AUTHORITARIANISM 101: Building an Authoritarian Regime
Some takeaways from student essays
Precis/TL;DR: in which we discuss the results of the final paper assignment for my AUTHORITARIANISM 101 course which wrapped up recently. It turns out that asking undergraduates to think like an aspiring autocratizing polity leads to great creativity - which was exactly the goal. As always, a list of publications concludes the newsletter.
This is the fourth of five installments in our occasional newsletter update on my AUTHORITARIANISM 101 course taught in the spring 2025 semester at George Washington University. You can find our previous entries on brainstorming the course, syllabus development, and our midterm checkup at these links. A final overview post will come sometime in the near future.
Assigning Something Interesting
The final paper assignment for my students this past semester was a ‘build your own authoritarian regime’ essay. In an effort to avoid yet another research paper and to push students towards creative thinking, I thought I might stretch them a bit: if you were thinking hypothetically, and from the safety of a college course, how would you build an authoritarian regime?
As our course was structured historically, I did not want anything overly abstract. Rather, I asked them to think through an alternative history exercise (or alternative current-day reality, in a few cases).
So they chose a country in Europe/Eurasia at any time from the French Revolution to the present day, and were instructed to describe an autocratization episode (or a transition from one authoritarian regime to another), focusing on the rise to power, stabilization/maintenance, ideologies, institutions, and legitimacy claims, as well as potential democratization.
Below the cut here are the assignment details. If you are a fellow professor or instructor, you are welcome to steal blatantly if you like. After this, I’ve included a few insights from the essays in graphical form for visual ease.
Final Essay Guidance
‘How to Build an Authoritarian Regime’
From the Syllabus: “Students will write medium-length scholarly essays (10-15 pages) on the topic of ‘how to build an authoritarian regime.’ Students will pick a country at a given-time period and use what they have learned in class, counterfactual analogies, and additional historical or contemporary research to provide a model of autocratization as a thought experiment. Students will model both autocratization as well as maintenance and eventual democratization for their cases. This will act as the final exam grade for the semester and will be due at the end of the final exam period. Grades will range from 18-25, with an expected average of 20-22.”
Target Goal: 10-15 pages, 1.5 space, Times New Roman font, footnote citations, with bibliography (not included in page count), submitted as a Word document to Blackboard by 11:59pm on the final day of the Final Exam period.
Purpose: use your knowledge of theories and concepts of authoritarianism to develop a counterfactual of autocratization and authoritarian stability in a real country (…hypothetically!). Your country must be an actual one in continental and insular Europe (e.g., UK, Germany, France, etc), Russia, or Northern Eurasia (e.g., Turkey, Caucasus, Central Asia) anywhere in the time-period 1800 to 2030. This therefore includes contemporary states as well as historical ones. The regime of your country at choice can be a democracy or it can be a different authoritarian regime.
Questions Your Essay Must Answer:
1. What country and time-period you have chosen
2. What type of regime you are transitioning to, and what regime came before
3. How does autocratization happen?
a. A coup (if so, suggest how this would occur and under what pretenses)?
b. An elite seizure of power or ‘self-coup’ (if so, again how and why)?
c. Civil war (if so, make sure to choose a country which had a civil war or plausibly almost had/could have one)?
d. A deliberate authoritarian political party advocating authoritarianism (if so, suggest why this would be popular)?
e. ‘Democratic backsliding’ (if so, suggest how this would occur, and how your party/leader would win election)?
f. Something else? Feel free to be creative, just make it believable!
4. How does the regime survive the initial years? What is the role for individual or collective leadership, governance structure, popular support, or military/coercive force? How would foreign affairs or the international environment impact it?
5. How does the regime survive over the decades? Which institutions or ideologies or individual character traits or economic structures (etc etc) help it last?
6. Assess whether it can successfully navigate succession, and how this would happen?
7. How might it democratize?
Tips:
1. Students should pick a country and a time-period that is personally interesting. You will need to dive into the political background of that country, whether in the present or in the past. So it should be a country you are willing to read about!
2. This essay is meant to be creative, but it is not an exercise in fiction writing. It is also not a morality tale, but a means to utilize the scholarly toolkit of comparative authoritarianism studies to explore a hypothetical. What is important is that you show a strong command of our theories and concepts of authoritarianism. That means regime types, methods of autocratization, the role of structure and personal contingency, the importance of ideologies, institutions, repression, and popular support, and any other topic we have brought up in class. You will be expected to address leader succession and explain how it would occur under the system you build.
3. You will likely find it necessary to choose a named figure (or real political party) in history to head your regime. This is better than inventing someone randomly and will ground you to the real politics of the time-period you choose. I recommend this. Some contemporary cases may not oblige this approach. If ever in doubt, talk to me.
