Authoritarian Breakdown in the Arab World: Linkages, Leverage and Regime Type

Scholars (see Levitsky and Way, 2005) have highlighted the importance of linkages and leverage in facilitating authoritarian breakdown. By linkages, we are referring to the ties that authoritarian regimes have to the United States, the European Union and other Western dominated international institutions and leverage refers to how vulnerable authoritarian regimes are to external pressure from these actors. But what previous scholars have failed to emphasize is that the type of authoritarian regime (i.e., personalist, military and single party) affects how much power international actors have in facilitating the ousting of an autocrat. With the recent events of the Arab Spring, applying linkages and leverage in combination with Barbara Geddes’ typology of authoritarian regimes can help improve our understanding of the role that the international community can play in these events. We differentiate between the various types of authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Libya, and apply the concepts of linkages and leverage in order to explain the events of the Arab Spring. By combining linkage, leverage, and regime type, this paper highlights the circumstances under which some policy tools will be effective in inducing authoritarian breakdown. The paper emphasizes that removing autocrats will be most difficult in military regimes that have few linkages or incentives to step down

Revisiting the Concept of the Failed State: Bringing the State Back In

The policy and donor communities have placed great importance on fixing ‘failed states’. World leaders have cited failed states as one of the greatest threats to the global community. Nevertheless the concept of the failed state is currently subject to a backlash from the academic community. Scholars have criticised the failed states literature on theoretical, normative, empirical and practical grounds. We provide a brief overview of these main concerns and offer a more systematic method for measuring ‘state failure’. Coming up with better ways of assessing how states underperform will enhance our understanding of how institutional decay affects stability and development and, most importantly, will provide an improved system of early warning for practitioners

Elite Co-optation, Repression, and Coups in Autocracies

This article provides an explanation for the significant variation in coups in autocracies. The existing theoretical literature focuses on the strategies that leaders use to thwart mass mobilization and survive in power. However, most autocratic leaders lose power through a coup, indicating that the main threats to political survival in autocracies emerge from insiders and not from outside the incumbent coalition. This article focuses on leaders' strategies to mitigate elite threats and argues that autocrats' strategies of co-optation and repression within the ruling elite and the armed forces affect the risk of coups in opposite ways. Elected authoritarian legislatures are instruments that leaders employ to co-opt members of the incumbent coalition and are expected to decrease the likelihood of coups. In contrast, purges of insider actors constitute a repressive strategy that depletes bases of support and increases the risk of coups. We find empirical support for these hypotheses from a sample of all authoritarian regimes from 1950 to 2004