[PDF] Autocracy eBook

Author : Masha Gessen
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 30,11 MB
Release : 2021-06-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0593332245

GET BOOK

“When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times “A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.

Author : G. Tullock
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 32,55 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9401577412

GET BOOK

My first serious thought about a scientific approach to politics was in Communist China. When the Communists seized China, the American Department of State, which was planning to recognize them, left its entire diplomatic establishment in place. At the time, I was a Vice Consul in Tientsin, so I found myself living under the Communists. While the Department of State was planning on recognizing the Communists, the Communist plans were obscure. In any event, they weren't going to recognize us in the Consulate General until formal relations were established between the two governments, so I had a great deal of leisure. As a man who then intended to spend his life as a political officer in the Department of State, I decided to fill in this time by reading political science. I rapidly realized, not only that the work was rather unsatisfactory from a scientific standpoint, but also that it didn't seem to have very much relevance to the Communist government under which I was then living. ! I was unable to solve the problem at the time, and after a number of vicissitudes which included service in Hong Kong and South Korea, neither of which was really a model of democracy, I resigned and switched over to an academic career primarily concerned with that mixture of economics and political science which we call Public Choice. Most of my work in Public Choice has dealt with democratic governments.

Author : David Pepper
Publisher : St. Helena Press
Page : 331 pages
File Size : 39,76 MB
Release : 2021-10-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1662919581

GET BOOK

“It’s the statehouses, stupid.” Laboratories of Autocracy shows that far more than the high-profile antics of politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jim Jordan—and yes, even bigger than Donald Trump’s "Big Lie”—it’s anonymous, often corrupt politicians in statehouses across the country who pose the greatest dangers to American democracy. Because these statehouses no longer operate as functioning democracies, these unknown politicians have all the incentive to keep doing greater damage, and can not be held accountable however extreme they get. This has driven steep declines in states like Ohio and others across the country. And collectively, it’s placed American democracy in its greatest peril since the dawn of the Jim Crow era. But Pepper doesn’t stop there. He lays out a robust pro-democracy agenda outlining how everyone from elected officials to business leaders to everyday citizens can fight back.

Author : Javier Corrales
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 36,88 MB
Release : 2023-02-06
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0815738080

GET BOOK

How Nicolás Maduro reinvented authoritarianism for the twenty-first centurVenezuela, which once enjoyed periods of democratically elected governments in the latter half of the twentieth century, has descended into autocratic rule, coupled with economic collapse. In his new book, Autocracy Rising, veteran scholar of Latin American politics Javier Corrales explores how and why this happened. Corrales focuses on two themes: party systems and institutional capacity. He argues that Venezuela’s democratic backsliding advanced when the ruling party obtained far too much electoral clout while the opposition fragmented. The state then took control of formerly independent agencies of the state. This allowed the ruling party to use and abuse of the law to favor the president—which in turn generated a permanent economic crisis. After succeeding Hugo Chávez in 2013, Nicolás Maduro confronted, unexpectedly, another change in the party system: a rising opposition. This triggered deeper autocratization. To survive, the state was compelled to modernize autocratic practices and seek alliances with sinister partners. In short, Maduro concentrated power, paradoxically, by sharing power. Autocracy Rising compares what occurred in Venezuela to twenty other cases throughout Latin America where presidents were forced out of office. Corrales illuminates the depressing cycle in which semi-authoritarian regimes become increasingly autocratic in response to crisis, only to cause new crises that lead to even greater authoritarianism.

Author : Daniel Treisman
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 50,70 MB
Release : 2018-02-06
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0815732449

