Ideocracies, or ideological dictatorships, such as the "Third Reich", the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China have, much more than any other kinds of autocracy, characterized the history of the 20th century. Despite their undeniable loss of significance, ideocracies have not disappeared from the world in the 21st century. This book explores the functioning of ideocracies and analyses the typical interplay of legitimation, co-optation and repression which autocratic elites use i...

Sachsen war in den vergangenen Jahren die Region Deutschlands, in der sich die Probleme der Erhaltung des gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalts und der bis in die bürgerlichen Schichten hineinreichenden Desintegration in besonders heftiger Weise entfalteten. Gesellschaftliche Integration und Desintegration sind dabei zwei Seiten einer Medaille. Der Band widmet sich daher zwei eng verflochtenen Themenkomplexen, zum einen den Integrationsprozessen der sächsischen und deutschen Zuwanderungsgesells...

Despite the so-called Third Wave of Democratization, many autocracies have been resilient in the face of political change. Moreover, many of the transition processes that could be included in the Third Wave have reached a standstill, or, at the very least, have taken a turn for the worse, leading sometimes to new forms of non-democratic regimes. As a result of these developments, the research on autocracies has experienced a revival in recent times.This unique two-volume work aims ...

Authoritarianism research has evolved into one of the fastest growing research fields in comparative politics. The newly awakened interest in autocratic regimes goes hand in hand with a lack of systematic research on the results of the political and substantive policy performance of variants of autocratic regimes. The contributions in this second volume of Comparing Autocracies are united by the assumption that the performance of political regimes and their persistence are related. Further...