Twenty‐First Century Autocrats and Their Followers: A Comparative Inquiry

Ludger Helms
Additional contact information
Ludger Helms: Department of Political Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria

Politics and Governance, 2025, vol. 13

Abstract:

Leadership and followership have long been considered to be defining features of democratic politics. However, more recently, both conceptual redefinitions and real-world developments have put issues of leadership and followership in regimes from beyond the family of established liberal democracies center-stage. This article looks into the nature of authoritarian leadership and followership from a comparative perspective and in light of theories of democratic political leadership. As the inquiry suggests, the rise and nature of leadership activities in contemporary authoritarian regimes reflects both the turn towards more competitive types of autocracy and the aspiration of many authoritarian powerholders to be seen as democratic. At the same time, some of the most spectacular manifestations of autocratic leadership relate to democratic rather than established authoritarian regimes. While followers of autocratic leaders can control their leaders only to the extent that a regime provides mechanisms of vertical accountability, authoritarian followers, even in established autocracies, are not in all regards less important or powerful than their democratic counterparts. Many authoritarian followers do not just support autocrats, but actively attack and chase non-followers or followers of other leaders, and thus play an independent role in the legitimation or de-legitimation of leaders and regimes.

Keywords: authoritarian; autocracy; autocrats; followers; followership; leaders; leadership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/9065 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:poango:v13:y:2025:a:9065

DOI: 10.17645/pag.9065

Access Statistics for this article

Politics and Governance is currently edited by Carolina Correia

More articles in Politics and Governance from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().