political regimes essay

Essay on Politics: Topics, Tips, and Examples for Students

Defining What is Politics Essay

The process of decision-making that applies to members of a group or society is called politics. Arguably, political activities are the backbone of human society, and everything in our daily life is a form of it.

Understanding the essence of politics, reflecting on its internal elements, and critically analyzing them make society more politically aware and let them make more educated decisions. Constantly thinking and analyzing politics is critical for societal evolution.

Political thinkers often write academic papers that explore different political concepts, policies, and events. The essay about politics may examine a wide range of topics such as government systems, political ideologies, social justice, public policies, international relations, etc.

After selecting a specific research topic, a writer should conduct extensive research, gather relevant information, and prepare a logical and well-supported argument. The paper should be clear and organized, complying with academic language and standards. A writer should demonstrate a deep understanding of the subject, an ability to evaluate and remain non-biased to different viewpoints, and a capacity to draw conclusions.

Now that we are on the same page about the question 'what is politics essay' and understand its importance, let's take a deeper dive into how to build a compelling political essay, explore the most relevant political argumentative essay topics, and finally, examine the political essay examples written by the best essay writing service team.

Politics Essay Example for Students

If you are still unsure how to structure your essay or how to present your statement, don't worry. Our team of experts has prepared an excellent essay example for you. Feel free to explore and examine it. Use it to guide you through the writing process and help you understand what a successful essay looks like.

How to Write a Political Essay: Tips + Guide

A well-written essay is easy to read and digest. You probably remember reading papers full of big words and complex ideas that no one bothered to explain. We all agree that such essays are easily forgotten and not influential, even though they might contain a very important message.

If you are writing an essay on politics, acknowledge that you are on a critical mission to easily convey complicated concepts. Hence, what you are trying to say should be your main goal. Our guide on how to write a political essay will help you succeed.

Conduct Research for Your Politics Essay

After choosing a topic for the essay, take enough time for preparation. Even if you are familiar with the matter, conducting thorough research is wiser. Political issues are complex and multifaceted; comprehensive research will help you understand the topic better and offer a more nuanced analysis.

Research can help you identify different viewpoints and arguments around the topic, which can be beneficial for building more impartial and persuasive essays on politics. Sometimes in the hit of the moment, opposing sides are not able to see the common ground; your goal is to remain rational, speak to diverse audiences, and help them see the core of the problem and the ways to solve it.

In political papers, accuracy and credibility are vital. Researching the topic deeply will help you avoid factual errors or misrepresentations from any standpoint. It will allow you to gather reliable sources of information and create a trustworthy foundation for the entire paper.

If you want to stand out from the other students, get inspired by the list of hottest essay ideas and check out our political essay examples.

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Brainstorm Political Essay Topics

The next step to writing a compelling politics essay is to polish your thoughts and find the right angle to the chosen topic.

Before you start writing, generate fresh ideas and organize your thoughts. There are different techniques to systematize the mess going on in your head, such as freewriting, mind mapping, or even as simple as listing ideas. This will open the doors to new angles and approaches to the topic.

When writing an essay about politics, ensure the topic is not too general. It's always better to narrow it down. It will simplify your job and help the audience better understand the core of the problem. Brainstorming can help you identify key points and arguments, which you can use to find a specific angle on the topic.

Brainstorming can also help you detect informational gaps that must be covered before the writing process. Ultimately, the brainstorming phase can bring a lot more clarity and structure to your essay.

We know how exhausting it is to come up with comparative politics essay topics. Let our research paper writing service team do all the hard work for you.

Create Your Politics Essay Thesis Statement

Thesis statements, in general, serve as a starting point of the roadmap for the reader. A political essay thesis statement outlines the main ideas and arguments presented in the body paragraphs and creates a general sense of the content of the paper.

Creating a thesis statement for essays about politics in the initial stages of writing can help you stay focused and on track throughout the working process. You can use it as an aim and constantly check your arguments and evidence against it. The question is whether they are relevant and supportive of the statement.

Get creative when creating a statement. This is the first sentence readers will see, and it should be compelling and clear.

The following is a great example of a clear and persuasive thesis statement:

 'The lack of transparency and accountability has made the World Trade Organization one of the most controversial economic entities. Despite the influence, its effectiveness in promoting free trade and economic growth in developing countries has decreased.'

Provide Facts in Your Essay about Politic

It's a no-brainer that everything you will write in your essay should be supported by strong evidence. The credibility of your argument will be questioned every step of the way, especially when you are writing about sensitive subjects such as essays on government influence on economic troubles. 

Provide facts and use them as supporting evidence in your politics essay. They will help you establish credibility and accuracy and take your paper out of the realm of speculation and mere opinions.

Facts will make your essay on political parties more persuasive, unbiased, and targeted to larger audiences. Remember, the goal is to bring the light to the core of the issue and find a solution, not to bring people even farther apart.

Speaking of facts, many students claim that when they say ' write my essay for me ' out loud, our writing team is the fastest to respond and deliver high-quality essays meeting their trickiest requirements.

Structure Your Political Essay

Your main goal is to communicate your ideas to many people. To succeed, you need to write an essay that is easy to read and understand. Creating a structure will help you present your ideas logically and lead the readers in the right direction.

Sometimes when writing about political essay topics, we get carried away. These issues can be very emotional and sensitive, and writers are not protected from becoming victims of their own writings. Having a structure will keep you on track, only focusing on providing supported arguments and relevant information.

Start with introducing the thesis statement and provide background information. Followed by the body paragraphs and discuss all the relevant facts and standpoints. Finish it up with a comprehensive conclusion, and state the main points of your essay once again.

The structure will also save you time. In the beginning, creating an outline for essays on politics will give you a general idea of what should be written, and you can track your progress against it.

Revise and Proofread Your Final Politics Essay

Once every opinion is on the paper and every argument is well-constructed, one final step should be taken. Revision!

We know nothing is better than finishing the homework and quickly submitting it, but we aim for an A+. Our political essay must be reviewed. You need to check if there is any error such as grammatical, spelling, or contextual.

Take some time off, relax, and start proofreading after a few minutes or hours. Having a fresh mind will help you review not only grammar but also the arguments. Check if something is missing from your essays about politics, and if you find gaps, provide additional information.

You had to spend a lot of time on them, don't give up now. Make sure they are in perfect condition.

Effective Political Essay Topics

We would be happy if our guide on how to write political essays helped you, but we are not stopping there. Below you will find a list of advanced and relevant political essay topics. Whether you are interested in global political topics or political science essay topics, we got you covered.

Once you select a topic, don't forget to check out our politics essay example! It will bring even more clarity, and you will be all ready to start writing your own paper.

Political Argumentative Essay Topics

Now that we know how to write a political analysis essay let's explore political argumentative essay topics:

• Should a political party take a stance on food politics and support policies promoting sustainable food systems?
• Should we label Winston Churchill as the most influential political figure of World War II?
• Does the focus on GDP growth in the political economy hinder the human development index?
• Is foreign influence a threat to national security?
• Is foreign aid the best practice for political campaigning?
• Does the electoral college work for an ideal political system?
• Are social movements making a real difference, or are they politically active for temporary change?
• Can global politics effectively address political conflicts in the modern world?
• Are opposing political parties playing positive roles in US international relations?
• To what extent should political influence be allowed in addressing economic concerns?
• Can representative democracy prevent civil wars in ethnically diverse countries?
• Should nuclear weapons be abolished for the sake of global relations?
• Is economic development more important than ethical issues for Caribbean politics?
• What role should neighboring nations play in preventing human rights abuse in totalitarian regimes?
• Should political decisions guide the resolution of conflicts in the South China Sea?

Political Socialization Essay Topics

Knowing how to write a political issue essay is one thing, but have you explored our list of political socialization essay topics?

• To what extent does a political party or an influential political figure shape the beliefs of young people?
• Does political influence shape attitudes toward environmental politics?
• How can individuals use their own learning process to navigate political conflicts in a polarized society?
• How do political strategies shape cultural globalization?
• Is gender bias used as a political instrument in political socialization?
• How can paying attention to rural communities improve political engagement?
• What is the role of Amnesty International in preventing the death penalty?
• What is the role of politically involved citizens in shaping minimum wage policies?
• How does a political party shape attitudes toward global warming?
• How does the federal system influence urban planning and attitudes toward urban development?
• What is the role of public opinion in shaping foreign policy, and how does it affect political decision making
• Did other countries' experiences affect policies on restricting immigration in the US?
• How can note-taking skills and practice tests improve political engagement? 
• How do the cultural values of an independent country shape the attitudes toward national security?
• Does public opinion influence international intervention in helping countries reconcile after conflicts?

Political Science Essay Topics

If you are searching for political science essay topics, check our list below and write the most compelling essay about politic:

• Is environmental education a powerful political instrument? 
• Can anarchist societies provide a viable alternative to traditional forms of governance?
• Pros and cons of deterrence theory in contemporary international relations
• Comparing the impact of the French Revolution and World War II on the political landscape of Europe
• The role of the ruling political party in shaping national policies on nuclear weapons
• Exploring the roots of where politics originate
• The impact of civil wars on the processes of democratization of the third-world countries
• The role of international organizations in promoting global health
• Does using the death penalty in the justice system affect international relations?
• Assessing the role of the World Trade Organization in shaping global trade policies
• The political and environmental implications of conventional agriculture
• The impact of the international court on political decision making
• Is philosophical anarchism relevant to contemporary political discourse?
• The emergence of global citizenship and its relationship with social movements
• The impact of other countries on international relations between the US and China

Final Words

See? Writing an essay about politic seems like a super challenging job, but in reality, all it takes is excellent guidance, a well-structured outline, and an eye for credible information.

If you are stressed out from juggling a hundred different course assignments and have no time to focus on your thesis, our dissertation writing services could relieve you! Our team of experts is ready to take over even the trickiest tasks on the tightest schedule. You just have to wish - ' write my essay ' out loud, and we will be on it!

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Related Articles

Political regime

What you should know about this indicator, how does the producer of this data - regimes of the world - describe this data, related research and writing.

Democracy data: how sources differ and when to use which one

The ‘Regimes of the World’ data: how do researchers measure democracy?

200 years ago, everyone lacked democratic rights. Now, billions of people have them

Explore charts that include this data, frequently asked questions, how does row characterize democracy.

Regimes of the World distinguishes four types of political systems: closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies, and liberal democracies.

• Closed autocracy : citizens do not have the right to choose either the chief executive of the government or the legislature through multi-party elections
• Electoral autocracy : citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature through multi-party elections; but they lack some freedoms, such as the freedoms of association or expression that make the elections meaningful, free, and fair
• Electoral democracy : citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature in meaningful, free and fair, and multi-party elections
• Liberal democracy : electoral democracy and citizens enjoy individual and minority rights, are equal before the law, and the actions of the executive are constrained by the legislative and the courts

You can find data on the more specific characteristics and derived measures in our Democracy Data Explorer.

How is democracy scored?

Regimes of the World treats democracy as a binary, by classifying a country as either a democracy or not.

This scoring thereby differs from other approaches such as Varieties of Democracy’s electoral democracy index and other projects , which classify countries as a spectrum, with some being scored as more democratic than others.

What years and countries are covered?

As of version 13 of the dataset, V-Dem covers 202 countries, going back in time as far as 1789. Many countries have been covered since 1900, including before they became independent from their colonial powers.

RoW covers countries and years since 1900. But we expand the years and countries covered and refine the coding rules, as detailed below.

How is democracy measured?

How does row work to make its assessments valid.

To measure what it wants to capture, RoW uses data from the Varieties of Democracy project, which assesses the characteristics of democracy mostly through evaluations by experts.

These anonymous experts are primarily academics and members of the media and civil society. They are also often nationals or residents of the country they assess, and therefore know its political system well and can evaluate aspects that are difficult to observe.

V-Dem’s own team of researchers supplements the expert evaluations. They code some easier-to-observe rules and laws of the political system, such as whether the legislature has a lower and upper house.

How does RoW work to make its assessments precise and reliable?

V-Dem uses several experts per country, year, and topic, to make its assessments less subjective. In total, around 3,500 country experts fill out surveys for V-Dem every year.

While there are fewer experts for small countries and for the time before 1900, they rely typically on 25 experts per country and 5 experts per topic.

How does RoW work to make its assessments comparable?

V-Dem also works to make their coders’ assessments comparable across countries and time.

The surveys ask the experts to answer very specific questions on completely explained scales about sub-characteristics of political systems — such as the presence or absence of election fraud — instead of making them rely on their broad impressions.

The surveys are available in English, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish to reduce misunderstandings.

Experts further evaluate hypothetical countries, many coded several countries, and they denote their own uncertainty and personal demographic information.

V-Dem then uses this information to investigate expert biases, which they have found to be limited: they only find that experts from a country tend to be stricter in their assessments.

How are the remaining differences in the data dealt with?

V-Dem uses a statistical model to address any remaining differences between coders.

The model combines the experts’ ratings of actual countries and hypothetical countries, as well as the experts’ stated uncertainties and personal demographics to produce best, upper-, and lower-bound estimates of many characteristics.

V-Dem provides these different estimates for all of its main and supplementary indices, including the Electoral Democracy Index and the subindices for free and fair elections, freedom of association, and freedom of expression.

With the different estimates, V-Dem explicitly acknowledges that its coders can be uncertain or make errors in their measurement.

In addition to its main classification, RoW provides an expanded version that identifies countries that may fit better into the next-higher or -lower main categories. You can find the data in our Democracy Data Explorer.

The overall classification is the result of evaluating whether necessary characteristics are present or not. If the experts consider a country’s elections to have been both multi-party and free and fair, and the country as having had minimal features of an electoral democracy in general (based on V-Dem’s electoral democracy index ), RoW classifies it as a democracy.

A country is classified as a liberal democracy if the experts consider the country’s laws to have been transparent; the men and women there as having had access to the justice system; and the country as having had broad features of a liberal democracy overall. If it does not meet one of these conditions, the country is classified as an electoral democracy.

A country is classified as an autocracy if it does not meet the above criteria of meaningful, free and fair, multi-party elections. It is classified as an electoral autocracy if the experts consider the elections for the legislature and chief executive — the most powerful politician — to have been multi-party. It is classified as a closed autocracy if either the legislature or chief executive has not been chosen in multi-party elections.

Where can I learn more about how RoW produces its data?

V-Dem, which publishes the RoW data, releases its data publicly and makes it straightforward to download and use.

It publishes the overall scores, the underlying subindices, and several hundred specific questions by country-year, country-date, and coder.

V-Dem also releases descriptions of how RoW measures democracy, as well as the questions and coding procedures that guide the experts and researchers.

What are the data’s shortcomings?

There are shortcomings in the way Regimes of the World characterizes and measures democracy.

The classification only captures that these political rights were broad, not that they were universal. This means that not all people living in a democracy necessarily enjoy its political rights: this includes children, but often also historically marginalized groups such as women.

The classification also focuses on electoral and liberal understandings of democracy and does not account for other characterizations, such as democracies as egalitarian political systems, in which political power is equally distributed to allow everyone to participate. This means that some of the most economically-unequal countries in the world, such as Brazil and South Africa, are classified as broadly democratic in recent years.

RoW also does not cover some countries with very small populations.

Furthermore, because the classification groups all political systems into four broad types, it is not very granular. This means that it does not pick up small changes in political institutions, or conversely that the classification sometimes categorizes countries with similar institutions differently. This includes some recategorizations of countries across years where their political institutions barely changed, but crossed a somewhat arbitrary threshold.

The assessment of the RoW classification remains to some extent subjective. It is built on difficult evaluations by experts that rely less on easier-to-observe characteristics, such as whether regular elections are held.

Finally, the index’s aggregation remains to some extent arbitrary. It is unclear why specific indicators were chosen, such as whether citizens had access to the justice system, and not (also) whether they were free from government repression.

