From Marxist revolution and the rejection of Chinese cultural tradition through market reforms and the embrace of Chinese cultural traditions, the party has repeatedly reinvented itself and maintained its monopoly of political power. Four decades after it abandoned communes and centrally planned economics, the party now sits atop a system of state capitalism and steers the world’s second largest economy. Confident in its success, the party now promises it will lead the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation – the restoration of China to advanced economy and great power status. This chapter reviews the multiple sources of the party’s strength and resilience in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It argues that the party’s strength lies in its adaptiveness and inventiveness across three dimensions: ideology, organization, and public policymaking. In doing so, the chapter provides a conceptual framework for the book and a launchpad for subsequent chapters which examine the multiple sources of CPC strength in greater depth.

The conclusion of Invisible Fatherland reviews the book’s findings with a view to the rise of Nazism and the concept of militant democracy. Juxtaposing the republic’s constitutional patriotism with Nazi ideology, the author highlights the clash between two diametrically opposed “ways of life.” While Nazism was a violent political order that dehumanized marginalized groups, Weimar democracy embraced plural and hybrid identifications. Although the republic ultimately fell to the Nazi threat, the study argues that its constitutional patriotism remains a positive legacy of Western-style democracy. By reframing the narrative, Invisible Fatherland provides a forward-looking, “glass-half-full” perspective on one of history’s most misunderstood democratic experiments

The chapter presents a novel perspective on exit, expanding it beyond physical migration from one country to another. It introduces the idea of death as a permanent form of exit, emphasizing its substantial influence on political dynamics. The text posits that voter exit is a critical factor in the survival of regimes, complementing various strategies employed by ruling parties to maintain their grip on power. This chapter also discusses the literature on dominant parties and different regime types. This chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the book, exploring these themes in greater depth and detail. Exit, through migration and mortality, is a pivotal element for understanding the complexities of political stability and regime longevity.

This chapter explores the impact that participation in bureaucratic corruption has on citizen activism in an autocracy. Using an original survey of Russian adults (N = 2350), we find that when citizens feel extorted, they are most likely to engage politically – likely, because they resent having to pay bribes. Yet we also find that Russians who give bribes voluntarily are also more politically active than those who abstain from corruption. To explain this finding, we focus on social relationships within which corruption transactions occur and embed them into political structures of an autocracy. Our analyses reveal that, relative to citizens who abstain from corruption, personal networks of bribe-givers are more extensive, mobilizable, and strong. Such networks, we argue, sustain meaningful encounters among “birds of a different feather,” facilitating citizen collaboration across social cleavages. In unfree societies then, corruption networks build a structural platform that can be utilized for collective resistance.

Chinese traditional culture is perceived as a sustaining factor for political trust within the authoritarian regime. Given the complexity and multidimensionality of Chinese cultural traditions, it is inadequate to address this notion through a singular index. This chapter categorizes Chinese traditional values into two dimensions: a nonpolitical dimension, encompassing traditional family and social values, and a political dimension, which includes traditional political values. I then empirically examine how these varying dimensions of Chinese cultural traditions influence ordinary people’s orientations toward political institutions and government officials.

This chapter synthesises the findings of the previous five chapters, weaving the distinct strands into a cohesive picture of micro-political constitutional contestation in Cambodia. As such, it highlights key themes that have run throughout the empirical cases, including ideas about authority and legitimacy, imposition and legal transplants, processes of translation, and the relationship of constitutions to ideas of order and stability. While drawing on lessons from Cambodia, I emphasise the comparative applicability and insight of the approach, and its associated range of methods. Hence, the chapter also contains comparative references to similar practices in other jurisdictions, focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on jurisdictions in Asia. Rather than striving to provide a comprehensive set of comparison, this section overtly aims to be indicative: drawing attention to instances where existing literature on constitutions has already discussed micro-political contestations without explicitly acknowledging or analysing them as such, and gesturing towards places where a similar approach would elicit new and important insights. Fundamentally, it argues that viewing constitutions in authoritarian regimes merely as ‘shams’ obscures more constitutional reality than it illuminates.

Opening with an anecdote about a political analyst who was admonished – and threatened – in the media by then Prime Minister Hun Sen for having the temerity to publicly question the constitutionality of a government policy, this introductory chapter introduces the reader to one of the central themes of the book – contestation over the ‘ownership’ of the constitution and the right to constitutional interpretation. After an overview of developments in the comparative constitutional studies literature, which highlights the extent to which ‘top-down’ and ‘court-centric’ approaches still prevail, I go on to explain how an approach to micro-political constitutional contestation can help illuminate constitutional practices that might otherwise be left hidden in the shadows. The reader is then introduced to the Cambodia case study: first, through an abbreviated account of Cambodia’s modern political history, and then via a more detailed explanation of the specific factors that have shaped constitutional practice in recent years. The chapter closes with some reflections on methodology and an overview of the structure of the book.

The only chapter to focus primarily on the state, Chapter 3 examines the way in which the Constitution has been understood ‘from above’ by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). Specifically, it focuses on the CPP’s weaponisation of constitutional language and process, as exemplified by debates over the protection supposedly provided by parliamentary immunity and by the Supreme Court’s 2017 decision to dissolve the CPP’s primary electoral opponent, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP). These examples, I argue, provide powerful and prescient examples of the way in which constitutional procedure, rather than being entirely overridden by the government, has in fact been used to undermine what would otherwise be considered some of the key normative contents of the constitutional document. In particular, I suggest, the constitutional language of ‘stability’ and ‘public order’ provide a subtext for the CPP’s reading of the formal Constitution that legitimises – or even necessitates – the overriding of democracy. As such, this chapter suggests that, rather than reflecting an absence of constitutionalism and rule of law, Cambodia can in fact be understood to exhibit characteristics of a ‘thick’ strain of ‘authoritarian constitutionalism’ that is rooted in a privileging of ‘law and order’.

This chapter shows how local lawyers and NGOs have sought to challenge the practice of ‘authoritarian constitutionalism’, including in the courtroom. Yet, even when the courts appear to take centre stage here, the audience and message for courtroom performances are unexpected. This chapter explains that lawyers who articulate constitutionally-framed arguments in high-profile court cases often see themselves as speaking first and foremost to journalists and NGO observers in the gallery, and thus to the local public and international stakeholders to whom those observers in turn report. To the extent that courts play a role in constitutional practice, in other words, they do so as a stage on which contestations can be performed for a wider audience. Hence, this chapter develops a concept of an ‘extended legal complex’, which seeks to capitalise on the ruling party’s desire to maintain at least a semblance of fidelity to the legal process to articulate critiques of alternative interpretations of the Constitution before a national and international audience. The chapter then explains how the Cambodian People’s Party has sought to neutralise this threat to their constitutional legitimacy by politicising the Bar Association, thereby hamstringing the work of activist-lawyers and legally complicating their relationships with local NGOs.