Defections From Authoritarian and Backsliding Regimes

When, why, and how supporters of authoritarian regimes cease complying with the regime.

Overview

When do supporters of authoritarian and democratic backsliding regimes cease to support their leaders? When do they defect? And what actions by opposition forces, civil resistance campaigns, or third party actors can motivate such changes? Defection is crucial to the logic of political change, particularly through nonviolent resistance, yet current literature lacks a unified theoretical and empirical framework for understanding the dynamics of defection. In this project we seek to build such a framework and test it trhough a variety of empirical approaches.

Research questions

1. What structural factors precipitate defections by regime support groups from authoritarian and backsliding regimes?
2. What strategies by civil resistance campaigns and other opposition actors increase the likelihood of defections?
3. What explains variation in the scale and scope of defections?
4. When do defections precipitate regime breakdown?

Methods

We are constructing a dataset measuring the compliance of key regime support groups in all authoritarian and backsliding regimes in the post-Cold War era. In later stages of the project we will be writing a series of mini case studies of defection, as well as conducting survey experiments on defection processes.

Funding

This research is possible thanks to generous support from the Horizons Project

Outputs

• Book manuscript: Defections: The Science of Switching Sides currently in progress.
• Scholarly article on the structural causes of defection
• Scholarly article on movement strategies that effectively spark defection
• Scholarly article on defection and regime breakdown
• Series of public-facing short articles on defection in backsliding and authoritarian contexts