Autocrats frequently appeal to socially conservative values, but little is known about how or even whether such strategies are actually paying political dividends. To address important issues of causality, this study exploits Russian president Vladimir Putin’s 2020 bid to gain a popular mandate for contravening presidential term limits in part by bundling this constitutional change with a raft of amendments that would enshrine traditional morality (including heteronormativity and anti-secularism) in Russia’s basic law. Drawing on an original experiment-bearing survey of the Russian population, it finds that Putin’s appeal to these values generated substantial new support for Putin’s reform package, primarily from social conservatives who did not support him politically. These findings expand our understanding of authoritarian practices and policy making by revealing one way in which core political values are leveraged to facilitate autocracy-enabling institutional changes and potentially other ends that autocrats might pursue.

What are the consequences of selective emigration from a closed regime? To answer this question, I focus on socialist East Germany and leverage an emigration reform in 1983 that led to the departure of about 65,200 citizens. Analyzing panel data on criminal activity in a difference-in-differences framework, I demonstrate that emigration can be a double-edged sword in contexts where it is restricted. Emigration after the reform had benefits in the short run and came with an initial decline in crime. However, it created new challenges for the regime as time passed. Although the number of ordinary crimes remained lower, border-related political crimes rose sharply in later years. Analysis of emigration-related petitioning links this result to a rise in demand for emigration after the initial emigration wave. These findings highlight the complexities of managing migration flows in autocracies and reveal a key repercussion of using emigration as a safety valve.

This article examines the process of drafting the authoritarian Portuguese Constitution of 1933, which took place during the military regime. The aim is to identify the powers involved, their objectives and the strategies they developed, and to find insights that shed light on the adoption of constitutions by authoritarianisms. The results suggest that conflict between political forces is endemic to the constitutional process, and that those who hegemonise support and aim to demilitarise the system are able to impose the new constitution even without guaranteeing the existence of democratic political parties. There is also a promising point of analysis: the emergence of an authoritarian constitution is based on path dependence, ie, it has many links with the material constitutionalism that precedes it, where there are already normalised authoritarian elements.

Propagandists discredit political ideas that rival their own. In China’s state-run media, one common technique is to place the phrase so-called, in English, or 所谓, in Chinese, before the idea to be discredited. In this research note we apply quantitative text analysis methods to over 45,000 Xinhua articles from 2003 to 2022 containing so-called or 所谓 to better understand the ideas the government wishes to discredit for different audiences. We find that perceived challenges to China’s sovereignty consistently draw usage of the term and that a theme of rising importance is political rivalry with the United States. When it comes to differences between internal and external propaganda, we find broad similarities, but differences in how the US is discredited and more emphasis on cooperation for foreign audiences. These findings inform scholarship on comparative authoritarian propaganda and Chinese propaganda specifically.

This article analyses a complex period in Colombian history, from the electoral victory of the Liberal Party in 1930 to the end of the Frente Nacional (National Front) in 1974, from the perspective of constitutional politics and constitutional theory. During this period, Colombia transited from democracy to dictatorship (civilian and military) and back to democracy. We therefore divide the period according to changes in regime type and also to changes in the degree of institutional constraints on power. We show that, due to combinations of regime type and constraints on power, under the same Constitution of 1886 three different constitutionalisms ensued: abusive, window-dressing, and authoritarian constitutionalism. Our analysis on Colombia highlights the role of powerful actors, such as the armed forces and the Catholic Church, that breathed life back into key constitutional provisions when these served as focal points for coordinating their actions even under an authoritarian regime.

Since the late 2010s, Rwanda has advertised its Visit Rwanda logo on the jerseys of prominent European football teams and has built new sports stadiums to host international sports competitions. Such strategies reflect the practice of sportswashing, which refers to the utilization of sports by political actors to gain global legitimacy while diverting attention from unjust processes occurring in their home countries. Dubinsky analyzes the effectiveness of Rwanda’s sportswashing through the concept of authoritarian image management, arguing that the mutual interests shared between authoritarian and Western actors facilitate the country’s sportswashing, despite the critiques it attracts.