What are the data’s strengths?

Despite these shortcomings, the classification tells us a lot about how democratic the world was in the past and today.

Its characterizations of democracy as an electoral political system, in which citizens get to participate in free and fair elections, and a liberal political system, in which citizens are protected from others and the state, are commonly recognized as the two basic principles of democracy and shared by most of the leading approaches of measuring democracy .

Because it treats democracy as a binary, the classification can make the many differences in political institutions we observe across countries and over time much easier to understand. It allows us to combine the many countries with similar political institutions, while still distinguishing countries whose institutions differ in meaningful ways. This allows us to observe whether one country is democratic or not, or whether a country has become a democracy or stopped being one over time.

The index also covers many countries and years. Except for microstates, it covers all countries in the world. Many countries are covered since 1900 — even while they were colonized by another country — and some of them as far back as 1789.

Finally, RoW and V-Dem take many steps to make their assessments valid, precise, comparable across countries and time, and transparent. RoW relies on many country and subject experts answering detailed surveys to measure aspects of political systems that are often difficult to observe, and acknowledges the remaining uncertainty in their assessments in its expanded classification.

What is our summary assessment?

Whether the Regimes of the World classification is a useful measure of democracy will depend on the questions we want to answer.

The classification will not give us a satisfying answer if we are interested in the political rights of historically marginalized groups specifically; in non-electoral or non-liberal understandings of democracy; in the political systems of microstates; and interested in small differences in the political systems of countries.

In these cases, we will have to rely on other measures .

But if we value a sophisticated measure based on the knowledge of many country experts and are interested in big differences in political regimes, within and across countries, and far into the past, we can learn a lot from this data.

It is for these latter purposes we use the measure in some of our reporting on democracy.

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources, v-dem – democracy and human rights, owid based on varieties of democracy (v13) and regimes of the world, how we process data at our world in data.

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Notes on our processing step for this indicator

Reuse this work.

• All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
• All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license . You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

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How to cite this data

In-line citation If you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Full citation

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Comparative Politics of Southeast Asia pp 1–20 Cite as

Government and Political Regimes in Southeast Asia: An Introduction

• Aurel Croissant 2  
• First Online: 02 September 2022

669 Accesses

Part of the book series: Springer Texts in Political Science and International Relations ((STPSIR))

Southeast Asia defies any straightforward generalization. Even more so than in other world regions, the manifold political, economic, cultural, historical, and social differences among the countries in the region present political scientists with a quasi-natural laboratory. Levels of socioeconomic modernization, paths to state and nation-building, ethnic heterogeneity, colonial heritage, the structure of governing coalitions and elite formations, the shape and extent of interest and civil society organizations as well as institutional factors like type of government or electoral system all differ widely. This chapter provides an overview of Southeast Asia’s demographic, cultural and religious characteristics, outlines its precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial political development. As of early 2022, the region’s eleven countries fall into three broad regime categories: Cambodia, Singapore and—according to some studies—the Philippines are examples of “electoral authoritarianism”. The second group of “closed autocracies” that avoid de-facto (and, perhaps, de jure) competition in elections includes, Brunei, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Thailand. Laos and Vietnam are self-proclaimed communist party states. Brunei is a royal dictatorship, whereas Myanmar and Thailand are directly or indirectly ruled by the military. The third category of “electoral democracies”, includes Indonesia, Malaysia, Timor-Leste and, perhaps, the Philippines.

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There is no generally accepted convention on spelling the term. In the UK, the term “South East Asia” or “south east Asia” is generally preferred, while in the USA, Southeast Asia is more commonly used. This textbook employs the spelling “Southeast Asia”, as it is the spelling countries in the region have adopted through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The name East Timor is still commonly used and was employed by Indonesia during its occupation. Since 2002, Timor-Leste is the country’s adopted and internationally recognized name.

The country was known as Burma from 1948 until 1989, when the ruling military junta changed its name from Burma to Myanmar. Myanmar is the transliteration of the official state name from the original Birman. This book employs both names interchangeably.

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Croissant, A. (2022). Government and Political Regimes in Southeast Asia: An Introduction. In: Comparative Politics of Southeast Asia. Springer Texts in Political Science and International Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05114-2_1

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• < Previous chapter

Authoritarian Regimes

Oliver Schlumberger is Professor of Comparative Politics in the Institute of Political Science at Tübingen University and is head of department of Middle East and Comparative Politics.

• Published: 06 December 2017
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This article first discusses the term “authoritarian regimes” and makes a claim for studying such regimes. An overview of the young but burgeoning research on authoritarian regimes structures the field in eight thematic clusters: (1) typological efforts and regime characteristics such as coalition formation and origins, (2) institutionalist approaches, (3) state-society relations beyond formal institutions, (4) repression, (5) political economy approaches, (6) international dimensions, (7) performance, and (8) linking the concepts of regimes and states. Although this wave of research has been extremely prolific, it still remains unsystematic and disparate in various regards. It is therefore necessary for this field of research to consolidate and thereby to contribute to genuine knowledge accumulation.

This article does not intend to contribute to the very broad literature on authoritarian regimes. 1 Rather, its first section aims at clarifying some basics (What are authoritarian regimes? Why study them?), and the second section, the bulk of this article, is divided into eight subsections to present a structured overview of the field and a critical discussion of the main debates. This rough and cautiously commented on overview of the evolving field demonstrates the extent to which research has not only increased output dramatically but also broadened thematically since the early 2000s. On this basis, the conclusions take a step back and reflect on the state of the art. I argue that there is a need for some emerging challenges to be addressed by future scholarship, as we otherwise risk producing research output without necessarily deepening our understanding. Working to address such challenges will thus shape the future research agenda for students of authoritarian regimes—or at least it should.

Some Basics

What are authoritarian regimes.

In political science, authoritarian regimes, since roughly the mid-twentieth century and along with democratic and totalitarian regimes, have constituted one of three classical types of political rule. Authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and democracy have been referred to as “the classical triad” of systems of governance or political regimes. 2

Unlike the essentially contested concept 3 of “democracy,” the definition of authoritarian regimes advanced by Juan Linz more than half a century ago is still broadly accepted by the scholarly community. According to Linz, authoritarian regimes are characterized by four defining traits: (1) limited, nonresponsible, political pluralism; (2) the absence of an elaborate and guiding ideology, having instead “distinctive mentalities”; (3) the absence of both intensive and extensive political mobilization; and (4) the exercise of power within formally ill-defined, but actually quite predictable, limits by a leader or a small group ( Linz 1964 , 297; for a more elaborate discussion, see Linz 1975 , 275–411). This characterization of authoritarian regimes captures them as one type of autocracy, a broader term that also includes other nondemocratic political regimes that are nonauthoritarian such as totalitarianism or, in Linz’s (and Chehabi’s) understanding, sultanism ( Chehabi and Linz 1998 ).

Although some authors have suggested alternative definitions of authoritarianism, none has achieved the scholarly consensus that Linz’s classical definition has reached. It will probably take much more time for new and potentially more conceptually sound propositions to stand a chance of arriving at similar levels of agreement within the academic community.

Authoritarian regimes must be distinguished from “authoritarianism,” which is a significantly broader concept. The latter comprises not only a specific type of political regime, but also a broader understanding of “authoritarian” individual (human) and collective (social) traits, themes, situations, behaviors, modi , and practices that can be found across a range of academic disciplines beyond political science, such as psychology, business administration, management, sociology, media and mass communication, cultural studies, or anthropology.

Beetham (2015 , 12) draws this distinction between authoritarian regimes and authoritarianism, in which the latter for him depicts a “mode of governing which is intolerant of public opposition and dissent.” If that is the case, an “authoritarian mode of governing is possible within a democratic system, though it only remains democratic so long as elections are genuinely ‘free and fair’, and formal civil and political rights are respected” (12). Whether or not this holds up against Linz’s definition need not be discussed here, as this article focuses on the study of political regimes only.

Why Study Authoritarian Regimes?

Contrary to the frame that dominated late twentieth-century research on political regimes—that is, the assumption that the world faced a democratic “end of history” (Fukuyama 1989 , 1992 ; cf. also Fukuyama 2014 )—authoritarian polities seem to be here to stay for the foreseeable future. Fukuyama’s hypothesis triggered a wave of almost immediate and often fundamental criticism, 4 which suggests that his hypotheses have proven short lived, and that the “end-of-history” hypothesis marks not an end to, but only a by now long-passed point in, academic debates about political rule and how it is exerted. For the past ten years Freedom House’s analysts have decried every single year a further weakening of democracy and/or a backlash of authoritarian regimes. In a nutshell, thus, one compelling reason for studying authoritarian regimes is the sheer empirical necessity : we need to study authoritarian regimes because they exist.

A theoretical necessity is the second—and until now largely neglected—reason: While authoritarian regimes continue to exist in no small numbers and historically have been the rule rather than the exception, academic debates on the topic and scholarly interest have been overwhelmingly dominated by research agendas established (and by research conducted by scholars residing and publishing) within democracies .

Among the consequences of this fact is that while the systematic study of authoritarianism can be said to have started more than half a century ago with Linz’s seminal 1964 article, this older literature was dwarfed by the vast conceptual, theoretical, and empirical literature on democracy. Linz’s 1964 piece on Spain under Franco, when he first conceptualized the authoritarian regime, was followed by a number of works written mostly by specialists on Latin American politics (cf., e.g., O’Donnell 1973 ; Malloy 1977 ; Collier 1979 ; and Perlmutter 1981 ). Along with the four volumes edited and in part written by Linz and Stepan (1978) , the Breakdown of Democratic Regimes , this older literature can be seen as the “formative” or “constitutive phase” of research on authoritarian rule. However, comparatively very little time and effort were invested in researching authoritarian rule after this formative period and through the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Another effect of the preoccupation of scholars with democracy rather than autocracy was that students of authoritarian regimes were mostly concerned with either the question of how to best get rid of them and transform them into normatively more desirable democracies (e.g., O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986 ; Di Palma 1990 ; as well as large parts of the “transitology” literature) or the question of why certain countries and regions had not been reached by Huntington’s famous “waves of democratization” (cf. Huntington 1991 ); that is, what puzzled scholars was the fact that “yet they persist” ( Brownlee 2002 ).

After the “constitutive phase” of research on authoritarianism (from the 1960s to the early 1980s), however, little effort was devoted to examining authoritarian regimes in their own right, to conceptualizing and analyzing such regimes as a distinct form of political rule and a specific mode of governance. The teleological lens of democracy as the ultimate point of reference seems to have been necessary to justify academic interest in nondemocratic regimes.

More recently, new research on authoritarianism has emerged. At least in major parts, this new research promises to overcome the persistent, albeit latent, democracy bias that has long existed even in studies on authoritarianism. 5

Twenty-First-Century Research on Authoritarian Regimes

Apart from the constitutive phase’s limited writings on authoritarian regimes, the new century saw the proliferation of a by now extremely broad and comprehensive body of literature. In fact, “the study of authoritarian regimes has recently become one of the hottest subfields in comparative politics” ( Art 2012 , 351). By 2017 it still was the fastest growing area in the subdiscipline.

What follows is a structured overview of some of the most important research themes of the past two decades: (1) typologies and regime characteristics; (2) institutionalist approaches to the study of authoritarianism, which have been for the most part focused on formal state institutions; (3) state-society relations beyond state institutions, including questions of legitimacy, civil society, and the media; (4) repression; (5) political-economic arguments for the survival or breakdown of authoritarian rule; (6) international dimensions of authoritarianism; (7) the performance of authoritarian regimes; and (8) the nexus between the authoritarian regime and the state.

Typologies and the Nature of Regimes

Typological questions.

In any new field of research, taxonomic efforts come first. In the case of authoritarian regimes, this has been particularly complicated because of a conceptual uneasiness with the empirical “grey zone” between democracies and nondemocracies. To analytically capture this grey zone of regimes that fit common definitions of neither democracy nor authoritarianism required extensive efforts at “disentangling political regimes” ( Munck 1996 ). One attempt at sub-typologizing democracies that are found to be less than “fully” democratic is through the invention of “diminished subtypes” (conceptually, see Collier and Levitsky 1997 ; cf. also Collier and Levitsky 2009 ; Zakaria 1997 ; and O’Donnell 1994 as early contributions along this methodological approach; for an alternative conceptualization, see Merkel 2004 ; for a critique, see Møller and Skaaning 2010 ). A similar method of typologizing consists of classifying grey zone regimes as “authoritarianisms with adjectives” rather than as democracies (competitive, liberalized, semi, etc.; see Levitsky and Way 2002 , 2010 ; Brumberg 2002 ; Ottaway 2003 ; and Schedler 2002 , 2006 ). 6 Diminished subtypes do not comprise all the definitional characteristics of the superordinate class. Rather, the adjective that is added in front of the regime type (or “root concept”) specifies what these democracies lack in comparison to “full,” “real,” or “liberal” democracies, or what makes such autocracies with adjectives stand out from other authoritarian regimes.

Rather than subsuming grey zone regimes under the root concept of either democracies or authoritarianisms, the concept of “hybrid regimes” inserts a fourth basic type of political rule into a previously tripartite regime typology (totalitarianism, authoritarianism, democracy). It locates such “hybrid regimes” between democracy and authoritarianism as a distinct regime type ( Karl 1995 ; Rüb 2002 ; Zinecker 2004 ; Wigell 2008 ; Gilbert and Mohseni 2011 ). All these discussions take place on a macro level of the “root concepts” of political regimes ( Sartori 1970 ) and deal with (a) the question of how to grasp the grey zone and (b) the question of where exactly the boundary between democracies and nondemocracies is to be drawn.

It was with Geddes’s (1999) distinction among different subtypes of authoritarian regimes (military, personalist, and single-party) that the search for typological clarity within the spectrum of nondemocratic regimes gained new momentum; the aim here was to find out about survival prospects for various types of authoritarian regimes. 7 Geddes’s lean tripartite typology is easily applicable, in particular for macro-quantitative purposes and the creation of larger data sets. Brooker (2009 , ch. 2) suggests essentially the same categories, while Ezrow and Frantz follow Geddes’s typology but add the category of monarchies “to give a fuller picture” (2011, xvi; cf. also Frantz and Ezrow 2011 ). It is unclear, however, why monarchies, if indeed they are not merely representative-democratic ones, would not be captured by the personalist subtype. Also, it is not self-evident that “personal authoritarian regimes” include all sorts of personalist forms of nondemocratic rule. 8

Various data sets on authoritarian regimes have been constructed. The three most prominent are by Geddes et al. ( 2014b ; cf. also 2014a ); Hadenius et al. (2012 ; an update of which is by Wahman et al. 2013 ); and Cheibub et al. (2010) . Although they resemble each other, they differ in their conceptualization of authoritarian regimes as well as in the subtypes they recognize (i.e., in the criteria they identify for definition, as well as in the number of subtypes and the definition itself). “Military,” “royal,” and “civilian” are the autocratic subtypes in Cheibub et al. (2010) , whereas “military,” “monarchical,” “party-based,” and “personal” are those of Geddes et al. (2014a) . Hadenius et al. (2012) use a different theoretical underpinning of subtypes by not following the identity of incumbents but rather types of underlying institutions, yet the subtypes they arrive at (“military,” “monarchy,” “one-party authoritarian,” “multi-party authoritarian,” and “no-party authoritarian,” plus “other”) come very close to those of the other data sets (cf. also Roller 2013 ). Such data sets are valuable because they are a precondition for engaging in diachronic studies and for running time series, as well as for testing hypotheses that view regime subtypes as an explanatory variable. Overall, while it seems that a consensus on authoritarian subtypes is emerging, a more critical question is whether these comply with the meta-methodological rules of class building.

