Political science concerns topics that can be highly relevant for politicians. Political science research and education offer insights that can help incumbents win elections or govern better. At the same time, the discipline provides knowledge that can be used to challenge politicians in office, for example, on how to organise mass protests or effective opposition parties. Therefore, politicians in power may have mixed feelings about the existence of political science departments. Some will encourage their establishment, while others – perhaps especially autocrats – may try to contain their presence or control their location. We study the existence and placement of political science units at universities across the world and assess the extent to which these features vary with regime type. Using large-N data on university subdivisions, we examine cross-national variation in existence and within-country variation in the location of political science departments. We find surprisingly few substantial differences along the democracy–autocracy continuum: Political science units, on average, are no more frequent in democracies. Across regime types, political science units are about equally likely to be located at public (versus private) institutions, and similarly likely to be placed at universities closer to the capital.

Using a model, we explain why propaganda in autocracies can be blatantly false and unconvincing. We model two news outlets that report on a hidden state of the world, motivated by the ex-post beliefs of the audience about the state of the world. News outlets face a tradeoff when making egregiously false statements. On the one hand, such statements are easily verifiable as false. On the other hand, a demonstrably false report reduces the credibility of the report made by the competing outlet. This is especially true for audiences in autocracies that are characterized by high media cynicism and are prone to making sweeping generalizations about the self-serving nature of all media.

In the last decade, studies have documented how autocrats use elections as a way of legitimising and stabilising their regimes. Simultaneously, a literature on negative external actors (also known as ‘black knights’) has developed, emphasising how various international actors use anti‐democracy promotion strategies to undergird authoritarian regimes. In this article, these two literatures are fused in an attempt to shed light on the external dimension of authoritarian elections and what is termed ‘black knight election bolstering’. First, five mechanisms are elucidated, through which external assistance increases the chances of ‘winning’ elections in authoritarian settings (signaling invincibility, deterring elite defection, undermining opposition activities, dealing with popular protests, and countervailing pressure from foreign democracy promoters). Second, it is argued that external actors are most likely to offer election bolstering when they face a particularly acquiescent partner or when electoral defeat is perceived to lead to radical and undesired regime change. The relevance of both factors is augmented when uncertainty of the electoral outcome is high. Finally, four cases of Russian intervention during elections in three authoritarian neighbour countries (Ukraine in 2004, Belarus in 2006, and Moldova in 2005 and 2009) are analysed. The case studies corroborate the theoretical arguments: not only does Russia engage in all five types of black knight election bolstering, but it does so only when one or more of the three explanatory factors are present.

In the present text, we introduce a classification scheme where we decompose democracies and autocracies into several categories. Based on this classification scheme, we create a global dataset covering the time period 1800–2016. In the dataset, we make yearly observations for all countries that have been independent at any point in time since the Second World War. Regarding democracies, we first distinguish between republics and monarchies. We then split the category of republics into presidential, semi-presidential, and parliamentary systems. Within the category of monarchies, almost all systems are parliamentary, but a few countries are conferred to the category semi-monarchies. Authors differ markedly in terms of how autocratic regimes should be classified. In the present dataset, we classify autocratic countries into the following main categories: absolute monarchy, military rule, party-based rule, personalist rule, and oligarchy. Within the categories party-based rule and oligarchy, we also identify a number of subcategories.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a new and unparalleled stress-test for the already disrupted liberal-representative, democracies. The challenges cluster around three democratic disfigurations: technocracy, populism, and plebiscitarianism—each have the potential to contribute to democratic decay. Still, they can also trigger pushback against illiberalism mobilizing citizens in defense of democracy, toward democratic resilience. This article looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic affects democratic decay and democratic resilience in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It finds varied responses to the COVID-19 crisis by the CEE populist leaders and identifies two patterns: the rise of autocracy and democratic resilience. First, in Hungary and Poland, the populist leaders instrumentalized the state of emergency to increase executive aggrandizement. Second, in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, democracy proved resilient. The COVID-19 pandemic alone is not fostering the rise of authoritarianism. However, it does accentuate existing democratic disfigurations.

Since the 1990s, incumbent-led autocratization in democracies is increasingly common. However, there is surprisingly little systematic and comparative research into the actions would-be autocrats actually take when they undermine democracy. We analyse the wealth of in-depth case studies of all cases of incumbent-led autocratization in democracies from 1990 until 2023 to develop such an overview of autocratic actions inductively. This empirically based would-be autocrats’ toolkit encompasses over 400 unique autocratic actions which we classify into seven overarching modes of autocratization: evasion, manipulation, infiltration, duplication, restriction, prohibition, and delegitimation. Would-be autocrats selectively use these different modes in varying arenas of democracy to gradually erode democracy. The toolkit provides a starting point to more systematically study autocratization within and across different cases, enabling the identification of sequencing and diffusion patterns, and helping generate better understanding of when autocratization is successful.

Introducing the Special Issue on “Judging under Pressure,” this Article sets out three interlinked challenges facing constitutional courts, broadly understood: persisting inequalities, the climate crisis, and rising autocratization. The Articles in this Special Issue identify, analyze, and prescribe a set of judicial responses and strategies when judging under pressure. Some reimagine and recalibrate the role of judges, while others respond with doctrinal and theoretical innovation; yet, throughout, there is a recognition of judicial constraints and institutional fragility.

Autocrats frequently appeal to socially conservative values, but little is known about how or even whether such strategies are actually paying political dividends. To address important issues of causality, this study exploits Russian president Vladimir Putin’s 2020 bid to gain a popular mandate for contravening presidential term limits in part by bundling this constitutional change with a raft of amendments that would enshrine traditional morality (including heteronormativity and anti-secularism) in Russia’s basic law. Drawing on an original experiment-bearing survey of the Russian population, it finds that Putin’s appeal to these values generated substantial new support for Putin’s reform package, primarily from social conservatives who did not support him politically. These findings expand our understanding of authoritarian practices and policy making by revealing one way in which core political values are leveraged to facilitate autocracy-enabling institutional changes and potentially other ends that autocrats might pursue.

How do autocracies use nationalism to normalize and contain unsettled times? The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked a decisive point in Russia’s politics from which there could be no return to an antebellum normality. Rather than attempt to mobilize the Russian public to war, state-run television sought to normalize the war as a banal reality for domestic audiences. Drawing on a content analysis of 1,575 reports from the state-run First Channel [Pervyi Kanal] from 2022 to 2024, this article argues that the Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia — the so-called “new regions” — are crucial to this strategy through their incorporation into banal nationalist depictions of Russia. In turn, televised depictions of residents in the “new regions” confer emotional weight and moral examples for ordinary Russians through their everyday practices: their fortitude in voting for Putin despite ongoing attacks; through their shared excitement in acquiring routine aspects of daily life from passports to pensions; and through their embodiment of Russia’s future. In the process, media depictions normalize imperial nationalist justifications for Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory in terms of the distinctiveness of the Russian people, Russia’s civilizing mission, and presentation of its war as defensive.