4. You are expected to use in-class and additional reading to support your arguments, both in terms of political background, parties, domestic and international conditions, etc as well as theories that you will cite to justify how your regime rises and maintains itself.
5. You want your hypothetical authoritarian regime to survive for a good deal of time (10-20 years, or more!). Write it as if you are ‘on its side,’ at least as a thought experiment. My recommendation is to avoid overly genocidal analogies from history, although I will read anything and withhold judgement.
6. Your choices can be as creative as you would like. Ideologies that never historically emerged (at least not in that country), or institutional formats that you may invent, or any other point of creativity, are fine. They simply must be explained and justified. Your essay must ‘pass the smell test’ – if you can’t tell a friend about your idea and have him or her nod interestedly, it will not do.
7. You do not get bonus points for trying to build a regime that you think Prof. Waller would particularly like, nor do you get bonus points for making it democratize early. Prof. Waller will be impressed if you manage to maintain a neutral, analytic, and thoughtful tone throughout your essay.
Sample Ideas to Jog Your Brain:
1. What if Napoleon had never risen? How would a left-wing Revolutionary government have institutionalized itself in the early 1800s? What model would it have followed?
2. What if the Habsburg emperor and his family had been assassinated in the 1880s and the monarchy left without an heir? Could a Caesarist figure emerge to save the empire? How?
3. What if French monarchists regained power during a crisis in the 19th century III French Republic? How would they do so, would they really bring back a monarch (which one?) or would they build a military regime instead? Or something else?
4. What if the Republicans won the Spanish Civil War and built an authoritarian socialist regime, how would it do so?
5. What if fascism had come to Britain in the 1930s? How would power be seized, how would the social and political institutions of Britain be brought under control, and how would new governance and media technologies been used?
6. What if Interwar Poland had collapsed into civil war after Pilsudski died? What sort of regime might have risen to replace it? What would be its social bases, and which Interwar-era governance models would it have followed?
7. What if Italy had fallen to political anarchy in the 1970s? What regime would have emerged in its wake? A military junta? A personalist dictatorship? Would a new authoritarian unity party be able to salvage the wreckage, and if so how?
8. What if the USSR had collapsed into anarchy after the death of Stalin while the Warsaw Pact was still around, what regime might have emerged from a communist east European regime untethered from Moscow?
9. What if Emmanuel Macron decides that only strong liberal authoritarianism could save France? What governance model would he choose, and how would he maintain it?
10. What if the AfD wins federal elections in Germany and decides to ensure perpetual power? What regime-type would it choose? How would it do so?
11. What if a peace settlement is reached in the Russia-Ukraine war but Zelensky becomes deeply unpopular? What kind of regime might replace him, how would it do so, and how would it attempt to impose post-war political order?
The options are endless, this is an opportunity to be creative!
Assessing Creative Authoritarianism
Student responses were highly positive in response this assignment. Unusually for final papers, many actually took the entire final month to ping ideas off me over email and office hours back-and-forths. As the assignment was quite open-ended, many of them did a lot of brainstorming to land on their country and regime-creation ideas.
In the end, out of 25 essays submitted, only ~7 were notably disappointing or otherwise obviously chatGPT’d. The rest varied strongly in creativity and smoothness, but nevertheless all displayed real effort and thinking. As their professor, I personally very much so got what I wanted!
In lieu of sharing specific details, I’ve put together a few charts showing how the students landed in terms of country, time-period, ideology, and regime-type chosen for their studies. Overall we had a strong focus on either the Interwar era or the contemporary period, which in general matched my perception of student interest.
Some of the more creative essays included hypothetical studies of a non-Napoleonic left-wing Directory in France, a female-led French monarchy inheriting Napoleon III’s empire, several Interwar socialist dictatorships winning out in Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, an apolitical technocratic Cold War era Switzerland, Irish and French eco-fascist/socialist states, modern Russia under Zyuganov’s communist party instead of Putin, an Estonian neoreactionary tech-right government, and the collapse of democracy in modern France, Germany, and Ukraine - among other worthy entries.
First, the below chart shows the countries chosen. You’ll note a pretty heavy bias towards France and the UK especially. I was surprised by the latter, as we didn’t really do all that much with Britain (this set of essays had several which I thought might have been heavily AI written, unfortunately… which might explain the surprise choice). On the other hand, we absolutely focused on France heavily in our 19th century section of the course, which definitely put the country on several students’ minds. All the other choices were much more scattered and evenly distributed, which was appropriate and reflected diverse student interests.
Second, the below chart shows the eras chosen for their case-studies. As I noted above, the vast majority were modern or Interwar, which makes a lot of sense. These are two periods of particular authoritarian creativity, and highlight cases that students were especially interested in. I have a suspicion that the Cold War was a little hard to imagine as a dynamic field ripe for alternative hypothetical visions of autocratization, while doing a deeper historical case required decent background knowledge to get going. Both of the 19th century essays were on France!
