China’s rapid economic development exerts significant political effects. Modernization theory posits, with an optimistic outlook, that sustained economic growth will foster increasing public demands for political liberalization and democratization. Empirical findings presented in this chapter reveal that a majority of Chinese citizens report heightened satisfaction with their civil liberties and political rights following improvements in their overall well-being. Specifically, life satisfaction in the economic sphere demonstrates a positive spillover effect on satisfaction with civic and political rights. Furthermore, life satisfaction across economic, social, and individual dimensions positively influences the political realm, resulting in inflated satisfaction regarding limited civil and political rights.

The cultural prerequisites for democracy have garnered significant attention over the past few decades. Confucian values are often viewed as incompatible with liberal democracy and are believed to hinder the process of democratization. This chapter investigates the impact of Confucian values on the commitment of ordinary Chinese citizens to democratic principles. The findings indicate no evidence that Confucian values inhibit the Chinese public’s support for democracy. However, they are negatively associated with liberal democratic values, which are essential for the resilience and consolidation of a nascent democracy.

How citizens in authoritarian regimes evaluate the practice of democracy in both new and established democracies holds significant implications for the prospects of democratization in their own countries. This chapter explores how Chinese citizens assess democracy in the United States, India, and Taiwan. It is theorized that ingroup favoritism and attitudes toward democracy are the primary factors influencing citizens’ evaluations of democratic practices in other societies. The findings reveal that Chinese citizens perceive the level of democracy in China to be comparable to that of the United States and Taiwan, while offering lower evaluations of India’s democratic system.

Citizens in authoritarian regimes comprehend the concept of democracy through a lens shaped by state manipulation and individual agency. This chapter investigates Chinese citizens’ perceptions of three principles of governance – government (1) of the people, (2) by the people, and (3) for the people – without explicitly invoking the term “democracy.” Notably, the principle of government by the people is the most favored among the Chinese people. Those who frame their understanding of democracy through the lens of government of the people express dissatisfaction with the current state of democracy and are critical of authoritarian politics. Conversely, public interpretations of democracy based on government for the people exhibit an anti-democratic orientation and align more closely with support for authoritarian rule.

This chapter introduces the central puzzle of this study: why, in contrast to other states in Southern Africa, have Zimbabwean democratic institutions stagnated or even declined since independence in 1980? To begin to answer this question, an overview of the resource sector in Zimbabwe, particularly the large diamond found in 2006, and the development of institutions since Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, is given. Furthermore, an institutional analysis, a brief overview of past studies, and a research design are outlined. In terms of case selection, Zimbabwe is placed in the overall population of cases when it comes to resource curse dynamics, and the concept of the “opaque” state is defined. Furthermore, Zimbabwe is defined in terms of democratization and state capacity, concepts that will be used throughout the study.

This introduction argues against analyzing the Democrat Party in terms of strict binaries such as liberal–illiberal, center–periphery, secular–reactionary, or victim–perpetrator. While the divisions that scholars emphasize are real enough to affect the lives of people in Turkey, these divides are multiple and cross-cutting. Instead, I present an account of the Democrat Party, its role in Turkey’s democratization, and its engagement with the emerging Cold War order that is mindful of the divides in Turkey but that also acknowledges the party’s ability to transcend those divides – or, at least, embody their multiple contradictions. This book presents a portrait of the Democrat Party that encompasses these contradictions while also emphasizing Democrat Party leaders’ connections to the domestic political order that preceded them and to the international order of the 1950s.

This chapter weaves together the biographies of the Democrat Party’s four founders up until early 1946, when they established the party. Each of these founders (Mahmut Celal Bayar, Bekir Refik Koraltan, Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, and Ali Adnan Menderes) played an important role in Turkey’s politics long before their break with the single-party regime. While accounts of the Democrat Party typically note that these men had once been members of the regime, few accounts give more than thumbnail sketches. By contrast, this chapter emphasizes the extent of their involvement in the politics of both the late Ottoman Empire and the early Republic of Turkey, crafting economic, educational, and legal institutions.

This chapter covers 1946–50, when the Democrat Party challenged the ruling Republican People’s Party, looking at some of the young activists whose efforts helped the party achieve victory. These include Samet Ağaoğlu, a well-connected bureaucrat and intellectual, who played a key role in promoting the Democrat Party as a “liberal” party seeking to limit the role of the state. The chapter also looks beyond campaigns in Istanbul and Ankara to consider the ways in which the party took shape in the provinces, specifically Balıkesir and Malatya. The first was a province on the west coast with a majority Sunni/Turkish population; the second was an eastern province with a sizeable Kurdish/Alevi population. In both cases, we see that political parties were closely allied with wealthy landowners, and the difference in affiliation tended to depend on which local faction had established a closer relationship with the state c. 1946. In other words, while intellectuals such as Ağaoğlu promoted the DP as an anti-statist party, in tune with postwar liberalism, we see from early on that, at the provincial level, supporters were more concerned with who controlled the state.