Origins of Authoritarianism, Regime Building, and Elite Constellations

Divergent origins lead to the formation of different types of authoritarian regimes. This is the argument advanced by a range of authors, although they do not agree about the exact patterns that make authoritarian regimes emerge or about the types that result from different modes of state formation. Slater’s (2010) comparative historical analysis of Southeast Asian cases sees various kinds of contentious politics as leading to either “provision pacts” or “protection pacts,” with the latter having greater prospects for durability (Singapore and Malaysia are the cases in which Slater sees such pacts emerging out of post–World War II mass mobilization). Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) , by contrast, elaborate what has become widely known as “selectorate theory,” building on earlier works on coalition building in democratic polities, while Brownlee (2002) finds extensive neopatrimonial ties causal for regime survival and restabilization in fifteen cases. Brownlee thus also refers to domestic regime- and state-society-related variables in explaining regime outcomes.

Both Slater and Bueno de Mesquita build on literature that has been adapted from the study of democracy/democratization to the study of authoritarianism/authoritarianization. 9 Alternatively, Solt (2012) offers a “relative power theory” to explain why prolonged and increasing social inequality leads to authoritarianism: Citizens then tend to regard hierarchical relations as natural and thus accept authority more readily. Yet this contradicts other authors who focus on various types of elite bargains or winning coalitions. Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) also look at strategic elite behavior, but in relation to class constellations. For them, dictatorship is a function of the interplay of wealth and inequality, with both very low and very high inequality making the emergence of authoritarianism more likely than medium levels.

Strikingly, a large share of the literature on origins, as well as on the question of durability of authoritarian regimes, focuses on questions of power sharing among elites and/or between an imagined ideal-type “leader” and elites (cf. Boix and Svolik 2013 ; Svolik 2012 ; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003 ; and ultimately also Slater 2010 ). 10 In light of the colored revolutions in the former Soviet Union and Balkans, the upheavals of 1989–1990, and the Arab spring, it might not be so clear that threats from within are actually greater for the survival of dictators than those that originate from the masses; this is so also in light of the findings of works like Slater’s (2010) , in which regime breakdown and re-formation starts with mass contention.

Contributions on elite politics that extend beyond the question of state or regime formation have also resulted in important intraregional or general insights (cf., e.g., Perthes 2004 on Arab countries and Bo 2007 on China). Depending on the nature of the regimes, elite conceptualizations other than “ruling” or “winning coalitions,” such as those of concentric circles, seem to be better able to empirically capture “politically relevant elites” ( Perthes 2004 ) and to present a fuller picture of who exactly influences not only decisions but also agendas.

Institutionalist Approaches

Without doubt, the largest share of the new research on authoritarian regimes has focused on the role of formal and often democratic-looking institutions, and this focus has been particularly (and strikingly) popular among US- and US-based scholars. Institutions examined include (competitive and noncompetitive) elections; parliaments; oppositions; and political parties, both single parties as well as parties in multiparty systems (to name just a few of the vast flood of literature, cf., e.g., Lust-Okar 2001 , 2005 , 2006 ; Lust-Okar et al. 2011 ; Gandhi 2008 ; Gandhi and Przeworski 2007 ; Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009 ; Magaloni 2006 , 2008 ; Magaloni and Kricheli 2010 ; Shambaugh 2008 ; Donno 2013 ; Brownlee 2007a , 2007b ; and many others).

To this we might add other institutions such as courts or constitutions in authoritarian contexts (e.g., the edited volumes by Ginsburg and Moustafa 2008 and Ginsburg and Simpser 2013 ), about which one of the core research interests is the fine line between the rule of law and “rule by law.” Proof has yet to be furnished, however, that a politically independent judiciary can actually exist within nondemocratic regimes, or in other words, that the rule of law is compatible in principle with authoritarianism.

Although notoriously difficult to study, there is also a recently renewed interest in civil-military relations and the role of armies in autocracies, in particular in situations of coups and during revolutionary uprisings, along with questions of coup proofing. This research has regional origins in studies on South and Southeast Asian countries such as Myanmar, Pakistan, the Fijis, and Thailand on the one hand, and Middle Eastern cases such as Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, and Tunisia on the other (e.g., Barany 2009 , 2016 ; Croissant 2013 ; Bellin 2004 ; Springborg 2015 ; Albrecht and Ohl 2016 ). While scholarly access to key decision makers almost never exists, heuristic categorization of professional versus nonprofessional armies or deductive principal-agent modeling remains the most common approach to tackling these questions.

Any number of correlations between institutions and autocratic survival, durability, reproduction, plurality, and other variables have been assumed and detected. Oppositional forces, whether “loyal” or “anti-systemic,” have also been examined for their intentional and unintentional contributions to authoritarian survival (cf Albrecht 2006 ). The bottom line in all of them is that institutions that bear the same name as their democratic counterparts decisively fulfill different functions, and produce dissimilar output, than those institutions in democratic contexts. This gives credence to the assumption that dictators actually engage in institution building for a variety of reasons, but all of them aim at enhancing autocratic rule.

What makes those contributions valuable is that they shed light on a long-neglected or misread component of authoritarian regimes. Formal democratic-looking institutions had been neglected because either they were considered mere rubber stamps that were at best created to maintain some semblance of democracy for external (Western) audiences and thus facilitate the acquisition of aid, or this semblance of democratic institutions was taken at face value and not further questioned. Yet even if such institutions as parliaments, political parties, and (unfree) elections were mere window dressing, and when citizens would not believe in them, why would autocrats then invest in having them? Many possible answers have been suggested; scholars assume them to be anything from opinion barometers, to patronage machines, to facilitators of power-sharing arrangements, to instruments that enable regimes to acquire some form of nondemocratic responsiveness (on the latter, cf. Miller 2014 ). 11

What remains conspicuously absent from this voluminous research, however, are informal institutions . They seem to have been relegated to the back burner and largely omitted. Art (2012 , 355) surprisingly considers this not a lack, but “a welcome correction to a literature that has focused overwhelmingly on patronage.” Have informal institutions thus lost their importance? Most probably not, but they are much harder to study.

State-Society Relations beyond State Institutions: Civil Society, the Media, Iconography, and Legitimacy

In the 1990s there was a largely transitology-inspired euphoria about the anticipated role of the “third sector.” Civil society organizations in particular were thought to be a vehicle for democratization, and in fact the prodemocratic functions of voluntary intermediate organizations in established democracies along the lines of Putnam’s neo-Tocquevillean argument (civic traditions and institutions as promoters of social capital and of democratic practices and values such as engagement or toleration; cf. Putnam 1993 ) remain little contested. But the picture became more serious in the 2000s regarding civil society under authoritarian conditions; autocrats responded to the upsurge in civil societies through a strategy of (a) co-opting organizations that emerged outside of governmental control and (b) deliberately creating a mimicry of look-alike institutions through processes of “imitative institution-building” ( Albrecht and Schlumberger 2004 ; see also Heydemann 2007 ). De facto, however, the public sphere was closely surveilled and controlled by regime-organized NGOs (GONGOs or government-organized nongovernmental organizations; cf. Hasmath et al. 2016 for a good conceptualization; see also Naím 2009 and Carapico 2000 ). 12 A third strategy pursued by regimes consists of publicly delegitimizing autonomous third-sector organizations as external agents that interfere with the sovereignty of authoritarian regimes. Also, a survey on Vietnamese NGOs finds that they can help embed the state and ruling party more deeply into local society ( Wischermann et al. 2015 ).

In line with the polyvalent roles civil society organizations play in different types of political regimes, there is still a widespread belief that the new media constitute “liberation technologies” ( Diamond 2010 ) that tend to undermine authoritarian rule (cf. also Lynch 2011 for a more nuanced discussion). Yet Rød and Weidmann (2015 , 339) emphasize the Janus-faced nature of new media, emphasizing that they also “can serve evil purposes” and be a “repression technology.” More specifically, autocrats use the Internet for three distinct purposes: to (a) track dissidents, (b) send signals of surveillance and control that aim at deterrence, and (c) influence public opinion through the spread of propaganda and misinformation. The latter in particular has become part and parcel of authoritarian policies, either directly or through hired regime-friendly bloggers who flood the Web with pro-regime posts and “information,” often also delegitimizing counterarguments (see also Chestnut Greitens 2013 , 263ff.). Kalathil and Boas (2001) demonstrate with the examples of Cuba and China how different types of authoritarian regimes make effective use of the Internet through different mixes of proactive and reactive strategies, respectively. Overall, autocrats seem to be able to gain net benefits from the new technology and effectively manage to enhance control, surveillance, and agnotology (conceptually on the latter, see Proctor and Schiebinger 2008 as well as Ahram and Goode 2016 ).

In this context the commercialization of media service provision does not help. Private suppliers of Internet access are compelled to abide by the rules and requests of local authorities. Likewise, Chinese TV privatization makes content appear more modern, but leaves censorship unchanged while support for governmental institutions is effectively raised ( Stockmann and Gallagher 2011 ). Even when content originates from liberal democracies, its effects are difficult to predict. Kern and Hainmueller (2009 , 378) find that on East Germans in the 1980s, “the net effect of West German television exposure was an increase in regime support.” In sum, therefore, what Rød and Weidmann (2015 , 349) state about the Internet goes for the media as a whole: “If democratic governments know how to take advantage of it, it might be naïve to think that autocratic governments do not.”

What applies to the media also holds true in the broader politics of symbols in virtually every corner of daily life, as Wedeen (1999) demonstrated. Using the Syrian case, she showed how a personality cult that nobody believes in is at the same time obviously phony and effective because it drives citizens to act as if they believed in it, thereby generating obedience and rules of behavior that strengthen the authoritarian regime. An iconography that appears ridiculous at first sight thereby turns out to be an effective tool for control and regime maintenance that goes beyond what we have come to know as preference falsification (on this latter point, with reference to the Chinese case, see Jiang and Yang 2016 ; see Kalinin 2016 , on Russia).

The effects of the media and symbol politics on political support for incumbents point to another dimension of authoritarianism that is important, but almost impossible to pin down and operationalize: legitimacy. There is today an overwhelming consensus in the social sciences to understand the concept along with its Weberian meaning as a reciprocal category. In this understanding, legitimacy is seen as the subjects’ belief in the legitimacy of the ruler(s) ( Legitimitätsglaube ), to be gained through either input procedures (that is: democratic elections) or through output or performance ( Scharpf 1999 ). Strikingly, studying legitimacy in authoritarian contexts seems an almost exclusively European (and German in particular) endeavor (e.g., Holbig 2010 ; Holbig and Gilley 2010 ; Schlumberger 2010 ; Kailitz 2013 ; Grauvogel and von Soest 2013 ; von Soest and Grauvogel 2016 ; Kneuer 2013 ; Pickel 2013 ; etc.), almost entirely neglected in Anglo-American research.

While common wisdom has it that autocracies by definition suffer from an inherent legitimacy gap, recent studies have presented both theoretical ( Schlumberger 2004 ) and empirical ( Gilley 2009 ) counterarguments: Legitimacy originates from various sources and does not per se depend on regime type. Gilley, for example, finds autocratic China among the most “empirically legitimate” countries in his sample of seventy-two cases. 13   Schlumberger (2010) distinguishes analytically between (a) the “who” (the addressees of claims to legitimacy); (b) the success or failure (whether addressees buy these claims); (c) the “what” (the content of legitimation strategies invoked); and (d) the “how” (How are claims to legitimacy delivered to their addressees?). Country-specific and regional studies such as those by Yakoutchyk (2016b ; on Belarus); White (2005 ; on Southeast Asia); and Schlumberger (2010 ; on the Middle East and North Africa) have flourished recently. The database by von Soest and Grauvogel (2016) takes this approach one step further; in their data, they differentiate along the content of legitimation strategies (or the “what”: foundational myth, ideology, personalism, international engagement, procedural mechanisms, and performance) and establish different “legitimation profiles” of political regimes. If the profile is coherent, their argument holds, authoritarian resilience is enhanced. Yet this of course evades the most difficult question of how legitimacy (as opposed to legitimation strategies) could be reliably and validly measured.

The flip side of legitimacy is repression, the other mainstay of authoritarian rule. 14 In comparison to “the asymmetric attention that quasidemocratic institutions have received thus far in the literature” ( Art 2012 , 361; see the subsection “Institutionalist Approaches” above), repression still remains understudied. 15   Landman (2013 , 4) correctly reminds us that we “must not lose sight of the study of repression and coercion.” He suggests that “the varied combinations of principals and agents in the face of diverse threats produce great variation in both the use and severity of repression, and a differentiation of regimes necessary for a comparative politics of authoritarianism” ( Landman 2013 , 24). Existing work on repression mostly centers on questions about why, when, how, and to what avail authoritarians engage in repressive activity. One core demand has been for “disaggregating repression” spatially, temporally, and with respect to its types, as well as for integrating the topic into wider political science research (cf. Davenport 2007 , 18ff.). Part of this is practiced by Josua and Edel (2015) , who model variation in repression as caused by (a) the setup of the authoritarian regime, (b) the state and its capacities, and (c) the nature of the challenge to the regime, while the decision for or against repression hinges upon the availability of alternatives—and alternatives, to them, “can be framed as the availability of legitimation strategies” (291).

This latter point in particular brings in threat perception, which influences the way incumbents perceive the need for repression (against mass protest or other contentious politics). Indirectly, this also brings in society, including the societal targets of repression (How targeted is repression?). Information from the “recipient’s side” (i.e., the victims) is usually limited because repression instills fear. However, sometimes it becomes possible to take on a bottom-up perspective, as is impressively demonstrated by Pearlman (2016) , who in a case study on Syrian refugees in neighboring countries traces shifts in this notion of fear.

Two other important dimensions that demonstrate the need for deeper research are added to the emerging agenda by Landman (2013 , 23ff.). First, he hints at possibilities of an internationalization/transnationalization of repression and second at its privatization. Other authors point to a path dependency in the emergence of repressive patterns that can be traced back to incumbents’ previous interactions with contenders ( Boudreau 2004 ). Art, in his turn, asks about the nature and identity of regime-hired “thugs” (which could be seen in combination with an increasing privatization of repression 16 ) and also about the origins of repressive institutions: “Why do some dictators succeed in building effective institutions while others fail?” (2012, 369ff.)

Ultimately, most of this literature takes repression as a dependent variable to be explained by regime features, state-society constellations, perceptions of the latter, or historical experiences. For obvious reasons, micro-level empirical studies are rare in this field, but they are all the more desirable, with respect to both the institutions and the effects of repression. In particular, further studies that do not take an isolated look at repressive action but view repression as part of the larger picture of how autocrats manage their societies are still much needed.

Political Economy of Authoritarian Regimes

Economic factors are often seen as an independent variable that explains regime outcomes. 17 In this regard, by far the most coherent argument links economic structures to nondemocratic political rule and is made by the rentier state approach (for a recent critical discussion, see Waldner and Smith 2015 ; for a related debate, see also Papyrakis 2016 ). It is quite firmly established that states that to a large extent rely on external revenues derived from rent income (such as the export of oil or natural gas) foster authoritarian rule and hardly democratize ( Beblawi and Luciani 1987 ; Ross 2001 , 2012 ). In a nutshell, this is because external revenues can be distributed domestically both to privilege strategically important elites and to aliment the population at large. In turn, extraction remains marginal, so that the shibboleth of the American War of Independence, “no taxation without representation,” seems effectively reversed: no representation without taxation. This argument has been further validated in quantitative studies by Smith (2004) and Ulfelder (2007) , but has also been criticized (for instance, by Herb 1999 and Alahmad 2007 ). 18 Further development and refinement of the core arguments have been made in various directions ( Peters and Moore 2009 ; Smith 2005 , 2006 ). Looking at revenues must be complemented by a view of disbursement patterns and allocative power per person ( Richter 2012 ), because this is what engenders loyalty. Further confirmation was recently provided by Lucas and Richter (2016) ; richness in resources strengthens authoritarian regimes. Interestingly, however, the likelihood of authoritarian leaders being ousted by competing elites does not seem to be reduced by the availability of external rent income.

