AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES

Authoritarian Regimes

Authoritarian Regimes

Introduction

In recent decades, students of authoritarianism have paid particular attention to the characteristics of autocracies that increase or decrease their longevity and propensity to collapse in the face of various internal or external challenges. These identified factors include the presence of an effective internal security apparatus, high level economic performance, discretionary control over economic resources, effective formal political institutions, and a country's insulation from external pressures for regime change. In addition to these elements, scholars have taken strides in disaggregating authoritarian cases into regime types and exploring the different strengths and vulnerabilities presented by particular forms of autocracy. Despite this veritable cottage industry of explanations for authoritarian resilience, students of authoritarianism have not often given sufficient attention to protest dynamics, explaining how or why popular mobilization tends to occur within particular authoritarian settings. There is a need to highlight features of authoritarian institutional structures that can alternatively facilitate or constrain popular actors 'ability to organize sustained, nationwide protest movements, an outcome that plays a crucial role in the generation of authoritarian breakdown. Therefore, all the issues and aspects related to authoritarian regimes will be discussed in detail.

Discussion

As noted by one researcher in 2008, one instrument that clearly increases the resilience of an authoritarian regime is an extensive, cohesive, well-funded, and experienced coercive apparatus that can reliably harass opposition and put down protest. Without security agents capable of and willing to suppress dissent, autocratic rulers are vulnerable to the kind of popular uprisings that might spiral out of control and bring about the collapse of the regime. In the view of Way, an effective security apparatus is well-funded, trained and equipped and usually has usually been hardened through experience in a major conflict. When confronted with large protests, these forces are ready and willing to use intimidation and violence to restore order when ordered to do so by the state elite (Abueva, 1988, 53).

The presence of this kind of effective internal security force is central to a regime's coercive capacity its ability to either prevent or crack down on opposition protest. These authors further break down coercive capacity into two distinctive modes of coercion. The first involves high-intensity coercion, which refers to highly-public acts such as dispersing large crowds as well as the harassing, arresting, and imprisoning of opponents. The second is slow-intensity coercion, the monitoring and low-profile intimidation of potential opponents, such as the denial of licenses or basic social services, extension of special taxes, and attacks by non-uniformed thugs. Coercive capacity can also be assessed on the dimensions of scope, the width of its reach into society and across a country's territory and cohesion, the level of compliance within the state apparatus. These distinguishing characteristics determine how well a security apparatus can prevent the outbreak of public opposition and secondly, how effectively it can reactively quickly suppress incidents of popular contention that do occur (Akimov, 1994, 128).

According to the researcher known as Nathan in 2003, the cohesion of an internal security ...