Book Project (Coauthored with Nathan J. Brown, Steven D. Schaaf, and Samer Anabtawi)
Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism
From the publication blurb: “Authoritarianism seems to be everywhere in the political world—even the definition of authoritarianism as any form of non-democratic governance has grown very broad. Attempts to explain authoritarian rule as a function of the interests or needs of the ruler or regime can be misleading. Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want argues that to understand how authoritarian systems work we need to look not only at the interests and intentions of those at the top, but also at the inner workings of the various parts of the state. Courts, elections, security force structure, and intelligence gathering are seen as structured and geared toward helping maintain the regime. Yet authoritarian regimes do not all operate the same way in the day-to-day and year-to-year tumble of politics.
In Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want, the authors find that when state bodies form strong institutional patterns and forge links with key allies both inside the state and outside of it, they can define interests and missions that are different from those at the top of the regime. By focusing on three such structures (parliaments, constitutional courts, and official religious institutions), the book shows that the degree of autonomy realized by a particular part of the state rests on how thoroughly it is institutionalized and how strong its links are with constituencies. Instead of viewing authoritarian governance as something that reduces politics to rulers’ whims and opposition movements, the authors show how it operates—and how much what we call 'authoritarianism’ varies.”
You may find a link to the book here (publication expected August 2024).
Dissertation Manuscript
Beyond the Rubber-Stamp: Essays on Parliamentary Bodies Under Authoritarianism
My Ph.D dissertation focuses on the political place of parliaments and council bodies in stable authoritarian regimes. Moving beyond theories of explaining when institutions such as parliaments and other assembly-style and conciliar institutions are created or shuttered under authoritarianism, this project highlights the day-to-day and year-to-year political world of parliaments across the lifespan of a given authoritarian regime, from activity to quiescence and from mundane concerns to controversial policy interests.
The manuscript is divided into three thematic essays making up five theoretical, conceptual, and empirical chapters. Each essay is distinct in its guiding research question(s), all with an eye to expanding and augmenting dominant approaches current in the comparative authoritarianism literature. I ask, regardless of effective output or regime maintenance considerations, when and why would normally 'rubber-stamp' legislative institutions ever become locations of actual policy-making, explicit public fora for elite dissent, or venues for vexatious opposition obstruction efforts? What does policymaking look like in these contexts, and how does the work of ambitious lower-tier elites travel across regimes? How have parliaments and councils as institutional bodies themselves changed over time in the last century, and do lessons from the authoritarian past help us to inform the authoritarian present? In what ways do modern authoritarian regimes chafe against the strictures of their inherited constitutional formats, and how do parliaments and other collegial bodies fit into this? This dissertation answers these and other questions, informing contemporary scholarly debates about authoritarian politics, the development of political and policy-influencing institutions, and the substantive politics of Russia and other Eurasian authoritarian regimes.
You may find a link to the archived dissertation PDF here (defended March 2022, published May 2022).
Professional Research
Working at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA Corporation) and its Russia Studies Program, I have been a researcher on a variety of government-funded projects related to Russian political-military affairs, strategic and foreign policy studies, elite strategic decision-making, and adversary analytics. You may find the Russia Studies Program website here, which includes links to publicly-released research products and publications.
Academic Research Agendas
I am engaged in multiple, ongoing academic research projects. These include working papers on councils and other non-electoral bodies in authoritarian political orders, ideological illiberalism in East-Central Europe and the Anglo-American world, theorists of contemporary authoritarianism, the role of religious authorities and ideology in Russian state policy, and party politics in pre-war Ukraine, among others. You may information on these working papers below, alongside links to already-published research.
My general scholarly foci are: authoritarian politics and political institutions, ideological illiberalism in Europe, Eurasia, and North America, and Eurasian political-military and strategic studies.
Supplemental Analytic Writing
Additional to my core academic research, I have also published analytic articles and essays on Russian elections, political institutions, and ideological rhetoric, dynamics of illiberalism in Eurasia and East-Central Europe, authoritarian politics in Belarus, and political decision-making in the Russo-Ukrainian War. I also have written extensively on questions of illiberalism, postliberalism, authoritarianism, political institutions, and ideology in the contemporary Anglo-American West.
Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism
From the publication blurb: “Authoritarianism seems to be everywhere in the political world—even the definition of authoritarianism as any form of non-democratic governance has grown very broad. Attempts to explain authoritarian rule as a function of the interests or needs of the ruler or regime can be misleading. Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want argues that to understand how authoritarian systems work we need to look not only at the interests and intentions of those at the top, but also at the inner workings of the various parts of the state. Courts, elections, security force structure, and intelligence gathering are seen as structured and geared toward helping maintain the regime. Yet authoritarian regimes do not all operate the same way in the day-to-day and year-to-year tumble of politics.
In Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want, the authors find that when state bodies form strong institutional patterns and forge links with key allies both inside the state and outside of it, they can define interests and missions that are different from those at the top of the regime. By focusing on three such structures (parliaments, constitutional courts, and official religious institutions), the book shows that the degree of autonomy realized by a particular part of the state rests on how thoroughly it is institutionalized and how strong its links are with constituencies. Instead of viewing authoritarian governance as something that reduces politics to rulers’ whims and opposition movements, the authors show how it operates—and how much what we call 'authoritarianism’ varies.”
You may find a link to the book here (publication expected August 2024).
Dissertation Manuscript
Beyond the Rubber-Stamp: Essays on Parliamentary Bodies Under Authoritarianism
My Ph.D dissertation focuses on the political place of parliaments and council bodies in stable authoritarian regimes. Moving beyond theories of explaining when institutions such as parliaments and other assembly-style and conciliar institutions are created or shuttered under authoritarianism, this project highlights the day-to-day and year-to-year political world of parliaments across the lifespan of a given authoritarian regime, from activity to quiescence and from mundane concerns to controversial policy interests.
The manuscript is divided into three thematic essays making up five theoretical, conceptual, and empirical chapters. Each essay is distinct in its guiding research question(s), all with an eye to expanding and augmenting dominant approaches current in the comparative authoritarianism literature. I ask, regardless of effective output or regime maintenance considerations, when and why would normally 'rubber-stamp' legislative institutions ever become locations of actual policy-making, explicit public fora for elite dissent, or venues for vexatious opposition obstruction efforts? What does policymaking look like in these contexts, and how does the work of ambitious lower-tier elites travel across regimes? How have parliaments and councils as institutional bodies themselves changed over time in the last century, and do lessons from the authoritarian past help us to inform the authoritarian present? In what ways do modern authoritarian regimes chafe against the strictures of their inherited constitutional formats, and how do parliaments and other collegial bodies fit into this? This dissertation answers these and other questions, informing contemporary scholarly debates about authoritarian politics, the development of political and policy-influencing institutions, and the substantive politics of Russia and other Eurasian authoritarian regimes.
You may find a link to the archived dissertation PDF here (defended March 2022, published May 2022).
Professional Research
Working at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA Corporation) and its Russia Studies Program, I have been a researcher on a variety of government-funded projects related to Russian political-military affairs, strategic and foreign policy studies, elite strategic decision-making, and adversary analytics. You may find the Russia Studies Program website here, which includes links to publicly-released research products and publications.
Academic Research Agendas
I am engaged in multiple, ongoing academic research projects. These include working papers on councils and other non-electoral bodies in authoritarian political orders, ideological illiberalism in East-Central Europe and the Anglo-American world, theorists of contemporary authoritarianism, the role of religious authorities and ideology in Russian state policy, and party politics in pre-war Ukraine, among others. You may information on these working papers below, alongside links to already-published research.
My general scholarly foci are: authoritarian politics and political institutions, ideological illiberalism in Europe, Eurasia, and North America, and Eurasian political-military and strategic studies.
Supplemental Analytic Writing
Additional to my core academic research, I have also published analytic articles and essays on Russian elections, political institutions, and ideological rhetoric, dynamics of illiberalism in Eurasia and East-Central Europe, authoritarian politics in Belarus, and political decision-making in the Russo-Ukrainian War. I also have written extensively on questions of illiberalism, postliberalism, authoritarianism, political institutions, and ideology in the contemporary Anglo-American West.
Projects Under Review
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