Counterintuitively, bust periods do not automatically lead to regime crises ( Smith 2006 ). Rather, as Moore (2015) demonstrated for the 2011 Arab revolts, earlier changes within the general fiscal framework toward indirect rather than direct taxation (itself a consequence of neoliberal adjustment policies) were key in a longer term relative deprivation of Arab societies that ultimately led to protest.

Neoliberal reform and its consequences, in their turn, have empirically led to more social inequality and to a relative deprivation of broad social segments in otherwise different world regions. They therefore constitute in themselves a link to protest and repression (cf. subsection “Repression” above); to regime performance (see the subsection “Performance” below); to questions of legitimacy (subsection “State-Society Relations beyond State Institutions” above); and to the origins of authoritarian regimes (see subsection “Origins of Authoritarianism, Regime Building, and Elite Constellations” above).

Since rentier states allocate resources to society, incentives to comply with regime restrictions are high as long as individual benefits are realized from such distributional politics. Such benefits are usually extended through informal, pyramidal patron-client relations that are also at the heart of a growing political economy literature on cronyism in autocracies. In this context, an amalgamation of regime-business interests can constitute powerful economic underpinnings of authoritarianism. Haddad (2012) , for example, shows in a single-case study on Syria how state agents orchestrated collusion with select business actors in the light of dwindling revenues such as oil or aid. Heydemann (2004) finds similar cross-regional results for the Middle East (cf. also Demmelhuber and Roll 2007 on Egypt) that strikingly correspond with the findings that Ledeneva (1998) reached on “Russia’s economy of favors.” With respect to Asia, Kang (2002) examines state-business relations with a similar focus, whereas Schlumberger’s (2008) “patrimonial capitalism” tries to conceptualize and theorize, but also to make empirically identifiable, cases in which this particular type of politically induced capitalism prevails. 19 Both Haddad (2012) and Schlumberger (2008) conclude that this type of state-business relations has detrimental impacts on development prospects, but the latter sees in this a type of economic order that emerged out of selective neoliberal reform in nondemocratic developing countries more generally.

International Factors

It took democratization studies almost four decades to take into account the fact that actors, processes, and structures outside the borders of individual states impact their political regimes within. In the recent research on authoritarianism, this subfield was included early on, so there is no doubt about the importance of international factors. But the range of possible influences from abroad and the conceptualizations of such influence are very broad indeed. They start with Levitsky’s and Way’s various studies on linkage and leverage 20 ( 2005 , 2006 , 2007 , 2010 ; and many subsequent studies by various authors). They identify important transnational mechanisms that impact regime outcomes. This subfield continues with studies on an often questionable efficacy of democracy promotion policies by Western powers, which furthermore can have unintended opposite effects (e.g., Kienle 2007 ; Dandashly 2014 ). Moreover, Western actors do not usually accord democracy promotion the policy priority in actual commitment that exists in rhetoric (e.g., Youngs 2010 ; Schlumberger 2006 ). Rather, it can unintentionally and mostly unconsciously make the representatives of democracy-promoting agencies part of local power games (see Leininger 2010 on Mali). Foreign aid more generally cannot automatically be assumed to be regime neutral (cf., e.g., Bader and Faust 2014 ). The (erroneous) assumption of the purely positive effects of Western influence that shines through early studies like those by Levitsky and Way has thus given way to a more differentiated picture.

From the viewpoint of authoritarian regimes, diverse options exist to shape relations to donors and influence donor perceptions by emphasizing themes that are foreign policy priorities of those donors (order and stability)—a phenomenon that Jourde (2007) studies by building on Bayart (2000) , with the help of the African cases of Gabun and Mauretania.

At the other end of the spectrum of international factors that affect regime outcomes, some autocracies have started an outright export of autocracy or aim at disrupting democratic regimes in their home environments. Not surprisingly, this “black knight” phenomenon is most prominently observed in the Russian case (see, for instance, Ambrosio 2009 ; Bader et al. 2010 ; Jackson 2010 , Dannreuther 2014 ) and in other post-Soviet countries like Belarus ( Yakoutchyk 2016a ). There is far less agreement about whether China also represents a black knight, and if so, under what conditions ( Bader 2015 ; cf. also Burnell 2010 ; for more skeptical accounts of autocracy promotion in general, see Tansey 2016 and Way 2016 ).

Finally, authoritarian learning, cooperation, and diffusion represent probably the most recent strand in the growing literature on international factors that impact authoritarian regimes. Apart from individual studies, Germany’s GIGA Institute Hamburg embarked on a global project on this topic (cf. Erdmann et al. 2013 ; Bank and Edel 2015 ; Lynch et al. 2016 ; cf. also Heydemann and Leenders 2011 ). The studies emphasize the adaptive capacities of authoritarian regimes in learning from each other’s experience as well as collaborating among themselves in order to preserve and uphold authoritarian rule.

Performance

The debate on whether autocracies or democracies fare better in creating growth and development dates back to the Cold War era but continues unabatedly, without consensus. Why is this question important? “A political order that does not perform well will ultimately be considered illegitimate no matter how democratic the policymaking process,” Risse and Kleine (2007 , 74) argue. Whether and how regime type affects the (economic, social, cultural, etc.) performance of countries is thus not restricted to research on authoritarianism, but has been a field of intense and contradictory arguments (“authoritarian advantage” versus “democratic dividend”). Much of the current literature can still be attributed to this dichotomous view of “who is doing better” (cf., e.g., Halperin, Siegle, and Weinstein 2005 ; Faust 2007 ).

Art (2012 , 365), however, rightly demands that “having discovered that ‘institutions matter’ in understanding authoritarian regimes, the next step for scholars is to unpack exactly how they do.” This process has started with respect to the specific performance of some institutions (and sometimes, in a next step, what that means for authoritarian survival, emergence, or durability). 21 Topics include, among others, environmental sustainability ( Wurster 2013 ), social performance ( McGuire 2013 ), property rights ( Knutsen and Fjelde 2013 ), and responses to economic crises (among others, see Tanneberg et al. 2013 ). Most of all, however, they deal with developmental performance. While some precursors do exist in the literature (e.g., King 1981 ), to date the lack of consensus on how to classify authoritarian regimes continues to have a negative impact on this research; taken together, clear directions of results are difficult to find (cf. also Croissant et al. 2014 , 2015 ).

A case in point is the impact of elections on performance. Miller (2015) claims that when the electoral process in autocracies is competitive, this has positive effects on health, education, gender equality, and civil liberties. While the mere existence of legislatures and elections, according to Miller, does not produce heightened levels of human development, the boldly stated finding is: “Multiparty elections […] motivate regimes to promote citizen welfare” (2015, 26). By contrast, McGuire (2013) states that single-party autocracies perform better than multiparty authoritarian regimes, having lower infant mortality rates. Yet again, Little (2016) claims that elections benefit citizens even if they are not competitive—that is, under any conditions. If we trust all three, that leaves us with confusion about contradictory findings. Juxtaposing these results, we would need to state more generally that elections are always good, but single-party rule is also, and add the gradualist assumption that the freer elections are, the better for citizens; from a scholarly viewpoint, this is not exactly satisfying. Schedler (2013 , 380ff.) concurs (“bad elections are better than no elections”), albeit on totally different, noneconomic grounds, whereas the various works by Lust-Okar ( 2006 , 2009 ), Magaloni ( 2006 , 2008 ), and others (see the subsection “Institutionalist Approaches” above) aim at demonstrating how elections foster and facilitate authoritarian regime maintenance. All in all, the research on regimes’ impact on performance cannot yet be considered to have produced unquestioningly consolidated new knowledge. One core question is: Are findings really generalizable on the basis of the quality, amount, and operationalization of the data used? And to add another challenge: because of the absence of any agreed upon typology of nondemocratic regimes, it seems very demanding to establish generalized claims on performance not about authoritarianism in comparison to democracy, but within the universe of authoritarian regimes in intra-class, subtype comparisons.

Links and Distinctions between Regimes and States

A final research arena is just about to open up, but, upon closer inspection, is not entirely new: the relationship between regime and state(-ness). Authors of the constitutive phase had either implicitly or explicitly assumed that “the autonomy and centrality of the state is the most important concept in modern politics” ( Perlmutter 1981 , 2). Against this backdrop, authoritarian regimes were seen as one specific way of organizing the state and its institutions, whereby authoritarian regimes would enhance state autonomy “at the expense of society and its development” ( Perlmutter 1981 , 4). State and authoritarian regime could thus be seen as corresponding, mutually reinforcing entities. Today authors are re-examining the relationship between state and democracy ( Andersen et al. 2014 ) and between state and authoritarian regimes ( Schlumberger 2016b ). As Russia’s autocracy consolidates with the help of huge oil and gas revenues, Perlmutter’s statement seems to hold: authoritarian regimes might be able to enhance stateness. Then again, states are crumbling where authoritarian regimes fall that have largely been congruent to the very states they ran, as evidenced in North Africa and the Persian Gulf (e.g., Libya or Yemen; cf. Schlumberger 2016a ). At any rate, the nexus between the two fundamental concepts is again under scrutiny, even though this research is still at its beginning.

Interestingly, work that focuses on the performance of authoritarian regimes is likely among the first within the vast new research on authoritarianism that takes the regimes’ side not as a dependent but as an independent variable, explaining by their institutional setup how well regimes fare on a number of performance criteria and in different areas. However, this is true only prima facie; if performance impacts regime legitimacy, and we know that legitimacy is heavily affecting the complex of stability and persistence, then the deeper research interest in performance ultimately lies, once again, in the survival, persistence, or breakdown of regimes (cf. Keremoglu-Waibler 2016 ). This is different with the emerging research on the nexus between state and (authoritarian) regime; here the survival and breakdown of political order as such, including the institutions and organizations typically associated with the state rather than with the regime, are taken as dependent variables, while political regimes are seen as a potential explanandum for the strengthening, weakening, or erosion and collapse of statehood.

Conclusions

“The field is in its infancy,” Gehlbach et al. (2016 , 566) correctly write about the study of authoritarianism. Yet this is not the case regarding the size of output, the number of publications, the thematic breadth of the field, and the diversity of methods applied. In these respects, the field has been exploding. But it is less than mature regarding the certainty with which we can trust the many and at times contradictory results that are published. This hints at a number of new challenges that are waiting to be addressed by future research, some of which have become apparent in the preceding discussion of the field.

First, there is a terminological fuzziness that stems from the “foggy zone” ( Schedler 2002 ) between authoritarianism and democracy. The blurred lines between the two, as well as the absence of a clear distinction between them, make the universe of cases unclear. At the heart of this problem lies the question of how to establish classes, and the inventors of “regimes with adjectives” in particular have ignored fundamental rules of categorization such as mutual exclusiveness and joint exhaustiveness. The same goes for sub-typologies of authoritarianism, as discussed above.

Second, while most contributions in the field are concerned with how autocracies emerge, how they survive, or what stabilizes them and makes them resilient, these variables are not all the same thing. Conceptual fuzziness is thus accompanied by a fuzziness in the dependent variable. Further clarification being absent, comparative checking across different studies then becomes difficult. We need to know what the precise explanatory purpose of a new study is and what similar or competing claims have already been advanced by others, on what grounds, data, and independent variables. This requires us to distinguish more sharply factors that lead to the emergence of authoritarianism from those that sustain it.

Third, dozens of arguments and hypotheses are on offer to explain authoritarian resilience, and their authors all too often claim that their argument “provides the best explanation” ( Slater 2010 , 230). But the claim is not enough: What arguments are central, which ones more ephemeral? Many authors borrow from earlier literatures, but few engage with competing claims by contemporaries. While this is not to deny multicausality, a science of politics should be able to adjudicate and both methodologically and intellectually discriminate between competing claims. This has hardly happened in the new literature on authoritarian regimes. Rather, it still seems to be caught in a phase of seeking to produce as much publishable output as quickly as possible, at the expense of creating as much scientifically sustainable knowledge as possible.

Fourth, and related to the third point, mere statistical testing will often not be enough in such a process of adjudicating various hypotheses and arguments. This is because autocracies are not only “information-shy” ( Henry and Springborg 2010 , 55, 110) but deliberately produce false data and misinformation, and thus engage in what is called “agnotology” (cf. Betancourt 2014 ). Regimes’ efforts at creating a post-factual world cannot be overestimated, and we “need to reconsider the implications of opacity for our own research” ( Schedler 2013 , 385). Yet very few publications address this problem with even a single word. No small part of the scholarly community sometimes seems to have replaced confidence in the degree of certainty in our results with confidence in the respectability of some methods as opposed to others. Thus, “one cannot expect to be able to study contemporary authoritarian regimes using the same kinds of methods for researching open regimes” ( Ahram and Goode 2016 , 838; see also Croissant 2014 ). If we still do, and do so unaware of the inherent methodological problems, we might even run into the danger of replicating the ignorance, misinformation, and false data that authoritarian regimes so characteristically produce themselves.

These points are certainly not exhaustive regarding the challenges the broad but adolescent research on authoritarian regimes faces. Overall, we see a very encompassing literature that is in various respects still unsystematic and offers lots of publications, but little consolidated knowledge. Questions of research design, concept specification, and methodological pitfalls abound; it is likely that results published today will face important qualifications or disconfirmation tomorrow as further research unfolds. Furthermore, some of today’s findings, such as the one discussed above (subsection “Performance” : “elections are always good [for development or other things], the freer the better”), might more be reflective, albeit subtly, of an age-old democracy bias that Western political research has suffered from for too long, rather than offering consolidated knowledge.

However, if scholars adhere to the maxims of conceptual clarity, thorough concept specification, critical (self-)reflection and comparative checking, and if we adhere to the principle of producing not just publications, but knowledge, then this field of investigation will doubtlessly mature over the next decade. What is needed most for this to materialize is less a further expansion of the field by new arguments and more a rigorous checking and testing of existing ones.

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Note, however, that here, as in most of the political science literature, “authoritarianism” is at times used interchangeably with “authoritarian regime.” This does not imply that it would not matter whether we view authoritarian regimes as one specific type of political regime , as it is defined here, and not to open the door to an all-encompassing conceptual confusion by promoting the idea that transnational and subnational arrangements or interactions should be called “authoritarian regimes,” as representatives of the subdiscipline of international relations have argued (cf. Glasius 2013 ).

Following Robert Fishman , a political regime can be defined as “the formal and informal organization of the center of political power, and of its relations with the broader society. A regime determines who has access to political power, and how those who are in power deal with those who are not” (1990, 428).

For the notion of “essentially contested concepts,” see Gallie (1956) .

Among the most prominent were Derrida (1993 , ch.2) and, from the other side of the political spectrum, the later book by Kagan (2008) .

I do not discuss here the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. On the latter, see Friedrich and Brzezinski (1956) and Arendt (1951) , as well as Sartori (1993) on the question of whether there are any empirical cases of totalitarianism today, and if not, what to do with the analytical category. Also, I am not going deeper into definitional discussions on democracy. For pragmatic reasons, I stick with Dahl’s (1971 , 3) definition of polyarchy, or, alternatively, with the more parsimonious but congruent definition of democracy suggested by Diamond, Linz, and Lipset (1988 , xvi).

Schedler’s “electoral authoritarianism,” however, might not fit easily into this category of “authoritarianisms with adjectives,” as he does not conceive of it as a diminished, but rather as a classical, subtype that is distinct in that it has (competitive) elections. A critical view is found in Snyder (2006) .

