifying the reasons why autocracies break down; and that the two viable types of autocracies identified by us are meaningfully distinguished by their different legitimation strategies.
Zusammenfassung
Das Modell der „drei Säulen der Stabilität” (Gerschewski 2013) geht von Legitimation, Kooptation und Repression als den grundlegenden Prinzipien andauernder autokratischer Herrschaft aus. Jüngste Studien testen das sogenannte WZB-Modell empirisch und untersuchen die Effekte, welche die drei Faktoren auf das Überleben von Regimen im Kontext von autokratischen Wahlen haben (Lueders and Croissant 2014). Der Befund, dass das WZB-Modell nur eingeschränkte Erklärungskraft in kompetitiven Autokratien hat, löste eine breitere Debatte über die empirische Anwendung des Modells aus (Kailitz and Tanneberg 2015; Lueders and Croissant 2015). Unser Artikel trägt zu dieser Debatte in mehrerer Hinsicht bei: (1) Anstatt lediglich den Effekt einer jeden Säule isoliert zu betrachten, untersuchen wir das Wechselspiel der Säulen. (2) An Stelle von kausaler Symmetrie gehen wir von unterschiedlichen Erklärungen für autokratische Stabilität und Instabilität aus. (3) Durch den Fokus auf die unterschiedlichen Konfigurationen der Säulen sind wir in der Lage, verschiedene Typen – oder „Welten” (Gerschewski 2013) – von (in)stabilen Autokratien zu bestimmen. Mit den Daten von Lueders and Croissant (2014) zu Wahlen in hegemonialen und kompetitiven autoritären Regimen zwischen 1990 und 2009 führen wir eine fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis durch, um empirisch zu untersuchen, welche Kombinationen der Dimensionen von Legitimation, Kooptation und Repression zum Überleben und welche zum Zusammenbruch von autoritären Regimen führen. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen auf, dass einzelne Säulen allein keine kausale Relevanz haben, dass das WZB-Modell aber durchaus in der Lage ist, stablie Autokratie-Typen zu bestimmen wenn man denn die Kombination der verschiedenen Säulen untersucht. Um die Gründe für den Zusammenbruch von Autokratien auszumachen eignet sich das Modell nicht. Die zwei aus der Analyse resultierenden überlebensfähigen Typen von Autokratien unterscheiden sich wesentlich durch ihre verschiedenen Legitimations-Strategien.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
We use the terms autocracy and authoritarian regime interchangeably.
INUS stands for a condition that itself is not sufficient while being a necessary parts of a combination of conditions that is unnecessary but sufficient for the outcome (Mackie 1965).
Highly unequally distributed sets such as the skewed outcome in Lueders and Croissant’s (2014) data, create analytic problems not only in logistic regression, but also in set-theoretic methods (Schneider and Wagemann 2012, Chap. 9.2). We take those challenges head on and employ recently developed parameters that are adequate for distinguishing meaningful set relations from those that are mere artifacts of the skewed data. For the analysis of necessity, this means that we test whether a superset of the outcome is empirically trivial because it is so much bigger than the outcome set and/or its own negated set. For the analysis of sufficiency, we test whether a given subset of the outcome is empirically trivial because it is so small that it is also a subset of the negation of the outcome (Ragin 2008; Schneider and Wagemann 2012).
The Appendix is available at Schneider’s Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse.xhtml?alias=cqs).
Future research might use a more fine-grained distinction and use fuzzy sets and incorporate information on how close (non-)defeat was.
See the Appendix of Lueders and Croissant (2014) for detailed information about their indicators.
We are aware of the potential pitfalls of these legitimation indicators, however, use them as well since our goal is not to innovate indicators but rather to test the WZB model from a set-theoretic perspective by using the same data and operationalization as Lueders and Croissant (2014).
As already observed by Kailitz and Tanneberg (2015), this operationalization is highly problematic when referring to the category of electoral regimes since it is merely an artifact of the applied definition for this type of autocracy. We discuss the implications of this operationalization for our findings in Sect. 4.2.
The Appendix includes histograms of each base variable and calibrated fuzzy set. It also contains scatter plots of each fuzzy set plotted against its base variable. For further information about the raw data, see Lueders and Croissant (2014, 341).
We also do not identify any meaningful disjunction as a superset of the outcome.
