Political system characterized by the rejection of democracy and political pluralism
This article is about authoritarianism in political science and organizational studies. For authoritarianism in psychology, see Authoritarian personality. For a form of government where power is held by a single individual, see Autocracy.
The political scientist Juan Linz, in an influential[8] 1964 work, An Authoritarian Regime: Spain, defined authoritarianism as possessing four qualities:
Political legitimacy based on appeals to emotion and identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems, such as underdevelopment or insurgency."
Ill-defined executive powers, often vague and shifting, used to extend the power of the executive.[9][10]
Minimally defined, an authoritarian government lacks free and competitive direct elections to legislatures, free and competitive direct or indirect elections for executives, or both.[11][12][13][14] Broadly defined, authoritarian states include countries that lack human rights such as freedom of religion, or countries in which the government and the opposition do not alternate in power at least once following free elections.[15] Authoritarian states might contain nominally democratic institutions such as political parties, legislatures and elections which are managed to entrench authoritarian rule and can feature fraudulent, non-competitive elections.[16]
Since 1946, the share of authoritarian states in the international political system increased until the mid-1970s but declined from then until the year 2000.[17] Prior to 2000, dictatorships typically began with a coup and replaced a pre-existing authoritarian regime.[18] Since 2000, dictatorships are most likely to begin through democratic backsliding whereby a democratically elected leader established an authoritarian regime.[18]
^ abCerutti, Furio (2017). Conceptualizing Politics: An Introduction to Political Philosophy. Routledge. p. 17. Political scientists have outlined elaborated typologies of authoritarianism, from which it is not easy to draw a generally accepted definition; it seems that its main features are the non-acceptance of conflict and plurality as normal elements of politics, the will to preserve the status quo and prevent change by keeping all political dynamics under close control by a strong central power, and lastly, the erosion of the rule of law, the division of powers, and democratic voting procedures.
^Ezrow, Natasha M.; Frantz, Erica (2011). Dictators and Dictatorships: Understanding Authoritarian Regimes and Their Leaders. Continuum. p. 17.
^Lai, Brian; Slater, Dan (2006). "Institutions of the Offensive: Domestic Sources of Dispute Initiation in Authoritarian Regimes, 1950–1992". American Journal of Political Science. 50 (1): 113–126. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006.00173.x. JSTOR3694260.
^Juan J. Linz, "An Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Spain," in Erik Allardt and Yrjö Littunen, eds., Cleavages, Ideologies, and Party Systems: Contributions to Comparative Political Sociology (Helsinki: Transactions of the Westermarck Society), pp. 291–342. Reprinted in Erik Allardt & Stine Rokkan, eds., Mas Politics: Studies in Political Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1970), pp. 251–283, 374–381.[ISBN missing]
^Svolik, Milan W. (2012). The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge University Press. pp. 22–23. Archived from the original on 21 October 2019. Retrieved 21 October 2019. I follow Przeworski et al. (2000), Boix (2003), and Cheibub et al. (2010) in defining a dictatorship as an independent country that fails to satisfy at least one of the following two criteria for democracy: (1) free and competitive legislative elections and (2) an executive that is elected either directly in free and competitive presidential elections or indirectly by a legislature in parliamentary systems. Throughout this book, I use the terms dictatorship and authoritarian regime interchangeably and refer to the heads of these regimes' governments as simply dictators or authoritarian leaders, regardless of their formal title.
^Svolik, Milan W. (2012). The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge University Press. p. 20. Archived from the original on 21 October 2019. Retrieved 21 October 2019. More demanding criteria may require that governments respect certain civil liberties – such as the freedom of religion (Schmitter and Karl 1991; Zakaria 1997) – or that the incumbent government and the opposition alternate in power at least once after the first seemingly free election (Huntington 1993; Przeworski et al. 2000; Cheibib et al. 2010).
^Svolik, Milan W. (2012). The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge University Press. pp. 8, 12, 22, 25, 88, 117. Archived from the original on 21 October 2019. Retrieved 21 October 2019.