Of course, the search for subtypes of authoritarian regimes had already begun in the constitutive first phase of research. Proponents include Linz himself (who identified no less than seven subtypes, ranging from “bureaucratic-military authoritarian regimes” to “post-totalitarian authoritarian regimes” to “organic statism”; Linz 1975 , 285–350), and Perlmutter with his five types (1981, 89–135). While inductively understandable, those early categories would today hardly stand any test of sound category building. In particular, and this is not specific to Linz, there is a general problem with regime typologies that use the prefix “post-.” Typically, the thing that follows the “post” does not help in defining the regime type, but merely refers to a certain empirical case or context (post-totalitarian, post-Soviet, post-conflict, etc.). If there really were peculiar similarities between, say, all post-Soviet regimes, then one should be able to identify and name them and also to explain in what ways such joint features would define a type of regime (logically, a regime type with these characteristics must then not exist anywhere but in that particular geographic area or situation).

For example, the concept of neopatrimonialism received renewed interest during the new wave of research (cf., among others, Erdmann and Engel 2007 ; Bach and Gazibo 2012 ), as did the notion of sultanism ( Chehabi and Linz 1998 ).

Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) clearly build on prominent literature on coalition building, such as Axelrod’s (1970) idea of “minimal connected winning coalitions” and Riker’s Theory of Political Coalitions (1962), while discarding the qualitative difference between democracies and autocracies altogether (whether this makes sense is a different matter; see, e.g., Sartori 1991 on comparing and miscomparing). Slater (2010) draws on Luebbert’s (1991) account of fascism, liberalism, and social democracy, but also, in a kind of reverse argument, on the structuralist tradition of Moore (1966) or Rueschemeyer, Stevens, and Stevens (1992) .

To be fair, Svolik devotes only the second half of his book to this question (the first half is about “authoritarian control”).

Another strand that is institutional in nature but little related to the above is the renewed attention that monarchical rule received in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings. All monarchical regimes survived, whereas five presidential republics collapsed, lost the personalist leader, or decayed into civil war ( Derichs and Demmelhuber 2014 ; Lucas 2004 ; 2014 ; Bank et al. 2014 , 2015 ). The reasons were seen either in their specific structure of legitimacy or by the elevated position of the monarch above the polity, where the throne is exempt from political contestation.

To be sure, the establishment of GONGOs is restricted to neither developing countries’ governments nor authoritarian rule; counter examples are the German political foundations and the US National Endowment for Democracy. In autocracies, however, they are for the most part established in order to achieve or maintain control over a sector of societal activity that, a priori and by definition, is understood as free from governmental interference. Typical examples include, among others, the Russian youth organization Nashi; the equally Russian-organized and internationally active World Without Nazism; Myanmar’s Women’s Affairs Federation, which infamously involves the wives of the ruling generals; and the Sudanese Human Rights Organization. They often either acquire monopoly positions within domestic society or are established to effectively weaken autonomous societal organizations from below. Other versions are DONGOs (donor-organized …), TANGOs (technical assistance …), RONGOS (royally organized …) or QUANGOs (quasi-nongovernmental …).

There are nonmarginal questions about Gilley’s operationalization and his proxies, which might explain part of this and other counterintuitive findings in his study.

It is of course possible to think of repression as a phenomenon that is exerted by state institutions and should therefore have been treated above (in the subsection on institutionalist approaches ), but (1) the phenomenon is not tied to particular institutions; (2) it can be exerted (and in many instances is exerted) by a broad range of noninstitutional actors; and (3) authors who study repression do not, in their majority, follow strictly institutionalist approaches. Therefore, it makes sense to separate it analytically for the present purpose.

See, however, the recent overview by Davenport and Inman (2012) .

Admittedly, this is not the way Landman understands “privatization of repression”; however, given the manifold ways in which (both authoritarian and democratic) regimes outsource repression to private agencies or mercenaries, the topic’s relevance is beyond doubt.

The paragraphs in this section are not about economic theories of political behavior (or what could be called “orthodox American political economy”), but about economic factors that trigger political consequences, or vice versa, that is, they are about the interrelationship of economic and political outcomes.

Yet most critics either accept the core claims of rentier state theory or else fail to operationalize it appropriately. For example, rentier state theory views not only oil, but also natural gas and other primary goods exports, as rent generators, in addition to the strategic location of a country, strategic infrastructure (such as the Suez canal for Egypt or oil and gas transit pipelines), aid, or remittances—all of which can lead to significant rent income for the state.

Cf. also the notion of socially, politically, and culturally embedded capitalism as elaborated by Di Maggio and Zukin (1990) .

This literature initially stemmed from democratization research (cf. Levitsky and Way 2005 ), but subsequently entered, as a heuristic device, the research on authoritarianism.

The first concerted effort at inquiring into this apart from individual articles is probably the special issue of Contemporary Politics on the “performance and persistence of autocracies” edited by Croissant and Wurster (2013) .

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Social Policy Regimes and Enhance the Social Conditions Essay

Introduction, historical perspectives, current perspectives, critical perspectives, comparative case studies.

Social policy consists of legislation, principles and activities that countries employ to enhance the social conditions of their people.

Due to the emergence of democracy across the world, social policy has become an integral part of democracy as it supports human rights and further enhances the delivery of services in important sectors such as healthcare, housing, security, education, trade and labour amongst other essential social aspects of the society (Kennett 2004, p.91).

The basic objective of a social policy is to enhance equity and to improve human welfare by ensuring the accessibility and affordability of essential resources to all members of society. Thus, the kind of social policy possessed by a country reflects the extent of how its government satisfies the societal needs since poor social policy depicts a society deprived of its essential needs and deficient of human welfare.

Kennett (2004) argues that although the social policy is a discipline on its own, it greatly interfaces with economics, political science, legal studies, history and health disciplines for they all have a significant impact on the welfare of humanity (p.91).

Thus, social policy is a complex discipline that attracts other related disciplines making it a multidisciplinary field of study. Given the complexity of social policy as a multidisciplinary subject, this essay examines factors that contribute to differential evolution of social policy in various countries ultimately exploring comparative case studies of three countries, the United States, China, and Sweden.

Social policy is a discipline that employs multidisciplinary approaches in the study of problems that affect social processes and the welfare of human beings in society. Social policy seeks to ensure that people receive essential services such as healthcare, education, housing, security and provision of food, water and employment to improve the lives of people.

Fundamentally, social policy aims at alleviating social problems that affect the wellbeing of humanity by ensuring that the government puts proper welfare structures in place to enhance accessibility and distribution of critical resources to the people. As a discipline, social policy is the study of social problems and wellbeing of humans.

The discipline emerged after the realisation that, disciplines like political science, sociology, economic, and history do not effectively examine social issues that society is grappling with (Esping-Andersen1990, p.9). Thus, social policy provides a wider examination of social issues, as it interfaces with all these disciplines. Therefore, social policy deals with everything that affects the wellbeing of humanity.

Social policy has evolved tremendously in the last three decades since social issues have been increasing due to globalisation. The economic system of capitalism that has swept across the world has enhanced inequality in many societies, thus necessitating social policy to reverse trends of inequality and improve the wellbeing of marginalised communities.

Although governments are making significant strides towards keeping abreast with the globalised forces of politics and economics, development have been trailing due to insufficient attention from policymakers. This means that the wellbeing of citizens has been gradually declining because social policy has not been created in tandem with the societal needs.

Inefficiency of social policy is evident in the wellbeing of indigenous people or marginalised communities for they are lagging behind when mainstream society is embracing and reaping varied benefits from globalisation.

Therefore, social policy helps in improving the wellbeing of marginalised communities and unprivileged citizens through the provision of essential resources such as: healthcare, housing, security, education, food, water and employment (Kennett 2004, p.91). If the government ensures that every citizen receives enough of these resources, it guarantees the wellbeing of the people and society.

Disparity in social expenditure in different countries is due to dissimilar approaches that welfare public policy and administration use in enhancing the wellbeing of citizens. Comparative theory of social policy has shown that four main approaches of social policy exist and can effectively elucidate disparity of social expenditure among nations.

Firstly, the deterministic approach views economic conditions as the determinant of social expenditure. In this approach, both local economy and international economy due to the advent of globalisation have a significant impact on social policy of a country. Secondly, political approach views that democracy enhances development of social policy because individuals have the freedom to advocate for the needs of the society.

The third approach views that cultural and social factors determine the nature of social policy of a country. This approach holds that social ideologies, cultural values and religious beliefs have a significant impact on the development of social policy.

While the fourth approach holds that structures of institutions in policy development determine the nature of social policy in a country, it, therefore, implies that countries with excellent policymaking structures have a good social policy, while those that have meagre policymaking structures have poor social policy (Mullard, & Spicker 1998, p.186).

Basing on regime theory, the welfare systems across the world depend on regimes for they have a strong influence on social aspects of society. According to the regime theory, three types of regimes exist that determine social policy systems in the society. These regimes are liberal, conservative and universal states (Hill 2006, p.25).

The first type of regime is a liberal state in which globalisation factors of free markets take precedence over welfare systems, as markets forces self-regulate satisfying demands of the society.

According to Esping-Andersen (1990), in a liberal regime, the government function is just to enhance efficiency of trade and economic growth through liberalisation, with minimal emphasis on development of social welfare systems (p.12). Countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada are in this category.

The conservative state is the second type of regime in which a state plays a vital role in the development of social policy institutions and structures that enhance formulation of social policy. In the conservative state, neither democracy nor globalisation trends of free markets determine formulation of social policy, but instead nationalism matters. Countries that fall in this category include China, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan.

The third type of regime is the universal state because it seeks to uphold the highest principles that improve the wellbeing of humanity. Hill (2006) argues that these states are very democratic, valuing social rights for they seek to promote a high standard of equality in society (p.28).

Countries under this category are trying to get out of globalising forces that seem to cloud many countries, preventing them from perceiving the importance of social policy. Countries like Sweden, Denmark and Norway fall under this category of regime.

Current trends of social policy across the world are under the influence of globalisation. Globalisation is a powerful political, economic and social ideology that is sweeping all countries to become one global nation, sharing common problems, demanding similar needs and requiring same policies (Pierson 2006, p.202).

Under the context of globalisation, countries are finding it hard to adopt conservative forms of state that have their own social policy. Since politics have a significant impact in the formulation of social policy, the influence of globalisation in the political arena consequently affects the development of social policy.

According to Kennett (2008), democracy is an overwhelming ideology in the globalisation of politics (p.12). Developed countries that have mature democracies tend to create a political environment that favours establishment and development of social policies.

For instance, a country like the United States have a good social policy because of a mature democracy, while developing countries like Zimbabwe have an immature democracy, which reflect a poor social policy.

Moreover, since the development of a social policy in a country is dependent on economic conditions, economic factors of globalisation affect the development of social policy.

Globalisation’s trend of liberalising markets is threatening the economies of many countries because free markets offer stiff competition in the business environment and thus do not provide a chance for uncompetitive goods from developing countries.

In essence, liberalised markets provided an opportunity for developed countries and mega-companies to monopolise and dominate markets. If the globalisation forces of liberalised markets threaten the existence of small companies and market share of developing countries, it means that economic growth and development gradually declines.

Pierson (2006) argues that nation-states are gradually losing their economic powers to international markets that regulate and determine the country’s capacity to survive in liberalised markets (p.201).

This means that the welfare system of a country is subject to a globalised economy. Countries that are uncompetitive in the liberalised markets will experience a decline in economic growth and development, which consequently hampers the establishment of social policy.

In contrast, social issues of globalisation such as the advocacy of human rights, cultural values and spread of religious beliefs enhance development of social policy. Due to technology, people living in the remotest corners of the world are able to keep abreast with social forces of globalisation that have transformed society into a global village.

Modern society can share common values and beliefs due to the advancement in information technology that hastens the transfer of information from civilized to uncivilized people.

Castells (2000) argues that information technology is transforming cultural and social aspects of society very fast, leading to the globalisation of societal values and beliefs (p.8). Therefore, information technology, as an aspect of globalisation is gradually establishing a global culture that favours formulation and development of social policy.

Development of social policy in contemporary society is dependent on the efforts of various players such as individual, non-governmental organisation and government (Mullard, & Spicker 1998, p.188). Individual members of the society play an integral role in the formulation, development and implementation of social policy, for they are at the receiving end of governance.

When a government issues orders, laws or polices, all citizens have a legal and moral responsibility of ensuring that no one is breaching those laws. Moreover, given that social policy deals wellbeing of citizens, individuals should demand better services that enhance their wellbeing and in so doing they participate in the formulation and implementation of social policy.

In times of crisis, non-governmental organisations help government in alleviating impacts of crises and improving wellbeing of the citizens.

According to Larner (2005), government uses structures and systems such as families, schools, communities, companies, media and political parties in imparting social policy into the society for people to adopt (p.53). These structures and systems are very important in the society for they reduce the burden of dealing with individual members of the society.

Diversity in the society in terms of gender, race, sexuality and disabilities is creating inequality that classifies people into various classes of economic status and power. Society for a long time has gendered roles that suite men and women, and mostly women have experience marginalisation since men dominate in various roles (Jenson 2008, p. 135).

Since society perceives women as weak gender, issues and challenges affecting women have become part of social policy as a way of empowering them and enhancing their wellbeing. Feminists protest that the society has stereotyped roles of women to be inferior to the roles of men, thus undermining capabilities and wellbeing of women.

The Anglo-Western perspective of gender is to empower women through formulation of social policy that provide for affirmative action. According to Jenson (2008), feminists are advocating for the rights of women in social, political and economic aspects of society (p.136).

In the social aspect of society, feminists argue that women have the same abilities as men, but discrimination and stereotyping of their roles as inferior have been undermining their quest for a better life.

Feminists also assert that men have dominated politics and misused political powers in undermining women. Another view of feminists is that economic structure of society has placed women in low economic classes, thus receive economic oppression from their counterparts.

Ethnicity and race have created inequalities, in that marginalised ethnicities or races are trailing in aspects of human development such: as social, political and economics. For the government to empower different ethnicities, it must have appropriate social policy in place that identifies specific needs of the people in certain communities.

For instance, according to Morrissey (2006), the indigenous people of Australia suffered from marginalisation and discrimination for a long period because the government had no any social policy until prompted by other Commonwealth Countries (p.349). This means that social policy of indigenous or marginalised communities is not only a limited issue but also a global issue.

Disability and sexuality is a social issue that is slowly gaining recognition in social policy. People with disabilities and aberrant sexual orientations have formed part of minority groups who need recognition and protection of their rights. In the case of people with disabilities, various governments have made significant progress in gathering for their needs in spite of poor social policies.

Currently, many disabled people are receiving formal education and employment that have considerably improved their wellbeing in the society (Shima, Zolyomi, & Zaidi 2008, p.9). Regarding aberrant sexual orientation, gays and lesbians are advocating for their rights based on their perception of the society as having marginalised and discriminated against them.

Proponents of homosexuals are arguing that lesbians and gays need recognition in the society. According to Concannon (2008), the constitution and social policy provide good structures that would enhance wellbeing of homosexuals if formulated and implemented well (p.327). Therefore, social policy is central to promoting the rights and wellbeing of minority groups like homosexuals and people with disabilities in the modern society.

Comparative case studies show that different countries have different approaches of social policy depending on their social, political, cultural and economic conditions. Therefore, what are the approaches that countries like the United States, China and Sweden employ in their social policy? Regime theory classifies the United States as a liberalised state, due to their capitalistic economy and the liberalisation of their markets.

The United States does not place much emphasis on development of the welfare system since free trade and capitalism favours individualism. Issues that mainly dominate the United States social policy are health insurance, security, education, employment and inequality, but mainly occur at state levels.

Bailey, Harte and Sugden (1994) argue that the United States does not have an integrated welfare system because of factors such as federalism, capitalism and liberalised markets that favour individualism (p.9). Different states in the United States have their own unique social policy in sectors like health, security, education and housing due to federalism.

Capitalism and liberalised markets have provided a lucrative environment for private enterprises and non-governmental organisations to venture into the welfare system, making it complex and expensive.

China’s social policy mainly has it basis in political stability making it fall under the conservative states according to regime theory. In China, democracy and liberalisation of trades have no any impact in the development of social policy since political figures and nationalists are only aiming to achieve political expediency and the stability of their nation.