An intriguing question regarding the relationship between international financial institutions (IFIs) and their Latin American borrowers concerns how and why regime type influences the degree to which the parties are prepared to sign loan agreements. Some scholars highlight a ‘democratic advantage’, while others argue that, on the contrary, a ‘democratic disadvantage’ is evident. This article engages with this scholarly debate, offering a historical perspective on the World Bank’s (WB) lending patterns vis-à-vis Latin America during the Cold War, and more specifically between 1948 and 1988, a period that witnessed both democratic and authoritarian regimes in the region. Drawing on never-before-examined documents from the WB archives and additional primary sources, and analysing WB lending to its four largest Latin American borrowers – Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and particularly Brazil – the article posits a third option, arguing that neither a democratic advantage nor a democratic disadvantage was evident during the period under study. Adhering to its self-declared principle of ‘political neutrality’, as outlined in its Articles of Agreement, and emphasising economic factors, the WB exhibited a clear tendency toward pragmatism and ‘political indifference’. This approach enabled the Bank to maintain its involvement in politically unstable countries like Brazil with minimal interruptions.

How can everyday entertainment shape gender politics in authoritarian regimes? Despite autocrats’ heavy control over media, political scientists studying authoritarianism largely neglect television programming. Particularly surprising given their target demographics, cooking shows are absent in political science gender analyses. Drawing from over 600 hours of Turkish cooking show content, I introduce conservative gender edutainment to capture the mechanisms by which TV shows facilitate authoritarian regimes’ gender construction projects. Using quantitative analysis of cooking show content, I first identify two complementary pedagogies — modeling and othering — that respectively teach adherence to, and vilify deviation from, regime-specified behavioral norms. I then use intertextual analysis to extract content that engagingly instructs viewers in the ideal woman in “New Turkey,” the neoconservative vision articulated by Turkey’s ruling (Justice and Development Party) AKP. Findings provide novel insight into vernacular channels of gender construction, while underscoring the added value TV-as-data holds for studies of identity politics in authoritarian contexts.

Building on the experience of Russian antiwar emigration in 2022, this article reinterprets the categories of “exit” and “voice” to better understand dissent under repressive political regimes. It argues that exit can function as a form of voice in contexts where other forms of voicing discontent are effectively eliminated by repression. This perspective on exit opens the category of voice to a normative conceptualization, defining it as an expression of civic identity. Acting on this identity in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine leads dissenting citizens either into self-imposed exile or inner exile. The article identifies three key modalities of voice available to dissenting citizens: exit-as-voice, voice-after-exit, and oblique voice. In all these modalities, voice is primarily performative, shaped by the political and ethical constraints that emerge from the interplay between repression and resistance. The article draws on an autoethnography of exit within Russian academia and on accounts of resistance both inside and outside Russia.

Using Cambodia as a case study, this article examines cause lawyering in a repressive political environment. It focuses on “closeted” cause lawyering, a practice that we define as the intentional pursuit of change through the legal process that is concealed for strategic purposes. Situated within the wider scholarship on (cause) lawyering in general and authoritarian Southeast Asia and China in particular, the article draws upon interviews conducted over seven years in Cambodia with 37 lawyers and human rights defenders working in practice areas considered politically controversial by the authoritarian state. We identify how closeted cause lawyers operate in such a way as to ensure professional and personal survival while quietly advancing their goals across three settings, including dignity restoration work with clients, legal professionalism in court and sustaining a moral community of like-minded lawyers. The article underscores the ongoing relevance of cause lawyering even where intentionality must be hidden, as well as the enduring importance of cause lawyers’ efforts to preserve an ideal of the rule of law. We conclude by suggesting that the authoritarian turn in a range of democracies, including the Unites States, suggests that closeted cause lawyering may be required to defend democracy even among conventional lawyers.