Stabilizing Authoritarian Rule: The Role of International Organizations

Christina Cottiero and Stephan Haggard

Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Working Paper Series from Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California

Abstract: Research has demonstrated how membership in democratic regional organizations can strengthen prospects for democracy. However, a significant number of regional organizations are dominated by autocratic members who have very different preferences: to limit democratic contagion and consolidate authoritarian rule against democratic challengers. We outline a menu of mechanisms through which regional organizations with authoritarian members might have pernicious effects on the prospects for democratic rule. We use cross-national quantitative analyses to demonstrate that membership in deeply authoritarian international organizations is associated with autocratization. We supplement the quantitative results with an analysis of 29 of the most authoritarian regional organizations and illustrative case studies. The multi-method approach strengthens inference by showing that authoritarian international organizations do in fact engage in behaviors inimical to democratic rule.

Keywords: Social and Behavioral Sciences; International organizations; authoritarian states; democratic backsliding (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07-27
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/5mk6g1z0.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

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:cdl:globco:qt5mk6g1z0

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Working Paper Series from Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().