Third, the below chart shows a somewhat on-the-fly categorization by regime-type. It’s not exact, some of the papers were more cloudy on that than others, and many mixed and matched. For example, one might merge the ‘royal dictatorship’ and ‘absolute monarchy’ ones together, and the ‘emergency regime’ category often overlapped with juntas, Caesarist regimes, and personalist dictatorships to some degree. Sometimes it was not always clear exactly how elections worked, as well. I also have grouped together both party-state and single-party regimes, in part because the full party-state was usually underspecified but implied rather than fleshed out, but the distinction was not always clear.
Fourth, the below chart highlights the legitimating and/or motivating ideologies most often suggested or identified in the essays. These also have overlaps (lots of nationalist plus x or socialist plus y or undefined emergency rule for stability, and so on…). As a note, the ‘corporatist’ label here is a little hard to understand as an ‘ideology’ proper, but it denotes more or less a bureaucratic-authoritarian model with strong societal/economic hierarchical organizations.
Concluding Takeaways
I’ll provide more takeaway thoughts in our wrap-up newsletter in due course. But overall, this was a very satisfying result for a somewhat bold final paper assignment. Students were engaged, became very invested, and thought hard (mostly) on the question. The directions were quite broad, and they wrote their papers in a variety of formats.
I received a good amount of compliments on what amounted to ‘their most interesting assignment this semester,’ as well as some shock as to how complicated the question of building an authoritarian regime ‘in the real world’ could actually be. Useful learning takeaways!
The biggest revision I need to include for next time is to push them to making visuals (charts, tables, party-systems schemas, and so on) which would have uniformly helped them structure their thoughts and illustrate the nature and internal politics of their regimes. Most of the best essays did so, and sought to schematize visually how their regimes’ power dynamics, factions, institutions, or evolution played out or were otherwise organized.
Ten out of ten, will assign again.
Further Reading
There are a few new reading updates, I’m listing them here to peruse at your pleasure.
First, my coauthor Naman Habtom (University of Luxembourg) and I have a new short article out in the policy journal Survival on the recent spate of coups in Sahelian West Africa. We argue that Huntington’s concept of praetorianism, alongside a framework interacting military ideas of guardianship, generational anti-colonial resentment, and shifting multipolar international politics helps explain ongoing dynamics in the region. The piece is brief, but we’re expanding it in a follow-on academic work in the near future. You can find “The Sahel Coup Belt and the Return of Praetorianism” here.
Second, I will (again) plug my new book review on Jerome Copulsky’s American Heretics: Religious Adversaries to Liberal Order (Yale University Press) published at FUSION. I argue that Copulsky’s work, which is a refreshingly neutral look at religious-inspired critics of America’s political and social order across the centuries, is also a tale of American nationhood and its challenges. You can find “National Heresies” here.
Third, someone at the JSTOR academic publication hub reviewed my article “Disentangling Authoritarianism and Illiberalism in the Context of the Global States System,” published in the Journal of International Affairs a few years ago. It’s basically a bite-sized summary with a bunch of quotes. Honestly not bad! You can find his review, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Authoritarianism” here.
Finally, a note that my article “Distinctions With a Difference: Illiberalism and Authoritarianism in Scholarly Study” at Political Studies Review has been short-listed by the journal for Best Original Research Article of 2024 (article link here). Which is a very nice thing! I’ll keep you posted.
An Outside Reading Corner
It would be remiss of me if I did not plug my colleague Marlene Laruelle’s new book Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime. This is the book on Russian ideology today, and should be a mandatory citation for anyone working on the topic.
I discussed the book’s contributions (alongside my other colleague Maria Snegovaya) at a launch last month, which you can find on YouTube here. I personally think my comments were excellent and engaging, so you should definitely listen in. :)
You can find it here at the Stanford University Press website.
That’s all from me for now!
- Julian
Interesting topic for a final paper. One thing I thought of while I was reading this article is that picking a country / time period that actually has an authoritarian regime actually works against you because even if you try to come up with an original one, it will be heavily influenced by what actually happened because of similar circumstances. Perhaps this is why Cold War was not as popular? When I tried to imagine an authoritarian regime rising in the Philippines in an alternate history in which Ramon Magsaysay didn't die in a plane crash, it just turned into the Ferdinand Marcos regime... with less shoes.
More positivity a fascinating exercise in counter factual history from my standpoint. I would find it challenging to attempt because l lack imagination. This gets drilled out of me by historical understandings of any period that l know reasonably well. Without Napoleon l just get straight (without all that messy 15 years of Napoleonic battlefield genius) to the restoration of the Bourbons via foreign powers intervention. I need a military capable leader to defeat opponents to the first republic, who are mainly monarchists, to allow my (new type) authoritarian regime to emerge. So lots of admiration for the students who tackled this challenge.