GET BOOK

Corruption, fake news, and the "informational autocracy" sustaining Putin in power After fading into the background for many years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia suddenly has emerged as a new threat—at least in the minds of many Westerners. But Western assumptions about Russia, and in particular about political decision-making in Russia, tend to be out of date or just plain wrong. Under the leadership of Vladimir Putin since 2000, Russia is neither a somewhat reduced version of the Soviet Union nor a classic police state. Corruption is prevalent at all levels of government and business, but Russia's leaders pursue broader and more complex goals than one would expect in a typical kleptocracy, such as those in many developing countries. Nor does Russia fit the standard political science model of a "competitive authoritarian" regime; its parliament, political parties, and other political bodies are neither fakes to fool the West nor forums for bargaining among the elites. The result of a two-year collaboration between top Russian experts and Western political scholars, Autocracy explores the complex roles of Russia's presidency, security services, parliament, media and other actors. The authors argue that Putin has created an “informational autocracy,” which relies more on media manipulation than on the comprehensive repression of traditional dictatorships. The fake news, hackers, and trolls that featured in Russia’s foreign policy during the 2016 U.S. presidential election are also favored tools of Putin’s domestic regime—along with internet restrictions, state television, and copious in-house surveys. While these tactics have been successful in the short run, the regime that depends on them already shows signs of age: over-centralization, a narrowing of information flows, and a reliance on informal fixers to bypass the bureaucracy. The regime's challenge will be to continue to block social modernization without undermining the leadership’s own capabilities.

Author : James R. Hollyer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 31,42 MB
Release : 2018-09-27
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1108356338

GET BOOK

Advocates for economic development often call for greater transparency. But what does transparency really mean? What are its consequences? This breakthrough book demonstrates how information impacts major political phenomena, including mass protest, the survival of dictatorships, democratic stability, as well as economic performance. The book introduces a new measure of a specific facet of transparency: the dissemination of economic data. Analysis shows that democracies make economic data more available than do similarly developed autocracies. Transparency attracts investment and makes democracies more resilient to breakdown. But transparency has a dubious consequence under autocracy: political instability. Mass-unrest becomes more likely, and transparency can facilitate democratic transition - but most often a new despotic regime displaces the old. Autocratic leaders may also turn these threats to their advantage, using the risk of mass-unrest that transparency portends to unify the ruling elite. Policy-makers must recognize the trade-offs transparency entails.

Author : Barry C. Lynn
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 38,75 MB
Release : 2020-09-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1250240638

GET BOOK

Barry C. Lynn, one of America's preeminent thinkers, provides the clearest statement yet on the nature and magnitude of the political and economic dangers posed by America’s new monopolies in Liberty from All Masters. "Very few thinkers in recent years have done more to shift the debate in Washington than Barry Lynn." —Franklin Foer Americans are obsessed with liberty, mad about liberty. On any day, we can tune into arguments about how much liberty we need to buy a gun or get an abortion, to marry who we want or adopt the gender we feel. We argue endlessly about liberty from regulation and observation by the state, and proudly rebel against the tyranny of course syllabi and Pandora playlists. Redesign the penny today and the motto would read “You ain’t the boss of me.” Yet Americans are only now awakening to what is perhaps the gravest domestic threat to our liberties in a century—in the form of an extreme and fast-growing concentration of economic power. Monopolists today control almost every corner of the American economy. The result is not only lower wages and higher prices, hence a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. The result is also a stripping away of our liberty to work how and where we want, to launch and grow the businesses we want, to create the communities and families and lives we want. The rise of online monopolists such as Google and Amazon—designed to gather our most intimate secrets and use them to manipulate our personal and group actions—is making the problem only far worse fast. Not only have these giant corporations captured the ability to manage how we share news and ideas with one another, they increasingly enjoy the power to shape how we move and play and speak and think.

Author : Klaus Larres
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 462 pages
File Size : 22,59 MB
Release : 2021-10-31
Category : History
ISBN : 1000467600

GET BOOK

In order to truly understand the emergence, endurance, and legacy of autocracy, this volume of engaging essays explores how autocratic power is acquired, exercised, and transferred or abruptly ended through the careers and politics of influential figures in more than 20 countries and six regions. The book looks at both traditional "hard" dictators, such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and more modern "soft" or populist autocrats, who are in the process of transforming once fully democratic countries into autocratic states, including Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The authors touch on a wide range of autocratic and dictatorial figures in the past and present, including present-day autocrats, such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, military leaders, and democratic leaders with authoritarian aspirations. They analyze the transition of selected autocrats from democratic or benign semi-democratic systems to harsher forms of autocracy, with either quite disastrous or more successful outcomes. An ideal reader for students and scholars, as well as the general public, interested in international affairs, leadership studies, contemporary history and politics, global studies, security studies, economics, psychology, and behavioral studies.