We consider rows with two or more cases as having enough empirical evidence (n.cut \(\geq 2\)). For larger N QCA, it is common practice to raise the frequency cutoff in order to take the increased chance of misclassified cases into account. It is also important to point out that for the outcome electoral defeat results remain unchanged even with n.cut \(=\) 1. In short, our finding that the WZB model is not good at explaining electoral defeat of autocrats is not an artifact of our choice of frequency thresholds.
Since no assumption on any of the logical remainder passes as an easy counterfactual, the intermediate solution is identical to the conservative solution. For the parsimonious solution formula, see the Appendix.
Notice that condition diff_leg also passes the consistency threshold but not that of RoN. Likewise, none of the disjunctions between single conditions passes the empirical criteria for being non-trivially necessary.
Our results of outcome no electoral defeat are robust against the alternative frequency threshold of 1 (see Appendix). The reason for this is straightforward: by raising n.cut from \(\geq\)1 to \(\geq\)2, only one truth table row is turned into a logical remainder row (row 48, cf. Table 7 in the Appendix).
The R script includes robustness tests using higher and lower consistency thresholds.
Since no assumption on any of the logical remainder passes as an easy counterfactual, the intermediate solution is identical to the conservative solution.
These are cases that are members of the adaptive but not the rigid authoritarian type (see below).
Some cases contradict our claim that adaptive authoritarian regimes are resilient. They are listed as deviant consistency cases in Table 7. Notice, though, that autocratic defeat in elections does not necessarily mean democratization. In Iran, for instance, the autocratic electoral defeats in 1997, 1998 and 2004 refer to the beginning and end of the reformist but nevertheless authoritarian Khatami regime.
Botswana is even categorized as democracy in the dataset of Wahman et al. (2013).
Table 10 in the Appendix specifies the Boolean expression for each of the four areas.
See Table 11 in the Appendix for the names of the cases.
See the R script for the use of the theory evaluation functions from the SetMethods package (Medzihorsky et al. 2016).
Puzzling cases and in need for closer within-case scrutiny are the non-stable autocracies in area TE and the stable autocracies in \(\sim\)T\(\sim\)E, for they contradict both Gerschewski’s and our model. See the Appendix for further insights to be gained from the theory evaluation.
Such more in-depth investigations are particularly needed in adaptive autocracies because this type of authoritarianism seems to be on the rise.
References
Ahrens, Joachim, Martin Brusis, and Martin Schulze Wessel (eds.). 2015. Politics and legitimacy in post-Soviet Eurasia. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bach, Daniel C., and Mamoudou Gazibo. 2013. Neopatrimonialism in Africa and beyond. Vol. 1. London and New York: Routledge.
Banks, Arthur S., and Kenneth A. Wilson. 2013. Cross-national time-series data archive. Databanks international. Jerusalem, Israel. http://www.cntsdata.com/ Accessed 21 May 2016.
Beck, Thorsten, George R. Clarke, Alberto Groff, Phillip E. Keefer, and Patrick Walsh. 2001. New tools in comparative political economy: the database of political institutions. The World Bank Economic Review 15(1):165–176.
Bratton, Michael, and Nicolas van de Walle. 1994. Neopatrimonial regimes and political transitions in Africa. World Politics 46(04):453–489.
Brownlee, Jason. 2009. Portents of pluralism: how hybrid regimes affect democratic transitions. American Journal of Political Science 53(3):515–532.
Cheibub, José A., Jennifer Gandhi, and James R. Vreeland. 2010. Democracy and dictatorship revisited. Public Choice 143:67–101.
Cingranelli, David L., and David L. Richards. 2010. The CIRI Human Rights Dataset, Version 10.04.2012. http://www.humanrightsdata.com/ Accessed 21 May 2016.
Collins, Kathleen. 2006. Clan politics and regime transition in Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Dusa, Adrian, and Alrik Thiem. 2015. QCA: A package for Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Version 2.4. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/QCA/index.html Accessed 01 Jan 2016.
Easton, David. 1965. A systems analysis of political life. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Eisenstadt, Samuel Noah. 1973. Traditional Patrimonialism and modern neopatrimonialism. Sage research papers in the social sciences. Beverly Hills: Sage Publ.
