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This guest author post is written by Nathan J. Brown, Steven D. Schaaf, Samer Anabtawi, and Julian G. Waller, co-authors of the new book Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism, from the University of Michigan Press. The book is now available in hardcover, paperback, and open access. It is a part of our “Dialogues in Democracy” collection of books that explore democracy and civic engagement.

Introduction

After a generation of scholars focused on democracy, democratization, and transitions from authoritarian rule, authoritarianism has very much returned to the spotlight. The reasons are clear: the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project, for instance, recently observed that worldwide, “there are now more closed autocracies than liberal democracies—for the first time in more than two decades.” Similarly, within the United States, 81% of voters perceive the persistence of American democracy as under threat.

But it is not merely authoritarianism’s global reach that is spreading. As a conceptual category in academic research, it has grown capacious indeed. While using the term “authoritarianism” to refer to political regimes is relatively new, it has quickly grown to encompass all non-democratic systems previously considered distinct, such as dictatorship and tyranny.

So how does this broad category of political systems work? Is it merely one in which politics and policy outcomes are direct reflections of the desires of unaccountable rulers? And what exactly are the most meaningful distinctions between how democratic and authoritarian systems operate on a day-to-day basis? Comparative scholarship probing these questions has directed much of its focus to the common denominator across autocracies: a preponderance of power which rests with an unaccountable regime or ruler, in which observed politics is explained as a function of ruler goals and wishes. This general characterization, however, has ultimately masked a great deal of variation within the internal political dynamics of autocracies.

Our new book, Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism, undertakes a pivot away from these regime-centric logics. It empirically examines real and meaningful differences in how state bodies can institutionalize themselves and forge alliances with an array of constituencies to cement their own political leverage and influence. In doing so, it illustrates just how varied authoritarian societies are in their operation—something the prevailing wisdom of regime functionalism can obscure. While some are indeed aptly described as places where a single autocrat or ruling body holds near-absolute control, others have state institutions that can operate independently—in managing their own institutional affairs and even directing public policies.

Is “Authoritarianism” Still a Useful Concept?

Our answer is a cautious affirmative, but for reasons less commonly cited and shorn of the easy assumptions that have come to dominate today’s scholarly and policy conversations. Democracy and authoritarianism are strikingly different regimes in one major sense. In democracies—in the modern, not classical sense—the political leadership of the state apparatus is chosen through regular competitive elections with uncertain outcomes. Authoritarianism describes all those systems that do not choose their leaders in such a manner. Authoritarian governments might be organized as totalitarian regimes, military juntas, absolute monarchies, ideological one-party states, oligarchies, or personalist/populist regimes that revolve primarily around a single individual. And indeed, those who classify authoritarian regimes tend to do so according to who rules or where rulers come from. Labeling a country as “authoritarian,” therefore reveals fairly little about its day-to-day political workings.

We argue that providing a more-encompassing understanding of authoritarian political landscapes requires recognizing the explanatory potential of institutional forces beyond the regime itself. To do so, we marshal evidence challenging accounts of authoritarianism that emphasize the near-total, instrumental control of the autocrat and his entourage. Instead, we examine state institutions across various authoritarian systems to better understand differences in how they operate.

We push back—partly—against the view that institutions like courts, parliaments, or even religious establishments in authoritarian regimes vary only in response to dictatorial or systemic needs. Our analysis finds a much more fluid and varying place for state institutions, even in stable and consolidated authoritarian regimes. 

Sometimes courts are pliant and dutiful executors of an authoritarian regime’s will. In other cases, they resist or even outright reject the regime’s legal goals. Some parliaments are quiescent and loyalist, while others are rambunctious and uncooperative. And some state religious institutions happily support an autocrat’s agenda, whereas others grasp their privileges tightly or even work to delegitimize the regime’s right to decide on religious and moralistic grounds. And in all cases, there are instances where a policy or decision seems to fit nicely with the regime’s goals but was actually developed and seized on by institutional subordinates or societal actors independent of the regime’s decision-making processes at the top.