This means that the current wave of globalisation in terms of liberalisation of markets and democracy is threatening survival of China’s social policy. Li, Feng, and Gizelis (2008), argue that the current economic, social and political trends of globalisation have compelled the Chinese government to construct new social policies (p.6).

New social policies became essential because the liberalisation of capital and labour markets have affected traditional labour and trade systems tremendously, thus necessitating restructuring of both social and economic policy.

The restructuring of economic policy resulted in unprecedented unemployment, which aggravated inequality and increased the cost of living, hence compelling the government to formulate new social policies to address these issues.

Moreover, the family-planning policy of one-child significantly changed the demography of China in that extended families that provided support for the elderly diminished, leaving nuclear families that have no capacity to support the old in the society. Thus, the Chinese government had to gather for the needs of the elderly through social policy (Li, Feng, & Gizelis 2008, p.5)

Sweden is the ideal form of a welfare state, which belongs to the category of a universal state according to regime theory. Hantrais (2007) argues that the Swedish model of social policy is very advanced compared to the British model because it provides universal care to its citizens, enhancing equality (p.23).

Comparatively, in the European Union, Sweden has the highest social expenditure relative to Gross Domestic Product per head. According to social expenditure database, Sweden spends 35.2% of Gross Domestic product, while it has Gross Domestic Product of $28100 per head, which is the lowest in Europe and the entire world (Hill 2006, p.20).

Hence, factors that contributed to development of social policy in Sweden as a welfare state include its

Good policy institutions, stable economy, political commitment to social issues, and culture that favour social protection.

Therefore, comparative case studies have shown that social policy in different countries varies according to political, social, economic and cultural factors. The comparative case studies have shown that variability in social policy and social expenditure in developed countries is attributable to political, social, and cultural factors, while financial factors do not have a momentous impact.

For instance, according to Hill (2006), the United States has Gross Domestic Product per head of $37,600 and spends about 19.6% of this in public social expenditure, while Sweden has Gross Domestic Product per head of $28,100 but spends approximately 35.2% of it in social expenditure (p.20).

The statistics shows that Sweden spends significantly higher on social expenditure as compared to the United States. Therefore, the disparity is in social expenditure across nations depends on economic, social, cultural and political aspects of government since they have a significant impact in the formulation of social policy.

Social policy is an integral type of policy that every government needs to enhance provisions of essential services and resources such as healthcare, education, security, employment, housing and food, among other societal needs. Social policy has evolved considerably in the last three decades because inequality has been increasing following the globalising factors of capitalism, liberalised markets and economic crisis.

Although globalisation seems to pose a harmful blow in the progress of social policy, it has benefits in enhancing democracies, providing information technology and creating a global culture that promotes the wellbeing of humanity.

Literature reviews and comparative case studies have shown that different countries employ different approaches in developing social policy. Thus, the social policy possessed by any country depends on economic, social, cultural and political factors.

Bailey, D., Harte, G., & Sugden, R., 1994. Transnationals and Governments: Recent Policies in Japan, France, Germany, the United States, and Britain. London: Routledge.

Castells, M., 2000. The Rise of the Network Society . Malden: Blackwell Publishers

Concannon, L., 2008. Citizenship, Sexual Identity and Social Exclusion: Exploring

Issues in British and American Social Policy. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy , 28, (10), pp. 326-339.

Esping-Andersen, G., 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism . United Kingdom: Polity Press

Hantrais, L., 2007. Social Policy in the European Union . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Press.

Hill, M., 2006. Social Policy in the Modern World: A Comparative Text . London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Jenson, J., 2008. Writing Women Out, Folding Gender In. Social Policy , 15(2), pp. 131-153.

Kennett, P., 2004. A Handbook of Comparative Social Policy . Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Kennett, P., 2008. Governance, Globalisation, and Public Policy . Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Larner, W., 2005. Analyzing Social Policy: A governmental Approach. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Li, J., Feng, Y., & Gizelis, I., 2008. China’s New Social Security System in the Making: Problems and Prospects. International Journal of Public Administration , 31(1), pp. 5-23.

Morrissey, M., 2006. The Australian State and Indigenous People 1990-2006. Journal of Sociology , 42(4), pp. 347-354.

Mullard, M., & Spicker, P., 1998. Social Policy in a Changing Society. London: Routledge,

Pierson, C., 2006 . Beyond the Welfare State? The New Political Economy of Welfare . United Kingdom: Polity Press.

Shima, I., Zolyomi, E., & Zaidi, A., 2008. The Labour Market Situation of People with Disabilities in Europe. European Center for Social Welfare, pp.1-18.

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Aristotle — The Question of Political Regime

The Question of Political Regime

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2015 Theses Doctoral

Essays on the Effects of Political Institutions on Development Policies

Cohen, Jordan Kyle

This dissertation examines the relationship between political institutions and development policies across a wide array of policy arenas. It consists of three essays. In the first essay, I examine how corruption in political institutions affects citizens’ attitudes towards proposed policy reforms that should yield long-run benefits. I argue that where corruption in political institutions reduces citizens’ benefits from existing programs, governmental promises to deliver benefits via reforms are less credible. Thus, citizens will cling to inefficient policies not because they are unable to recognize the benefits of reform but because they do not trust political institutions to implement reforms in ways that will benefit them in practice. I use this logic to explain why citizens frequently resist attempts to reform the economically and environmentally costly practice of setting domestic gasoline prices below market prices. To reveal these patterns, I rely on original survey and administrative data from Indonesia. The second essay maintains the focuses on the quality of political institutions and natural resource governance but from a more macro perspective. In this essay, I argue that political regimes and political time horizons shape financial arrangements between governments and multinational oil companies. This essentially asks the reverse of a central question in comparative politics. Rather than asking how oil income affects political institutions, I ask how political institutions motivate politicians to make policy choices that increase or decrease the government’s access to oil income over time. To do so, I utilize an original dataset on financial arrangements between host countries and multinational oil companies, as reflected in historically confidential oil contracts. The final essay travels to a different substantive area of development policy, yet allows for a critical role for political institutions. This essay argues that the relationship between developing country governments and foreign aid donors should be conditional on the quality of political institutions, with aid donors giving countries with institutions better able to commit to selecting policies that promote development wider latitude to direct foreign aid resources towards local priorities. Instead, I find that political and security alliances shape whether donors give developing country governments more “ownership” over aid flows. Overall, the dissertation deepens understanding of the relationship between the quality of political institutions and policies within developing countries, while offering insights into contemporary policy debates about natural resource governance, environmental politics, and development aid.

• Investments, Foreign--Government policy
• Investments, Developing country
• Sustainable development--Government policy
• Political science
• Natural resources—Management

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Schumer Urges New Leadership in Israel, Calling Netanyahu an Obstacle to Peace

The top Senate Democrat, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the United States, spoke from the Senate floor to condemn Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and call for elections to replace him.

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By Annie Karni

Reporting from Washington

• March 14, 2024

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, on Thursday delivered a pointed speech on the Senate floor excoriating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as a major obstacle to peace in the Middle East and calling for new leadership in Israel, five months into the war.

Many Democratic lawmakers have condemned Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership and his right-wing governing coalition, and President Biden has even criticized the Israeli military’s offensive in Gaza as “over the top.” But Mr. Schumer’s speech amounted to the sharpest critique yet from a senior American elected official — effectively urging Israelis to replace Mr. Netanyahu.

“I believe in his heart, his highest priority is the security of Israel,” said Mr. Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the United States. “However, I also believe Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.”

Mr. Schumer added: “He has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu Has ‘Lost His Way,’ Schumer says

Senator chuck schumer, the majority leader, called the israeli prime minister, benjamin netanyahu, a major obstacle to peace in the middle east..

I rise to speak today about about what I believe can and should be the path forward to secure mutual peace and lasting prosperity for Israelis and Palestinians. The fourth major obstacle to peace is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I have known Prime Minister Netanyahu for a very long time. While we have vehemently disagreed on many occasions, I will always respect his extraordinary bravery for Israel on the battlefield as a younger man. I believe in his heart he has his highest priority is, as is the security of Israel. However, I also believe Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take the precedence over the best interests of Israel. He has put himself in coalition with far right, far-right extremists like Minister Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. And as a result, he has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah. As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me. The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after Oct. 7. The world has changed radically since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.

The speech was the latest reflection of the growing dissatisfaction among Democrats, particularly progressives, with Israel’s conduct of the war and its toll on Palestinian civilians, which has created a strategic and political dilemma for Mr. Biden. Republicans have tried to capitalize on that dynamic for electoral advantage, hugging Mr. Netanyahu closer as Democrats repudiate him. And on Thursday, they lashed out at Mr. Schumer for his remarks.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said on the Senate floor that it was “grotesque and hypocritical” for Americans “who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of the democratically elected leader of Israel.” He called Mr. Schumer’s move “unprecedented.”

“The Democratic Party doesn’t have an anti-Bibi problem,” Mr. McConnell said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “It has an anti-Israel problem.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called Mr. Schumer’s remarks “earth-shatteringly bad” and accused him of “calling on the people of Israel to overthrow their government.” And House Republicans, gathered in West Virginia for a party retreat, hastily called a news conference to attack Mr. Schumer for his comments and position themselves as the true friends of Israel in Congress.

Mr. Schumer’s remarks came a day after Senate Republicans invited Mr. Netanyahu to speak as their special guest at a party retreat in Washington. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican, asked Mr. Netanyahu to address Republicans virtually, but he could not appear because of a last-minute scheduling conflict. Ambassador Michael Herzog, Israel’s envoy to the United States, spoke in his place and also addressed the House G.O.P. gathering on Thursday.

In his speech at the Capitol, Mr. Schumer, who represents a state with more than 20 percent of the country’s Jewish population, was careful to assert that he was not trying to dictate any electoral outcome in Israel. He prefaced his harsh criticism of Mr. Netanyahu with a long defense of the country, which he said American Jews “love in our bones.”

Mr. Schumer said there had been an “inaccurate perception” of the war that lays too much blame on Israel for civilian deaths in Gaza without focusing enough on how Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields. And he acknowledged how difficult it was for traumatized Israelis to contemplate the possibility of a two-state solution at this time.

But he was unsparing in his criticism of Mr. Netanyahu, calling the prime minister one of the top obstacles to achieving peace in the Middle East, along with Hamas, “radical right-wing Israelis” and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, who he also said should be replaced.

“The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after Oct. 7,” Mr. Schumer said, referring to the day of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. “The world has changed — radically — since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.”

Mr. Schumer said the only solution to the decades-old conflict was a two-state solution: “a demilitarized Palestinian state living side by side with Israel in equal measures of peace, security, prosperity and dignity.” He said Mr. Netanyahu, who has rejected the idea of Palestinian statehood, was jeopardizing Israel’s future.

“At this critical juncture, I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel, at a time when so many Israelis have lost their confidence in the vision and direction of their government,” Mr. Schumer said, adding that he believed a majority of the Israeli public “will recognize the need for change.”

“As a democracy, Israel has the right to choose its own leaders, and we should let the chips fall where they may,” he said. “But the important thing is that Israelis are given a choice. There needs to be a fresh debate about the future of Israel after Oct. 7.”

Mr. Schumer gave White House officials advance notice that he would be making the speech.

“We fully respect his right to make those remarks and to decide for himself what he’s going to say on the Senate floor,” said John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman. “He obviously feels strongly about this. We understand and respect that. This wasn’t about approval or disapproval or anything in any way, but he did give us a heads-up that he was going to do it.”

Mr. Schumer’s speech was the second time since Oct. 7 that he has taken to the Senate floor to address the Israeli-Hamas war. The conflict has prompted him to think more deeply and speak more openly about his Jewish faith and heritage, as well as the moral and political dilemmas the war has presented for Jews in Israel and the United States.

In November, Mr. Schumer made a deeply personal speech condemning the rise of antisemitism in America that has flared since Israel began retaliating against Hamas for its attack. Those remarks appeared to be mostly directed at members of his own party; he warned that some liberals and young people were “unknowingly aiding and abetting” antisemitism in the name of social justice. Mr. Schumer has since spoken to publishers about writing a book on antisemitism.

On Thursday, his speech was aimed squarely at Mr. Netanyahu and far-right members of his governing coalition, who Mr. Schumer said were falling short of Jewish values.

Mr. Herzog had a stern response. “Israel is a sovereign democracy,” he wrote on social media. “It is unhelpful, all the more so as Israel is at war against the genocidal terror organization Hamas, to comment on the domestic political scene of a democratic ally.”

In his remarks, Mr. Schumer said that Mr. Netanyahu refused to “disavow Ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and their calls for Israelis to drive Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank.”

“He won’t commit to a military operation in Rafah that prioritizes protecting civilian life,” Mr. Schumer said. “He won’t engage responsibly in discussions about a ‘day after’ plan for Gaza, and a longer-term pathway to peace.”

Mr. Schumer said that if Mr. Netanyahu and his current coalition remained in power, “then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.”

Underscoring how contentious the issue of Israel is in American politics, Mr. Schumer’s speech was criticized by both the right and the left.

Layla Elabed, the campaign manager for Listen to Michigan, an antiwar group of activists who voted “uncommitted” in the state’s Democratic presidential primary, said that “Senator Schumer is beginning to shift but far too slowly and with little substance for what actions Biden can take now to stop the outrageous civilian death toll in Gaza.”

Nicholas Fandos and Peter Baker contributed reporting.

Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times. She writes features and profiles, with a recent focus on House Republican leadership. More about Annie Karni

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

News and Analysis

​​In a new report, a group of experts warned that “famine is imminent” in northern Gaza . In the coming months, the report said, as many as 1.1 million people in the territory could face the severest level of hunger classified by the group.

​​Israeli negotiators are traveling to Qatar to participate in a new round of talks aimed at achieving a cease-fire  in Gaza and the release of hostages held by Palestinian militants, according to officials.

​​Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who is facing increasing pressure to negotiate a cease-fire, lashed out at Senator Chuck Schumer  over his call for elections to be held in Israel when the war winds down.

A Struggle for Life’s Basics: Most of Gaza’s population fled to the southern territory of Rafah , hoping to escape the war. As they hunt for food and shelter, a potential Israeli invasion has added to their fears.

A Strained Lifeline: The United Arab Emirates has maintained its links to Israel throughout the war in Gaza, but the relationship, built on a U.S.-brokered deal, is under pressure as anger against Israel grows .

Shifting Ties: Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish minority has long lived apart from the nation’s secular mainstream, but the war in Gaza has both widened that divide and, in some ways, helped to bridge it .

A Winding Path: The U.S. airman who lit himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington to protest the war had left an isolated Christian community for the Air Force before turning to leftist and anarchist activism .

Rage, waste and corruption: how Covid changed politics

Four years on from the start of the pandemic, the drama may have subsided but the lingering effects go on. Are we suffering from political long Covid?

L ike many people, I have had Covid and I have had long Covid. They are very different experiences. I first caught the disease at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, when its effects were relatively unknown. It was unnerving and highly unpredictable. I did not get particularly sick, but I probably gave the virus to my father, who did. Back then, Covid appeared to be the great divider – the old were far more at risk than the young, and those with pre-existing vulnerabilities most at risk of all – and the great equaliser. Almost everyone experienced the shock and the fear of discovering a novel killer among us. We soon acquired a shared language and a sense of common purpose: to get through this together – whatever this turned out to be.

I developed long Covid last year, six months after I had caught glandular fever. The fresh bout of the Covid virus made the effects of the glandular fever far worse: more debilitating and much harder to shake. Some mornings it was a struggle to get out of bed, never mind leave the house. It was as though Covid latched on to what was already wrong with me and gave it extra teeth. The experience was unpredictable in a very different way from the drama of getting sick in 2020: not a cosmic lottery, but a drawn-out bout of low-level, private misery. Good days were followed by bad days for no obvious reason, hopes of having recovered were snuffed out just when it seemed like the worst was past. Long Covid is less isolating than being locked down, but it is also a lonelier business than getting ill at the peak of the pandemic was, if only because other people have moved on.