Gandhi, Jennifer. 2008. Political institutions under dictatorship. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Geddes, Barbara, Erika Frantz, and Joseph Wright. 2014. Autocratic breakdown and regime transitions: a new data set. Perspectives on Politics 12(02):313–331.
Gentile, Michael. 2013. Meeting the ’organs’: the tacit dilemma of field research in authoritarian states. Area 45(4):426–432.
Gerschewski, Johannes. 2013. The three pillars of stability: legitimation, repression, and cooptation in autocratic regimes. Democratization 20(1):13–38.
Gerschewski, Johannes, Wolfgang Merkel, Alexander Schmotz, Christoph H. Stefes, and Dag Tanneberg. 2012. Warum überleben Diktaturen? PVS 2012(47):1.
Ginsburg, Tom, and Alberto Simpser. 2014. Constitutions in authoritarian regimes. Comparative constitutional law and policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goertz, Gary, and James Mahoney. 2005. Two-level theories and fuzzy set analysis. Sociological Methods & Research 33(4):497–538.
Grauvogel, Julia, and Christian von Soest. 2017. Legitimationsstrategien von Autokratien im Vergleich: Ergebnisse einer neuen Expertenumfrage. Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft doi:10.1007/s12286-017-0329-x.
Guriev, Sergei, and Daniel Treisman. 2015. The new dictators rule by Velvet Fist: the New York Times, May 24. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/opinion/the-new-dictators-rule-by-velvet-fist.html Accessed 20 Nov 2015.
Gwartney, James, Robert Lawson, and Joshua Hall. 2012. Economic freedom of the world: 2009 annual report. Vancouver, BC: The Fraser Institute. www.freetheworld.com Accessed 21 May 2016.
von Haldenwang, Christian. 2016. Measuring legitimacy - new trends, old shortcomings? DIE Discussion Paper 18/2016. Bonn: Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik.
Helmke, Gretchen, and Steven Levitsky. 2004. Informal institutions and comparative politics: a research agenda. Perspectives on Politics doi:10.1017/s1537592704040472.
Heston, Alan, Robert Summers and Bettina Aten. 2012. Penn World Table Version 7.1. http://www.rug.nl/research/ggdc/data/pwt/pwt-7.1. Accessed 21 May 2016.
Hoffmann, Bert. 2014. The international dimension of authoritarian regime legitimation: insights from the Cuban Case. Journal of International Relations and Development 18(4):556–574.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The third wave. democratization in the late twentieth century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Hyde, Susan D., and Nikolay Marinov. 2012. Which elections can be lost? Political Analysis 20:191–210.
Kailitz, Steffen. 2013. Classifying political regimes revisited: legitimation and durability. Democratization 20(1):39–60.
Kailitz, Steffen, and Dag Tanneberg. 2015. Legitimation, Kooptation, Repression und das Überleben von Autokratien „im Umfeld autokratischer Wahlen“. Eine Replik auf den Beitrag von Hans Lueders und Aurel Croissant. Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 9(1-2):73–82.
Kitschelt, Herbert. 2003. Accounting for postcommunist regime diversity: what counts as a good cause? In Capitalism and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: assessing the legacy of communist rule, ed. Grzegorz Ekiert, Stephen E. Hanson, 49–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kudaibergenova, Diana T. 2015. The ideology of development and legitimation: beyond ‘Kazakhstan 2030. Central Asian Survey 34(4):440–455.
Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. 2010. Competitive authoritarianism: hybrid regimes after the cold war, reprint edn. Problems of international politics. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Lewis, David. 2016. Blogging Zhanaozen: hegemonic discourse and authoritarian resilience in Kazakhstan. Central Asian Survey 4937 (April)., 1–18.
Lueders, Hans, and Aurel Croissant. 2014. Wahlen, Strategien autokratischer Herrschaftssicherung und das Überleben autokratischer Regierungen. Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 8(3-4):329–355.
Lueders, Hans, and Aurel Croissant. 2015. Eine Antwort auf die Replik von Kailitz und Tanneberg zu unserem Beitrag „Wahlen, Strategien autokratischer Herrschaftssicherung und das Überleben autokratischer Regierungen“. Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 9(3):183–193.
Mackie, John L. 1965. Causes and conditions. American philosophical quarterly 2(4):245–264.
