Book Pre-Order Discount

Our publisher thinks this book is going to be great!

A quick note that our new book, Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism, is now available for pre-order on the University of Michigan Press website.

The book is available simultaneously as a hardcover ($85) for libraries and those that want longer-lasting copies as well as a more budget-friendly softcover ($35). I have been given a code for those that pre-order between now and the release date, which takes 40% off of the price!

The code is ‘POAUG’ and will work until the release date in August. After that, the publisher has granted us a different, post-release discount code (‘UMF24’) which will give 30% off instead. Please let me know if you are having trouble making the code work. But I do recommend taking advantage if you can!

The book is also available at Amazon on pre-order if you prefer that, although without the special discount deal. A PDF version of the book will be available open-access after publication as well, which is a very cool thing (great for students, especially).

Brown et al. looking good!

Our book is a work of comparative political science scholarship that will be of interest for anyone interested in authoritarianism, political institutions, and elite politics. I’ll leave the blurb for the book here:

Authoritarianism seems to be everywhere in the political world—even the definition of authoritarianism as any form of non-democratic governance has grown very broad. Attempts to explain authoritarian rule as a function of the interests or needs of the ruler or regime can be misleading. Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want argues that to understand how authoritarian systems work we need to look not only at the interests and intentions of those at the top, but also at the inner workings of the various parts of the state. Courts, elections, security force structure, and intelligence gathering are seen as structured and geared toward helping maintain the regime. Yet authoritarian regimes do not all operate the same way in the day-to-day and year-to-year tumble of politics.

In Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want, the authors find that when state bodies form strong institutional patterns and forge links with key allies both inside the state and outside of it, they can define interests and missions that are different from those at the top of the regime. By focusing on three such structures (parliaments, constitutional courts, and official religious institutions), the book shows that the degree of autonomy realized by a particular part of the state rests on how thoroughly it is institutionalized and how strong its links are with constituencies. Instead of viewing authoritarian governance as something that reduces politics to rulers’ whims and opposition movements, the authors show how it operates—and how much what we call “authoritarianism” varies.

I’ll be plugging the new book regularly over the next six months - including a summary of the argument, a little insight into how we ended up writing it, and just general reminders to BUY BUY BUY (and tell your friends). It’ll make a great graduation present or back-to-school gift for sure. 😏

- Julian