The physical and psychological effects of these different versions of Covid – the short and the long – are oddly parallel to its political consequences. The disease turns out to be its own metaphor. We are all suffering from political long Covid now. The early drama is over. A series of lingering misfortunes has replaced it. As with long Covid, different countries are suffering in different ways, trapped in their own private miseries. The shock of the new has gone, to be replaced by an enduring sense of fatigue.

When the pandemic hit, its effects on politics were intensely felt and hard to predict. In some ways, it seemed like the ultimate stress test. Different political systems – and leaders – were exposed in different ways. Those with longstanding vulnerabilities seemed destined to fail. At the same time, the advent of Covid appeared to open up the prospect of new kinds of political solidarity. We were in this together. Covid’s global impact was a reminder of what it is that we all have in common. An acute awareness of our shared vulnerability might create the conditions for a renewed sense of purpose in tackling global problems, including the climate emergency. Maybe a pandemic was just what we needed to remember what was at stake, and to remind some of us how lucky we are.

Four years on, the picture looks very different. The immediate experience of the pandemic feels more and more remote, even though public inquiries are now under way, trying to establish just what really happened and who was to blame for what went wrong. Part of the reason for the remoteness is that much of what once looked like high-stakes decision-making has come out in the wash: many outcomes were similar, regardless of the political choices that were made. Maybe it was in the lap of the gods after all.

At the same time, the more pernicious but harder to recognise political consequences of Covid are all around us. The immediacy of the threat has passed, but the lingering signs of the damage it did to the body politic are everywhere. The pandemic and its consequences – lockdowns, economic dislocation, inflation, growing frustration with political elites – have found out pre-existing weaknesses in our politics and made them worse. It has given what ails us extra teeth.

The early days of Covid gave reason to hope that the massive disruption it entailed might also shift the direction of travel of global politics. That hope turned out to be illusory. In the first phase of the pandemic, it looked to have exposed populist grandstanding for what it was: bleach, it turned out, was no sort of viral disinfectant. But populism remains on the rise around the world, feeding off the many discontents of the lockdown years, and of the years that preceded them.

Likewise, Covid did not start any major wars – 2020 and 2021 were two of the most peaceful years for international conflict on record. But a post-Covid world is now as militarily dangerous as at any time since the cold war.

Covid did not exacerbate climate breakdown: for a short while, carbon emissions fell as economies shut down. But the world is still getting warmer and the hope that tackling the virus would provide a model for more urgent climate action turns out to have been a pipe dream.

The pandemic wormed its way into the weak spots in our political life, just as long Covid finds weaknesses in the human body. It no longer galvanises us, nor is it capable of destroying us. Instead, its symptoms are erratic and hard to fathom, appearing in surprising and seemingly unrelated places. Political long Covid is neither the great divider nor the great equaliser. It’s the great destabiliser.

D uring 2020, when the pandemic forced governments around the world to improvise their responses at breakneck speed, it looked as though it would expose some basic truths about the strengths and weaknesses of different political systems. The biggest and most immediate contrast was between autocratic China and the democratic west. Ruthlessness and decisiveness – which the Chinese political system appeared to possess in abundance – were the order of the day. The democracies struggled to keep up.

In March of that year, after Italy became the first European country to grapple with the question of how to keep its population from infecting one another, the Chinese sent a group of health officials to help advise . The Italians were concerned by the fact that, despite putting draconian lockdowns in place, the virus was still spreading. The Chinese explained the problem. These weren’t actually lockdowns as they understood them. People could still leave their homes for emergencies, enforcement was sporadic, and punishment was relatively light. Meanwhile, in Wuhan, the very centre of the Covid outbreak, armed guards stood outside apartment blocks, curfews were brutally enforced and those with the virus could be barricaded inside their homes. Within a matter of weeks, Italy’s death toll was more than double that of China’s.

The biggest contrast with China was the US, where a federal system of executive decision-making, a widespread suspicion of government mandates and an incompetent president meant that Covid soon killed far more people than anywhere else. If the US was the flagship for democracy, then it looked like democracy was failing to answer the call.

However, it quickly became clear that the global picture was more complicated than any hastily assembled political morality tale might suggest. New Zealand – democratic, liberal and with a robustly independent population – for a long time kept the virus almost completely at bay . The country had the advantage of being an island state that was able to shut its borders. But Britain is also an island, and that made no difference to the government’s ability – or inability – to act. Vietnam, which is not an island, did almost as well as New Zealand. Russia did almost as badly as the US. Some of the worst death tolls were in the countries of eastern Europe, such as Bulgaria and Serbia, which had a mixed legacy of authoritarianism and democracy. Dividing the world up by regime types proved little.

Demography turned out to be as important as politics: elderly, unhealthy populations suffered more. Equally, any geopolitical morality tales concealed a more complex set of tradeoffs. A zero-Covid policy, ruthlessly enforced as in China, turned out to be storing up trouble for the future . Even with the advent of effective vaccines – and China’s homegrown versions turned out to be less effective than elsewhere – too many of China’s population remained unprotected from the virus and the much-delayed economic opening left them exposed. China has also displayed a longstanding weakness of autocratic systems: an absence of transparency means we don’t know the ultimate death toll there, because they are not telling. It is simply not possible to compare it with other countries.

The wider tradeoffs – the toll that lockdowns have taken on mental health, on treatment for other illnesses, on educational prospects for the children worst affected – make it hard to draw any clear political lessons. Sweden, which was heralded – and viciously derided – for providing a real-time experiment in the efficacy of non-lockdown policies, now presents as mixed a picture as anywhere else: more Covid-related deaths than its Scandinavian neighbours ( 2,576 deaths per million , compared with Denmark’s 1,630 and Norway’s 1,054) but similar or even lower overall excess mortality rates from all causes, and less educational and economic disruption, though no readily quantifiable economic benefits. Covid was not just a political stress test. It was a series of impossible choices.

Four years on, it is also clear that many of the lasting political consequences of the virus have little to do with the relative performance of individual governments. In the UK, the long-term incumbent parties north and south of the border are suffering serious Covid fallout despite adopting opposed approaches to the pandemic. The Tories in Westminster were reluctant lockdowners, the SNP in Edinburgh far more enthusiastic ones. It made little odds for the final outcomes: overall mortality rates were relatively consistent for the UK as a whole and variations had more to do with the underlying population profiles in different parts of the country than with the policy preferences of elected politicians.

What lingers is something more familiar: the whiff of corruption and the stench of hypocrisy. Although Rishi Sunak, as chancellor, was responsible for one of the more hare-brained schemes of 2020, “eat out to help out” – which gave diners discounts for getting back into pubs and restaurants, at a time when the virus was still widespread in the population and about to surge back – that is not the reason why he is in such deep political trouble. Instead, the Covid legacy that haunts the Tories stems almost entirely from the parties held in Downing Street during Boris Johnson’s premiership, when the rest of the country was still locked down. Ultimately it is not the contrast between the public performance of different administrations that has come to matter politically, but the contrast between public pronouncements and private practice: not how many died in the end, but how many died while the wine was flowing in Downing Street. Hypocrisy is the political killer.

The same is true for the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon, who once appeared caring and decisive in her nightly news conference, now seems sanctimonious and evasive, her WhatsApp messages long deleted , her personal grievances exposed. The harsh light of a public inquiry has revealed the SNP to have been as motivated by petty point-scoring and score-settling as any other self-interested political party.

Politics everywhere – in whatever form – takes its toll on its practitioners. The scars accumulate, especially for longstanding administrations. Covid, initially, appeared to be something else: an unprecedented governmental challenge, requiring a new kind of skill set. But in the end, it found a way to expose the regime fatigue that had set in regardless. As Johnson and Sturgeon have discovered, long political Covid is a lonelier business than the exposure they faced in the white heat of the initial outbreak. It works its way through to latch on to personal vulnerabilities and makes them far harder to shake off.

W hat happened to the sense of solidarity that the arrival of Covid appeared to have engendered? In the early days of the pandemic, many governments – including in the UK – were worried that people would soon tire of restrictions on their freedom of movement. Some behavioural models had indicated that widespread disobedience would become the norm after a matter of weeks. Those models turned out to be wrong. Most citizens around the world did as they were told for far longer than might have been expected.

This gave rise to a hope that concerted action on an equivalent scale might be possible in other areas, too. If, in the face of a serious threat, the public was willing to act in the common interest, even if that meant making significant personal sacrifices, then perhaps other collective action problems – from mass migration to the climate crisis – might be amenable to a similar spirit of cooperation. Maybe we were more public-spirited than we had given ourselves credit for.

Yet no such dividend has been delivered. On the most contentious political questions, we remain as far apart as ever. Environmental policies – particularly when tied to net zero targets – still provoke deep divisions and can stoke widespread anger. A voting public that was so furious with Johnson over breaking his own Covid rules that it effectively helped turf him out of office nonetheless elected a Tory in his Uxbridge and Ruislip constituency when the party turned the issue of the Ulez traffic levy being introduced by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, into a symbol of bureaucratic meddling in the affairs of local communities. Lockdown was one thing. But environmental protections are something else: readily weaponised as evidence of elite interference in ordinary people’s lives.

Anti-immigrant sentiment, including among many of the older voters who most dutifully complied with Covid restrictions, continues to fuel populism around the developed world. Geert Wilders won the popular vote in last year’s Dutch general election on a platform that combined migrant-bashing with net zero scepticism. But unlike some other far-right politicians, Wilders is no Covid sceptic. He had also been one of the first Dutch politicians to complain about his country’s slow rollout of its Covid vaccination programme.

Why does Covid solidarity not translate to other areas? In part, it is the lack of any comparable sense of urgency. Net zero targets are there to stave off long-heralded but also long-distant threats of catastrophe. At its height, Covid threatened to crash public health systems in a matter of days. But there is another difference. Public support for government restrictions during Covid was about controlling collective behaviour when it threatened our personal safety. The danger was other people: keep them in to keep us safe. Climate action is so much harder to sell because it seems to represent an infringement of personal freedom for the sake of some far less immediate collective benefit. In that sense, Covid compliance has more in common with anti-immigrant sentiment. Keep them out to keep us safe.

Throughout the pandemic, public opinion in the UK tended to be critical of the government for being too eager to lift restrictions rather than too keen to impose them. In a pandemic the majority of British people want other people to be told what to do, even if it means being told what to do themselves.

This has not been the case everywhere. In large parts of the US, the public proved deeply resistant to the many varieties of mandated behaviour, particularly when it came to mask-wearing, which became a proxy for a whole host of other resentments and frustrations. The pandemic latched on to what unites us and what divides us. It did nothing to change the contours of those divisions.

The truth is that public cooperation during Covid did not reveal civic capabilities of which we had been unaware. Publics obeyed the injunctions of democratic politicians because those politicians were already doing their best to respond to the choices of the public. Successfully observed lockdowns were as much a reflection of ongoing behaviour as they were a constraint upon it. Likewise, when lockdowns failed, it was often because political leaders, themselves pandering to perceived public opinion, failed to endorse them wholeheartedly.

Covid didn’t generate the political response required to change the way we live. In most cases, it gave us the political response that we asked for.

T he area where Covid made the biggest immediate political difference was in public finance. Politicians suddenly found the money that was needed to stave off disaster, conjuring it up any way they could. The magic money tree turned out to exist after all. In a genuine crisis, despite everything that had been said about the insurmountable limits on public spending, there proved to be both a will and a way to surmount them.

As chancellor in 2020, Sunak launched a furlough scheme that guaranteed 80% subsidies to almost everyone in employment: the closest the UK has ever come to instituting a kind of universal basic income. In the US, a rolling series of extensive relief and stimulus packages included direct cash payments to all households, mortgage relief, tax holidays and giant subsidies to businesses. As a result, people stayed in work and businesses stayed afloat, while public debt in both countries soared. At the same time, governments around the world spent heavily to support vaccine development programmes. Conventional practice in the pharmaceutical industry meant there was invariably a multi-year gap between finding a new treatment and bringing it to market. But again, these constraints turned out to be dispensable. Effective vaccines arrived within a year of the outbreak.

Was this, then, the model for an alternative political future, in which vastly accelerated public spending can drive innovation while protecting citizens from disruption? Could it be the means of tackling the climate crisis?

In reality, the response to Covid was less like a trial run for a new climate politics and more like the response to a war. The emergency measures were put in place for the attritional phase of the pandemic, when the threat of collapse was real. They have been steadily wound down ever since. Meanwhile, the spending on vaccine research was only a part of wider government programmes that tended to be far less efficient and highly wasteful. As in any actual war, successful weapons programmes are the exception, not the norm. Most of the money gets siphoned off by schemes that go nowhere.

As a result, the legacy of government action on Covid has been lingering dissatisfaction rather than a new sense of political possibility. The symptoms of political long Covid include public frustration with the bill that has to be paid. Part of the cause for that frustration is widespread inflation, stoked by looser public finances, which has fuelled anger with governments around the world and created electoral volatility. Javier Milei might not be president of Argentina without Covid-fuelled inflation. Donald Trump might not be making a comeback without it, either.

At the same time, stories of the waste and corruption that inevitably went along with unfettered government spending continue to surface. In the UK, the face of government pandemic spending is not Kate Bingham, the head of the highly effective UK vaccines taskforce, but the Tory peer Michelle Mone , who is accused of having used a VIP fast-lane to bypass standard procurement processes and secure government contracts for a company to supply PPE worth more than £200m, much of which apparently turned out to be useless (though the company denies this). The price of sidelining politics as normal is that when politics as normal resumes, the corner-cutting doesn’t look so good.

In the aftermath of the first and second world wars, when government spending among the belligerents was colossal, and waste and corruption were widespread, lasting social transformation nonetheless followed in their wake. The foundations of a new kind of welfare state were laid by the scale of wartime public investment, along with a sense that public sacrifices needed to be repaid.

The pandemic has not been the same. In part, it is a question of scale. The $12bn the US federal government spent supporting vaccine research is a drop in the ocean of public spending. Even the trillions of dollars the US government made available in various forms of aid pales compared with the legacy of pre-existing programmes such as Medicare and Medicaid. The levels of US public debt in 2024 are similar as a percentage of GDP to what they were in 1945, in the immediate aftermath of second world war. But that has more to do with the long-term burdens of welfare programmes and defence spending than with the response to Covid.

In a war, the young fight and give up their lives to keep the old safe, who in return pledge to make life better for the those who are being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice. It is part of what creates a sense of mutual obligation between the generations. In Covid, it was the old who lost their lives, but it was still the young who made many of the sacrifices, in lost employment and educational opportunities. That makes the tradeoff more complicated. Its legacy has not been a new intergenerational compact. If anything, political differences between the generations are wider than ever, and Covid has exacerbated them. The young have not been repaid for their sacrifice with the kinds of promises that tend to follow an actual war: better housing, greater educational access, full employment. This is in part because the price paid by the younger generation has proved far harder to quantify than the physical toll the disease took on the old. Who owes whom for what? This was a war with no obvious winners.

Except, perhaps, those politicians who saw what might come next. In October 2022, as his invasion of Ukraine was stalling, Vladimir Putin told his government coordination council in Moscow that the lesson was clear: Russia needed to translate Covid urgency into military urgency. “We faced certain difficulties and the need to upgrade our work, give it a new momentum and a new character when we were responding to the coronavirus pandemic,” he said. Those lessons had to be taken forward in prosecuting the war. “We need to get rid of those archaic procedures that are preventing us from moving forward at the pace the country needs.” As a first step, Putin declared martial law in the four regions controlled by Russian forces.