In short, the title of our book is its principal conclusion: autocrats can’t always get what they want. And even when they try, they only sometimes get what they need. In many cases, autocrats and meaningfully autonomous state institutions simply learn to live with each other, with the former maintaining their grip on political power but the latter operating much of the machinery of public policy on a day-to-day basis. To pursue this line of inquiry, we focus on two dimensions of institutional autonomy: how much they have control over their internal operations and how much they are able to formulate clear agendas or missions. And that is where we find wide variation among regimes, among institutions, and even within the same institution over time.

But how and why do authoritarian state institutions gain or lose autonomy? Here we move beyond the claim of the title to probe the inner workings of different types of authoritarian state institutions in an eclectic set of cases: constitutional courts in Egypt and Palestine; parliaments in Russia and Kuwait; and religious establishments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Germany’s authoritarian past. Our primary findings show that two factors allow them to gain the most autonomy: internal institutionalization and linkages with other actors both inside and outside the state. The cases of Egypt and Russia exemplify our complications nicely.

Institutions, Autonomy, and How Authoritarianism Works from the Inside

Egypt has always had rule that can be classified as authoritarian. With the exception of the brief and contested years between 2011 and 2013, Egypt is a clean case of non-democratic rule that has had several regime breaks without changing the core, unaccountable nature of the system. This is not the case where authoritarianism is surreptitiously hidden behind sophisticated, pluralist election machinery and unfair media manipulation, as in places like Hungary or Turkey.

Yet something else has lurked below the surface—or rather has been woven into the fabric of daily Egyptian political life. For instance, in the 1980s, Egypt’s constitutional court developed its own sense of legality and corporate identity, seeking every chance it could to institutionalize its own self-governance and strengthen linkages with an upper-middle class strata of lawyers and advocates. From the regime’s perspective, the court quickly became dysfunctional: it has shown a meaningful capacity to challenge Egypt’s authoritarian regime over the years, sometimes subtly, sometimes vociferously and contentiously.

Similarly, authoritarian Egypt inherited a powerful religious institution in the form of the Al-Azhar university, which formed under the Fatimid Empire in the tenth century and evolved into one of the most celebrated and well-respected sources of Islamic teaching long before Egypt’s modern authoritarian regime rose to power. Egyptian rulers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, despite their clear authoritarian credentials, have always had a testy relationship with this religious institution, finding themselves unable to command Al-Azhar to do what they want and often having to simply deal with it using its religious authority in ways that frustrate regime goals. Al-Azhar has never threatened the regime, but neither did the regime create it—and while it has bent and reshaped Al-Azhar, it has not done so as it has pleased.

We see a similar dynamic in modern Russia, two and a half years into its destructive war against Ukraine. Russia today is a personalist regime in a wartime state of emergency. Its state institutions are now sclerotic and fully subservient to President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rule. But these same institutions were not always so quiescent throughout all of Russia’s authoritarian history, with a parliament that has on occasion been embarrassingly over-productive in crafting legislation it thought the regime desired and a constitutional court that has played a careful game at safeguarding its own autonomy in certain spheres, while capitulating in others. Moreover, Putin will not live forever, and state institutions – a parliament, a constitutional court, a host of powerful security agencies, an empowered military establishment, and a resurgent, state-sponsored Orthodox Church – will still be there when he is gone.

We do not argue that a post-Putin Russia will emerge as a liberal democracy. But the way the state operates may change in the future depending on how state institutions – and the personnel staffing them – emerge and operate from the scrum for power that follows the end of Putin’s personalistic leadership. As our historical analysis in the book suggests, many of these institutions will almost certainly seek to carve out new autonomy and authority for themselves, some will sidestep and shirk top-down directives, while still others will simply hunker down and play as loyalists to whoever comes out on top just to avoid attracting attention while still retaining the capacity to manage their own internal affairs.

So, when we speak of the rise of authoritarianism globally today, we should be measured and attentive to just how much the meaning of being under “authoritarian” rule varies in practice and across contexts. Indeed, democracies may be alike in important ways. But authoritarian regimes are varied and strange, not easy to put into a single box except at the highest level of abstraction. It is easy to say what they are not when speaking in one breath (i.e., democracies), but impossible to find such similar ease in saying what they are without deeper analysis and sub-categorization. Autocrats are sometimes autocrats in the full sense of the word. But in many cases, authoritarian executives just can’t always get what they want, which tells us both that they are rarely all-powerful and often capable of being subject to meaningful—even if limited—constraints.