Episode 1.14: The Autocrat’s Gambit, with Anne Meng

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By their very nature, autocracies are political systems in which power is highly concentrated; dictators can do pretty much as they please. So dictatorships might seem an unusual place to go looking for institutions: the rules and structures that limit discretion and set bounds on who can do what. 

Yet over the last two decades, political scientists studying autocracies have done exactly that. The field has witnessed what Tom Pepinsky has called “an institutional turn” in the study of authoritarianism, with scholars such as Barbara Geddes, Jason Brownlee, and Jennifer Gandhi analyzing how institutions like dominant parties and elected legislatures order political life in autocracies and help ensure the survival of these regimes. 

Dr. Anne Meng, an assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia, began her own research on autocratic institutions with a focus on ruling parties. She eventually came to believe, however, that parties and legislatures were mostly a sideshow, and that she and other scholars of autocratic institutions had been getting something fundamentally wrong. They were too focused on de jure rules that appear constraining and insufficiently focused on de facto power: on whether institutions have any impact on the distribution of actual leverage within the political system.

Anne’s recent book, Constraining Dictatorship, is an analysis of how and why autocrats use institutions to share real power with their rivals, and of how these institutions shape the regime’s long-run trajectory. Anne also argues that the institutions that matter most are devices that we usually overlook, such as succession rules and cabinet appointments. 

In our conversation with Anne, we probe the logic of her innovative argument and hear about how she confronted the difficulties of testing it empirically, like how to measure the elusive concept of leader strength. We also talk about the formal model she developed and how it helped her clarify the tradeoffs that leaders confront as they choose between short-term material gains and long-run survival in office. 

More broadly, this is a conversation about what it is, fundamentally, that allows institutions to lend order to political life, and about how we can identify meaningful institutional and political change when we see it. You will also want to stay tuned to hear how Anne wrote the bulk of this book in a single semester.

Works discussed in the episode:

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2006. Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Brownlee, Jason. 2007. Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Geddes, Barbara. 1999. “What do we know about democratization after twenty years?” Annual Review of Political Science, 2(1), pp. 115-144.

Gandhi, Jennifer. 2008. Political Institutions under Dictatorship. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. University of Oklahoma Press.

Meng, Anne. 2021. "Author Exchange with Ken Opalo for Constraining Dictatorship." 2021. Democracy and Autocracy, 19(1), pp. 16-22.

Pepinsky, Thomas. 2014. “The Institutional Turn in Comparative Authoritarianism.” British Journal of Political Science, 44(3), pp. 631-653.