Covid was not an actual war, though it often felt like one. Nor was Covid a dry run for how to deal with the challenge of the climate crisis, though it occasionally felt like that too. Now we know that Covid was, for some politicians, a dry run for war itself.

C ovid did not fundamentally change the way we live. The French writer Michel Houellebecq , when asked what impact Covid would have on the future, said: “The same, but worse.” That is perhaps too bleak. It is not all worse. In some respects, life has returned to its previous patterns, for better and for worse. The drivers of change remain the same, even if some of them have accelerated.

The pandemic dramatically accelerated some social transformations that were already under way. Working from home was something being facilitated by new technology long before 2020. The pandemic did not create hybrid working, nor did it begin the steady hollowing out of downtown office space. But it brought them forward by about a decade.

Politics, too, is similar enough to what went before that it seems unlikely future historians will see 2020-21 as representing a sea-change in world affairs. The US and China are more hostile to each other than they were, though the hostility had been growing for more than a decade before 2020. The Middle East is more unstable than it was, electoral politics more fractious, authoritarians more assertive, the planet hotter, the disparities greater. This is somewhat different. But none of it is new. And there is no vaccine for political long Covid, any more than there is for the longer form of the disease itself. Its effects are too sporadic and its triggers still too poorly understood for that.

But in one respect, the political consequences of Covid in 2024 might yet come to look decisive in the history of the 21st century. The politician who paid the highest electoral price for the pandemic was Donald Trump. At the start of 2020 he was well set for re-election: the US economy was relatively strong, his base was relatively happy (above all with his nominations to the supreme court), and the Democrats were unable to agree on a candidate to oppose him. Covid changed all that. Trump handled it badly – he never got his message straight – and even some of his supporters noticed. The economy suffered. The Democrats rallied behind Joe Biden, who did not have to suffer the physical stresses of a full campaign because most forms of campaigning were impossible. Trump lost, but only narrowly – without Covid he would almost certainly had won.

For the many people inside and outside the US who found Trump beyond the pale, his removal from office looked like one of the few blessings of the pandemic. Yet had Trump won in 2020 he would have been, like most second-term US presidents, something of a lame duck. He had achieved little by way of serious reform in his first term: a second term would have likely been even more underwhelming, since Trump runs on resentment, which re-election would have done much to defuse. Now, in 2024, we would be looking at the back of Trump, and at a new generation of candidates, some of whom might have been offering something new.

Instead, a narrow defeat in 2020 – coupled with his insistence that he had been robbed – has given Trump all the resentment he needs. It is Biden who has inherited the problems of a post-Covid world and the challenge of defending his administration from the resentments that have built up. A second Trump term coming after an interlude of four years, during which time he and his supporters have been making sure they won’t get fooled again, and his opponents have been looking for ways to have him jailed, is a far more serious prospect. The stakes are much higher. The damage could be far greater.

This year is the busiest year around the world in the history of electoral democracy: more than 4 billion people are entitled to vote in elections from India to Ireland to Mexico. It is one sign that Covid, which put so many democratic freedoms on hold, did not do so permanently. But the US presidential election in November still has the potential to outweigh all that. Trump is by no means certain to win. Yet if he does, and if he decides this time to make good on his promise to change the way the US is governed, by hollowing out the administrative state and by withdrawing US support for Ukraine and for Nato, then Covid will have had a truly lasting impact on global politics. At that point, political long Covid will be hard for any of us to escape.

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VIDEO : Further High Court decision could have consequences for government immigration detention regime

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DAVID SPEERS, REPORTER:  Legally uncertain and politically fraught. The Home Affairs Minister says the High Court through a series of decisions last year has drawn new boundaries around immigration detention.

It’s created uncertainty around who can be held, on what grounds, and for how long.

Clarity will only come through further test cases before the High Court but in the meantime the Opposition is cutting the Government no slack.

DAN TEHAN, SHADOW IMMIGRATION MINISTER:  Our plan to start with would be to sack the minister.

DAVID SPEERS:  In November, the High Court overturned its own precedent in a landmark decision relating to a stateless Rohingya refugee known as NZYQ.

It found the Government could not continue holding someone with “no real prospect of removal” in the “reasonably foreseeable future”.

NZYQ, a convicted child sex offender, was released along with nearly 150 others deemed to be in a similar legal situation.

But that’s not the end of the matter.

What exactly did the High Court mean by “no real prospect of removal”? And just how long is the “reasonably foreseeable future”?

This is where the uncertainty lies.

A case due to be heard by the High Court next month could provide some clarity. It involves an Iranian man known as ASF17 who arrived in Australia by boat and has been held in immigration detention for more than a decade.

He says he fears for his life if returned to Iran because he’s bisexual, a Christian, and a Kurd.

But the main sticking point is his refusal to cooperate with authorities seeking to deport him.

ANDREW GILES, IMMIGRATION MINISTER:  The Government believes that these individuals, those who are not cooperating with their removal, should be removed from Australia as a priority and while they are not, they should remain in immigration detention.

DAVID SPEERS:  In November the Federal Court agreed with the Government – it found the ongoing detention of ASF17 was lawful.

The High Court challenge to that ruling will have significant ramifications. It could trigger the release of more asylum seekers who refuse to cooperate with authorities.

Just how many has been the subject of speculation.

Senior government sources insist they won’t know precisely until the High Court makes a clear decision.

The Government is desperate to avoid a further mass release of detainees. It’s hired dozens more lawyers and is trying to show it’s on the front foot but it’s at the mercy of the High Court and even the Opposition is unable to say what more it could do beyond greater transparency.

DAN TEHAN:  I would look at all the information. I would make sure that we’re being upfront with the Australian people as the size of the challenge that is confronting the Government and then work through it with my number one priority in place keeping the Australian community in place.

DAVID SPEERS:  As for those released last year, the Government is yet to lodge an application for any to be locked back up again under the new preventative detention regime put in place after the NZYQ decision.

It’s wading through some 35,000 documents to build a water-tight first case against the highest risk offender.

The Opposition is critical of how long it’s taking and says it’s ready to support any changes that would speed up the process.

JAMES PATERSON, SHADOW HOME AFFAIRS MINISTER:  Introduce amendments to lower the bar, to make it easier to apply. I'm very confident that we would assist with swift passage so that these laws can actually be used.

DAVID SPEERS:  The problem is lowering the bar to make it easier for the Government to lock people up might increase the likelihood the preventative detention regime is also found to be unconstitutional.

The mandatory ankle bracelets imposed on those released have also been the subject of multiple challenges.

The legal landmines are everywhere.

As for the politics, the Opposition is accusing the Government of losing control.

The Government says the Opposition is ignoring the new landscape and won’t take up its offer of a briefing.

Neither side has an easy bullet-proof solution to head off a ruling that could see more detainees released.

No one can out-legislate the High Court. 

The federal government has been under sustained pressure over its handling of a High Court decision that ended indefinite immigration detention in Australia.

With a second major legal case underway, there are still limited solutions for a complex problem. National political editor David Speers explains.

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"The Regime's" meme-worthy satire can't compare with Katie Britt or today's bad political actors

Living in this bizarre reality augments the dissonance at work in hbo's limited series starring kate winslet, by melanie mcfarland.

It took about two years for a scene in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 feature “Downfall” to become an internet meme Hall of Famer. You’ve probably seen some version of it. The late Bruno Ganz ’s Adolf Hitler, dug into this bunker like a late summer tick, transforms in the space of a door clicking shut into an erupting Vesuvius, spewing lava-hot rage on his top officers.

Enterprising YouTubers changed the subtitles to suit whatever subject they wanted Hitler to be freaking out about in any given week, and for several years some version of it circulated  before YouTube cracked down on our good time . Everyone had their favorite; mine was the 2010 version showing Ganz’s Hitler appearing to freak out about Jay Leno returning to “The Tonight Show.”

These days the internet moves much more quickly. Not even a couple of hours passed before online artists rolled up their sleeves to cook Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala ., for serving up one of the creepiest State of the Union GOP rebuttals ever.

Nestled in what appeared to be a kitchen display at her local Lowe’s, Britt dramatically read for the lead role in a Lifetime ‘90s-era woman-in-peril flick, dropping anecdotes about cartel-sanctioned gang rape, murder and the upbeat reminder that we are “steeped in the blood of patriots who overthrew the most powerful empire in the world.”

“Mr. President, enough is enough. Innocent Americans are dying. And you only have yourself to blame,” Britt declared with an "angry teacher parent volunteer" energy. “Fulfill your oath of office. Reverse your policies. End this crisis. And —” for this part, she adopted a “9-1-1- call from the closet” whisper “—  stop the suffering .”

I don’t think I fully appreciated what Kate Winslet and writer Will Tracy are doing with HBO's “The Regime” until I took in the highlights of Britt’s speech a few times. Britt has little in common with Winslet’s Chancellor Elena Vernham, the dictator of the nonexistent country of Middle Europe, understand. Elena knows how to perform, for one. She also dresses to impress . . . her will on her underlings.

Tracy, who co-wrote the script for “ The Menu ,” introduces Elena years into her iron-fisted rule and establishes how well-versed she is, or thinks she is, at speaking to the nation.

“My loves,” she calls her people in her impeccably staged official broadcasts where she touts her hard work at “smashing the failed state” and saving the country from “bandit radicals” of the left.

We can see how meaningless everything Elena preaches is but, oh, doesn’t she make autocracy look good! Her locks? Laid. Her drip? Flawless. Elena speaks about her regime as if she’s in a relationship with her people. “And so I bless you all and I bless our love. Always,” she tells them in her speech celebrating her seventh Victory Day – that is, the seventh year after she “won” her office in a “free and fair election.”

Tracy and Winslet have explained that Elena Vernham isn’t based on any one or two real-life strongmen; she’s a mosaic of many. Still, it's tempting to pick out certain traits – like her mysophobia or her obsession with starring in holiday song-and-dance performances despite being ridiculously tone deaf – and link them to specific leaders. For instance, she doesn’t simply want appreciation. She wants top billing in the dreams of her faithful.  She wants to be loved .

“Broken people really love broken people, don’t they?” someone tells Elena in a later episode when her back against the wall. “They’re born in pain, so you turn their pain to anger and make their anger your cudgel. It’s brilliant!”

Political catchphrases, like memes, can twist our perception of the world. Elena speaks of having a “graceful mind,” which is what exactly?  An undefinable and therefore unattainable state, save for the special and worthy who get it.  It's a lovely sounding concept. Kind of like Middle Europe.

“Broken people really love broken people, don’t they?”

Elena’s land sits both geographically and philosophically between Russia and America’s European allies; their main resources are sugar beets and cobalt mines that the United States wants to secure exclusive majority control over in exchange for a sizable investment in Elena’s regime and agreement to look the other way as she cracks down on local protests with deadly force.

But she comprehends that how things look or sound matters more than what’s happening. Her party is called the New Liberty Front which sounds so, I don't know, free ? And yet her administration allegedly protects her people’s freedom through surveillance and sanctions its law enforcement goons physical searches of its citizens.

When a group of miners protests and a military battalion responds by shooting them dead, she enlists their corporal Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts) to be her guard dog. He follows her around the hotel she’s co-opted as her political headquarters and palace with a moisture monitoring device until a nocturnal break-in reveals a better use for him.

All of this is about optics. Zubak isn't special. His entry level job could have been any member of his unit since Elena simply wanted a “butcher” in uniform. Luckily for her – Europe, not so much – Zubak only wants to please Elena and has a rugged sexy appeal, wrapping his violent inclinations in charisma.

Britt, one of the GOP’s youngest congressional members, was drafted along those same lines. She was supposed to play the reasonable, relatable young mom to Joe Biden’s supposedly doddering old man who, in his address, came out swinging. Her job was to make her party look good in comparison, and the Democrats lax on anarchy. Here’s how that worked out.

“What in the first week of acting school is this?” asked baffled X poster  @nycsouthpaw

Soon after, a user who goes by the handle  @BowmanInc  spliced together an “Inside the Actors’ Studio” parody.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” jokes  proliferated.

And the fun continued from there. One likened Britt’s 17-minute performance  to an audition for a “Misery” reboot . John Fugelsang  joked , "Guys I didn’t get to see the end of Katie Britt's speech but did she finally get to speak w/a manager?"

Political catchphrases, like memes, can twist our perception of the world.

“The Regime” isn’t as clean of a satire – an oblique way of saying that its comedic power is more reliant on Winslet’s excellent expressiveness than the setups. Maybe that’s a component of the environment. We aren’t merely post-“Veep,” a show that had the relative luxury of fantasizing about political fecklessness, but in an era when real-life political farce rains down around us and the actors are in a position to endanger and ruin lives.

This, I think, is what makes any joy one might take in MAGA conservatives’ misery over Britt’s broadcast debut temporary – and leave no doubt, the party’s leadership was aghast, according to many reports . (“What the hell am I watching right now?” a Trump adviser blurted, per Rolling Stone .)

But durable memes and other internet parodies are products of ironic remove, I think, which is something few of us can afford. Fifteen years ago we assured ourselves we were distant enough from Hitler and Nazism enough to make them into clowns. Most of us probably didn’t imagine a major political party would have overturned Roe v. Wade, either.

Or, for that matter, that they would enlist a woman to reassure other women that her party, the one working to destroy their reproductive rights and freedoms, is the “choice our children deserve.” While sitting in a fake kitchen.

Living in this bizarre reality augments the dissonance at work in “The Regime.” Elena is ridiculous but shockingly realistic. The humor laced through her lickspittles' obsequious efforts to placate her doesn’t quite dare you to laugh but isn’t going out of its way to encourage giggles either. This, too, is about optics; how can we easily laugh when we see the corrupt organs of our own sick political corpus behaving similarly every day?  

The first of “The Regime's" six episodes shows Elena as a coddled ruler whose cabinet members appease her if only to keep the machinery going – a mechanism designed to line their pockets and those of their enablers, including the United States, leaving the scraps for the working class.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter , Crash Course.

Then again, the only members of the servant class that we see are Andrea Riseborough’s Agnes, the downtrodden palace manager. Elena never sets foot in the palace’s kitchen – that’s Agnes’s job, along with having given birth to the son Elena claims to be hers.

It’s plain to see Agnes knows something’s wrong with her leader’s mission but soldiers onward nevertheless. She’s just the help at the end of the day – same as Zubak. And Britt, perhaps, which further shortens the shelf life of this mockery. For every hilarious swipe at her expense, some believe everything half-baked statement she dropped.

That side-splitting “Downfall” meme was from a serious, depressing drama about the days leading up to Hitler's suicide, don't forget, and the story is told from the perspective of a secretary, Traudl Junge, who willingly went to work for him. At the top of the movie we see footage of the real Junge, expressing her guilt over the fact that she went along without thinking because she convinced herself she wasn’t a fanatic.

“In Berlin, I could have said, ‘No, I’m not doing it. I don’t want to go to the Fuhrer’s headquarters.’ But I didn’t do that. I was too curious. I also didn’t realize that destiny would take me somewhere I didn’t want to be. But nevertheless, I find it hard to forgive myself,” she said.

This is the scene worth recalling all these years after the meme’s relevance has subsided, and it hints at what we should be absorbing from “The Regime” as it airs simultaneously to the coming weeks of election madness.

Winslet is magnificent, and she makes Elena the sun queen around which all of her people revolve, an eminently GIF-worthy figure. We’d be wise to keep an eye on Agnes too, because the Elenas of the world couldn’t make it without the people just doing their jobs. And they're not the telegenic influencers making us laugh off proposals and positions that should terrify us. 

"The Regime" airs Sundays on HBO and streams on Max.

about this topic

• "One of our biggest disasters ever": Republicans "f**king losing it" over Katie Britt SOTU response
• Biden won't win young voters with TikTok
• "Downfall": This German film about Hitler's last days is powerful and compelling

Melanie McFarland is Salon's award-winning senior culture critic. Follow her on Twitter: @McTelevision

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