Authoritarian Breakdown

Although most human beings have lived under some form of authoritarianism throughout most of recorded history, the academic study of politics has focused on democracy. This focus may reflect the intellectual interests of the predominantly North American and West European scholars who built the discipline of political science, or it may be due to the greater transparency and routinization of democratic politics, which makes it easier to observe and to theorize. Whatever the reason, this focus has left us with few shoulders of giants on which to stand as we try to understand political change in less democratic and less institutionalized settings.1 The study of regime transition is one of the areas in which the near absence of theories about authoritarian politics has impeded scholars ’ ability to explain events. Since World War II, more than 125 authoritarian regimes have ended, as have many democracies. Many fine studies of these transitions have been written, but few of the general explanations proposed by scholars have turned out to hold across the full range of cases. One reason for the inability to develop a general explanation for transitions, I argue below, is that different forms of authoritarianism break down in characteristically different ways. As a consequence, explanations of transition developed in response to experiences in one part of the world, in which some particular kind o