The subfield of civil–military relations has experienced a remarkable revitalization in recent
years, yielding a wealth of intriguing insights. Yet, despite these auspicious developments …

This accessible volume shines a light on how autocracy really works by providing basic facts
about how post-World War II dictatorships achieve, retain, and lose power. The authors …

Social scientists have created a variety of datasets in recent years that quantify political
regimes, but these often provide little data on phases of regime transitions. Our aim is to …

How do some dictatorships become institutionalized ruled-based systems, while others
remain heavily personalist? Once implemented, do executive constraints actually play an …

From the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the spread of democracy
across the developing and post-Communist worlds transformed the global political …

How did Iraq become one of the most repressive dictatorships of the late twentieth century?
The conventional wisdom about Iraq's modern political history is that the country was …

Many qualitative social scientists conduct single-session interviews with large numbers of
individuals so as to maximize the sample size and obtain a wide range of study participants …

Although coups remain a pressing concern for rulers across the globe, the mechanisms
through which common coup-prevention strategies operate have not been well theorized or …

What modern authoritarian leaders have in common (and how they can be stopped). Ruth
Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the" strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian …

From spray-painted slogans in Senegal to student uprisings in South Africa, twenty-first
century Africa has seen an explosion of protests and social movements. But why? Protests …