Authoritarian System (authoritarian + system)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Disobeying an Illegitimate Request in a Democratic or Authoritarian System

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2010
Stefano Passini
Crimes of obedience in the form of illegal or immoral acts committed in response to orders from authority occur in many contexts. In particular, under some circumstances of threats, people can easily accept restrictions upon democratic procedures. Recent studies have underlined the role of legitimacy in understanding the authority relationship and the importance of evaluating the legitimacy of the request rather than the legitimacy of the authority in preventing the rise of authoritarianism. The purpose of this study was to verify if people respond differently when an illegitimate request is put forward by a democratic or an authoritarian authority. The results on 224 subjects confirmed that people tend to be more obedient when they perceive authorities as democratic, notwithstanding the legitimacy of their requests. [source]


Superpresidentialism and the Military: The Russian Variant

PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2008
ZOLTAN BARANY
This article explains the evolution of the presidential-military nexus in post-Soviet Russia. Why has the role of presidents become the overriding factor in Russian civil-military relations? What explains the differences between the relationships Russia's two post-Soviet presidents, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, developed with the armed forces? I argue that following the 1993 crisis between the president and the legislature, and even more so after the 1996 presidential elections, the Russian polity has gradually become a superpresidential authoritarian system and the type of executive-military relations that has evolved is consistent with this designation. Rather than establishing civilian oversight of the armed forces shared between the legislative and the executive branches, Yeltsin and Putin created a state in which civilian control has become synonymous with presidential control. [source]


The Politics of Social Harmony: Ruling Strategy and Health Care Policy in Hu's China

ASIAN POLITICS AND POLICY, Issue 2 2009
Bin Yu
This study seeks to explain the causes of social welfare policy change in a single-party authoritarian system. Using the evolution of Chinese health care policy as an example, it discerns why the Hu Jintao administration opted for a compensation-oriented welfare policy paradigm in the absence of adequate interest articulation and apparent electoral accountability, despite the virtual collapse of the Chinese social welfare system during the 1990s. I explore the hypothesis that a high level of political pressure, coupled with a high degree of economic openness, drove the Chinese Communist Party to alter its ruling strategy, a political paradigm that best ensures its monopoly on political power and consequently produces distinct implications for public policy outputs. This study suggests that authoritarian regimes can and do compensate the citizenry under certain circumstances. Further, it also reveals a self-adaptation process initiated by a single-party authoritarian system. [source]


Political Institutions and Constrained Response to Economic Sanctions

FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 3 2008
Susan Hannah Allen
Institutional constraints within the target state not only influence a leader's ability to resist economic sanctions, but they also affect the decision-making process within the target state and the nature of information that a sender can ascertain about likely response. Autocratic leaders, who are less constrained, send noisier signals about their probable behavior. This lack of constraint also allows more freedom to resist sanctions, as they can shunt the costs of sanctions off onto the general public, who have little influence over policy outcomes or leadership retention. Democratic leaders are more constrained and more susceptible to sanctions pressure. As result, there is less uncertainty for senders about probable response. Using a heteroskedastic probit model to explore potential systematic components of the variation surrounding sanctions response, the impact of sanctions is shown to differ by regime type,both in the response to coercion as well as in the variance surrounding that response. The results presented here suggest that as expected, democracies are more susceptible to sanctions pressure, but the response of mixed and authoritarian systems are more difficult to predict. These findings have implications for the design of future sanctions policy as well as suggesting which states make the best targets for economic coercion. [source]