This chapter summarizes the main findings, arguments, and contributions of the book. It reviews the theoretical arguments and discusses promising avenues for further research on revolution and counterrevolution. Then it explains how the book’s findings speak to a number of scholarly and public debates. First, for scholars of violence and nonviolence, who have argued that unarmed civil resistance is more effective at toppling autocrats than armed conflict, the book raises questions about the tenacity of the regimes established through these nonviolent movements. Second, it speaks to scholarship on democratization, highlighting the important differences between transitions effected through elite pacts versus those brought about through revolutionary mobilization. Third, it offers lessons about how foreign powers can help or hinder the consolidation of new democracies. Next, the chapter discusses implications for Egypt and the broader Middle East, including the possibility that future revolutions might avoid the disappointing fates of the 2011 revolutions. The chapter ends by reflecting on what the book has to say about our current historical moment, when rising rates of counterrevolution appear to be only one manifestation of a broader resurgence of authoritarian populism and reactionary politics worldwide.

Chapter 1 introduces the main arguments, findings, and contributions of the book. Counterrevolution is a subject that has often been overlooked by scholars, even as counterrevolutions have been responsible for establishing some of history’s most brutal regimes, for cutting short experiments in democracy and radical change, and for perpetuating vicious cycles of conflict and instability. The chapter reveals some of the most important statistics from the book’s original dataset of counterrevolution worldwide. These statistics raise a number of puzzling questions, which motivate the theoretical argument about counterrevolutionary emergence and success. After previewing this argument, the chapter discusses the main contributions of the book, including to theories of revolution, democratization, and nonviolence; to ongoing debates about Egypt’s revolution and the failures of the 2011 Arab Spring; and to our understanding of the present-day resurgence of authoritarianism worldwide. It finishes by laying out the multi-method research strategy and providing an overview of the chapters to come.

The expansion of the press in the late nineteenth century – Britain and America leading the way; Germany and other countries soon following – reinforced its self-proclaimed role as representative of the public. Politicians could no longer ignore newspapers and needed to (appear to) take into account public opinion. However, sensitivity to news related to the security of a political position: monarchs remained most shielded from public opinion and the press, followed by non-elected insiders, non-elected outsiders, elected insiders, and elected outsiders. Both journalists and politicians posited that ‘the press’ shaped the parameters of political manoeuvrability and provided politicians with the daily information needed to perform their duties. Politicians’ choice of newspapers, seen to affect their decisions, became subject to debate in newspapers themselves. Politicians were portrayed as bourgeois readers, reinforcing their participation in an imagined community of readership that developed in this period, particularly in the major urban centres. Despite the expectation to heed the voice of the people, journalists also expected politicians to stand above the clamour of the press and to lead public opinion in pursuit of national interests. In response to these contradictory expectations, politicians increasingly sought to steer the press themselves.

The Age of Empire formed a historical window of opportunity in which mass media and imperial politics temporarily coalesced to create a new kind of ‘publicity politician’ in a system of ‘transnational media politics’. Mass media expanded the scope of politics, and media politics encompassed political subsystems such as government politics, party politics, and monarchical politics. While Wilhelm II, Bülow, Chamberlain, Rhodes, Leopold II, and Roosevelt were particularly media-savvy or mediagenic, they shaped the system of media politics, setting standards for both their contemporaries and successors. Media became central to the acquisition and exercise of political power. Politicians became media consumers, media influencers, and media objects. Throughout history, political leaders had publicized themselves through various media, but now media management became central to politics, making leaders visible to the public on a global scale impossible before. This heightened visibility was crucial to politicians’ survival in this new era of mass democracy. Media-savviness, mediageneity, or media celebrity alone did not suffice for survival – the publicity politician combined these qualities. The direct mediation of politics contained the seeds of both democratization and de-democratization, and subsequent media developments reinforced this paradoxical potential over the course of the next century.

This chapter examines the intended and unintended consequences of American hierarchy on partner states. It analyzes the impact of increased state capacity resulting from American economic hierarchy on civil conflict, human rights, democratization, and inequality. The results suggest that economic hierarchy reduces conflict, human rights abuses, and promotes democracy primarily through direct effects rather than via increased state capacity. However, both economic and security hierarchy exacerbate political inequalities. The chapter highlights the complex implications of American hierarchy.

This brief conclusion summarizes the main thesis of the book, noting that both conservative and progressive critiques of social media lack strong empirical justifications, and that many if not most of the regulatory proposals directed at social media are not only likely to be found unconstitutional, but are also wrong-headed. It then argues that it is time we all accept that the old, pre-social media world of gatekeepers is over; and further, that this development has important, positive implications for the democratization of public discourse in ways that free speech theory supports. Finally, the Conclusion analogizes the modern hysteria over the growth of social media to earlier panics over changes in communications technology, such as the inventions of the printing press and of moving pictures. As with those earlier panics, this one too is overblown and ignores the positive potential impacts of technological change.

The Introduction introduces the central research questions of the study and summarizes the main arguments. It also lays out the research design and discusses the key concepts and how it measures them. Finally, it provides summaries of all of the chapters in the book.