Maerz, Seraphine F. 2016. The electronic face of authoritarianism: E‑government as a tool for gaining legitimacy in competitive and non-competitive regimes. Government Information Quarterly 33(4):727–735.
Magaloni, Beatriz. 2010. The game of electoral fraud and the ousting of authoritarian rule. American Journal of Political Science 54(3):751–765.
Mazepus, and Honorata. 2016. What makes political authority legitimate? An analysis of ideas about legitimacy in the Netherlands, France, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. ECPR Joint Sessions, Workshop “Legitimation in Non-Democracies: Concepts, Theories and Empirical Evidence across Regime Subtypes”, Pisa, April 24-28, 2016.
Medzihorsky, Juraj, Ioana-Elena Oana, Mario Quaranta, and Carsten Q. Schneider. 2016. SetMethods: functions for set-theoretic multi-method research and advanced QCA. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/SetMethods/index.html Accessed 14 Aug 2016.
Mello, Patrick A. 2012. Parliamentary peace or partisan politics? Democracies’ participation in the Iraq War. Journal of International Relations and Development 15(3):420–453.
Mendel, Jerry M., and C. Ragin Charles. 2011. fsQCA: Dialog between Jerry M. Mendel and Charles C. Ragin. www.compasss.org Accessed 21 May 2016.
Morgenbesser, Lee. 2016. Behind the façade: elections under authoritarianism in Southeast Asia. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Ortmann, Stephan, and Mark R. Thompson. 2013. China’s obsession with Singapore: learning authoritarian modernity. The Pacific Review 27(3):433–455.
Pepinsky, Thomas. 2014. The institutional turn in comparative authoritarianism. British Journal of Political Science 44(03):631–653.
Ragin, Charles C. 1987. The comparative method: moving beyond qualitative and quantitative strategies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ragin, Charles C. 2006. Set relations in social research: evaluating their consistency and coverage. Political Analysis 14(3):291–310.
Ragin, Charles C. 2008. Redesigning social inquiry: fuzzy sets and beyond. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Rohlfing, Ingo, and Carsten Q. Schneider. 2013. Combining QCA with process tracing in analyses of necessity. Political Research Quarterly 66(1):220–235.
Roller, Edeltraud. 2013. Comparing the performance of autocracies: issues in measuring types of autocratic regimes and performance. Contemporay Politics 19(1):35–54.
Schedler, Andreas. 2013. The politics of uncertainty. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Schmotz, Alexander. 2015. Vulnerability and compensation: constructing an index of co-optation in autocratic regimes. European Political Science 14(4):439–457.
Schneider, Carsten Q., and Ingo Rohlfing. 2013. Combining QCA and process tracing in set-theoretic multi-method research. Sociological Methods and Research 42(4):559–597.
Schneider, Carsten Q., and Ingo Rohlfing. 2014. Case studies nested in fuzzy-set QCA on sufficiency: formalizing case selection and causal inference. Sociological Methods & Research doi:10.2139/ssrn.2366088.
Schneider, Carsten Q., and Claudius Wagemann. 2012. Set-theoretic methods for the social sciences. Strategies for social inquiry. Cambrigde: Univ. Press.
Svolik, Milan W. 2012. The politics of authoritarian rule. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics
Wahman, Michael, Jan Teorell, and Axel Hadenius. 2013. Authoritarian regime types revisited: updated data in comparative perspective. Contemporary Politics 19(1):19–34.
Weber, Max. 2002. Economy and society: an outline of interpretive sociology, 7th edn., Berkeley: University of California Press.
Whitehead, Laurence. 1996. The international dimensions of democratization. Europe and the Americas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
World Bank. 2016. Indicators on Economic Development and Poverty. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator Accessed 14 Jun 2016.
Acknowledgements
We thank Aurel Croissant and Hans Lueders for sharing their data and Bruno de Paula Castanho e Silva for his help in preparing the data.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Additional electronic material for this article (Appendix) available online at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse.xhtml?alias=cqs.
Caption Electronic Supplementary Material
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schneider, C.Q., Maerz, S.F. Legitimation, cooptation, and repression and the survival of electoral autocracies. Z Vgl Polit Wiss 11, 213–235 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-017-0332-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-017-0332-2
Keywords
- Authoritarianism
- Elections
- Persistence
- Legitimation
- Cooptation
- Repression
- Qualitative Comparative Analysis