New research tracks autocratisation, its drivers, violence and social consequences with innovative methods and data.
Five IDOS colleagues from the Transformation of Political (Dis-)order department took part in this year’s Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Boston under the main theme “Democracy Under Threat: How to Understand, Protect, and Rebuild”: PD Dr Julia Leininger, Dr Jasmin Lorch, Dr Karina Mross, Michael Roll, PhD and Dr Semuhi Sinanoglu. They organized two panels, “Innovative Approaches to Measuring Regime Change” and “Autocratization and Political Violence: Investigating a Complex Relationship”, and chaired a third. The common thread was formed by questions that run through our research program: how does democracy erode, who drives this process, how can we measure it better; and what are its social and political consequences?
Julia Leininger presented her paper that examines the roles of religious actors in the third wave of autocratisation. The paper introduces key conceptual tools for studying religion in regime change and develops a typology of three roles religious actors may assume in autocratisation: facilitators, victims, and defenders.
Semuhi Sinanoglu introduced DERTT, a new dataset that he co-created with Lucan Way, Steven Levitsky and Yashar Talebirad, which tracks autocratisation transparently, reproducibly, and in a cost-efficient way: it uses a precision-first LLM pipeline to extract more than 76,000 incidents from public human-rights reports globally from 2000 to 2023, and every incident is traceable to its source sentence.
Karina Mross, with Charlotte Fiedler and Daniel Nowack, asked when autocratisation turns violent, and identified the conditions and mechanisms that link autocratisation to civil conflict onset. Karina Mross also presented jointly with Simon Hug co-authored work (also with Christoph Dworschak, Sandra Penić Sarah Zahreddine) that explores an innovative measurement of societal dynamics during conflict drawing on collective music listening behaviour.
Together with Julia Wießmann from the University of Heidelberg, Jasmin Lorch compared Bangladesh and Indonesia to show under which conditions governments turn the “terrorist threat” into a legitimation tool for autocratisation and the repression of political opponents.
Michael Roll’s presentation focused on gender and climate policy. While recent studies have shown that an increasing representation of women legislators and mayors is associated with better climate policy, the causal mechanisms are unclear. He introduced a framework for investigating potential mechanisms.
