Chapter 7 concludes the Jordanian case study by analyzing the theory’s expectations for how strategic interactions around delegation and blame influence repression, protest, and accountability in authoritarian political systems. Original protest data indicates that the monarchy permits hundreds of protests each year and that security forces repress only a tiny fraction of these events. Instead, repression is highly targeted at those individuals who cross the regime’s redlines by publicly blaming and criticizing the king. The chapter explains how this approach to repression complicates anti-royal coordination, even among those opposition figures who personally blame the monarchy for Jordan’s ills. The chapter also illustrates how the monarchy provides limited accountability by removing prime ministers and cabinet ministers when the public becomes visibly dissatisfied with the government’s performance.

Chapter 1 builds from the example of the Arab Spring uprisings to illustrate the importance of blame for authoritarian politics and its relevance to the stability of ruling monarchies. The chapter summarizes the book’s argument about how power sharing affects attributions under autocracy and how autocrats strategically try to limit their exposure to blame by delegating decision-making powers to other political elites. It then describes why autocratic monarchs are better positioned than other autocrats to avoid blame by sharing power. The chapter also discusses the book’s contributions to scholarship on authoritarianism, including how popular politics affect regime stability, when autocrats are more or less likely to share power, why autocratic monarchies have been so stable, and how power sharing and popular politics interact in authoritarian settings. The chapter ends with an outline of the remainder of the book.

Chapter 6 continues the Jordan case study by providing an important assessment of the theory’s expectations over time. Drawing on archival documents, internet search data, elite interviews, and secondary sources, the chapter shows that Jordan’s kings have shared power more credibly when they have more reasons to be concerned about popular discontent. Furthermore, it also demonstrates that Jordanians have responded to these changes as the theory expects, becoming more likely to blame the king for their grievances when the monarchy controls the decision-making process more directly, and less likely to blame the king when he delegates more credibly to other political elites. Not only do these findings demonstrate the theory’s utility for explaining changes in authoritarian decision-making over time, but they also help to account for alternative explanations to the argument, such as the possibility that the Jordanian monarchy benefits from traditional legitimacy that protects its reputation from popular anger.

Chapter 2 provides a detailed account of the book’s theoretical arguments. It first expands on why blame is important for dictators, explaining how even the most powerful autocrats must be worried about a revolutionary uprising if enough citizens come to the conclusion that they are personally responsible for the country’s problems. Next, it outlines a theoretical framework of power sharing and blame in authoritarian regimes, defining the actors, their interests, and strategic interactions around blame and delegation of decision-making responsibilities. As autocrats become more concerned about threats from the public, they should be more incentivized to share power to shift blame, but they must also take into account the risks of delegating to elites who may try to challenge them from within the regime. The chapter then explains why monarchs are advantaged in using delegation to avoid blame, arguing that monarchs can share power more safely with other elites and that such delegation is more likely to align with the public’s expectations about how responsibility should be attributed for governance. The chapter concludes by outlining the key implications that will be tested in the subsequent empirical chapters.

Chapter 3 provides evidence from cross-national statistical analysis as well as two case studies that are consistent with the major implications of the theory. First, it draws on internet search data, survey data, and short case studies of Russia and Morocco to demonstrate that power-sharing arrangements affect how the public attributes blame under autocracy. The case studies also suggest that autocrats delegate strategically in response to shifting threats to their rule. Second, the chapter uses cross-national data from Varieties of Democracy to test my expectations about how strategic interactions around delegation and blame influence broader governance outcomes in autocracy. The analysis indicates that autocrats who share power more are less vulnerable to popular discontent, which is consistent with their ability to shift blame more effectively. The analysis also shows that autocrats who share power more are less likely to use repression and more likely to provide a measure of accountability by sacking ministers when the public becomes dissatisfied. These findings indicate that the book’s arguments provide insights into a range of modern authoritarian regimes around the world.

This chapter presents a case of nonelectoral strategies of political influence by agrarian elites in Argentina and the limitations of such strategies. Until 2008, Argentine landowners influenced politics through lobbying and, when this failed, through protests. The chapter presents evidence of how Argentine agrarian elites did not invest in electoral representation prior to 2008 because they did not experience an existential threat. It also shows how landowners decided to enter the electoral arena with the rise of an existential threat in the form of confiscatory taxes in 2008. Given Argentine agrarian elites fragmentation, they deployed a candidate-centered strategy, sponsoring the candidacies of a dozen agricultural producers for Congress under diverse party affiliations. However, institutional features and ideological differences among producers’ associations blunted the effectiveness of the strategy and led to its abandonment. Later on, with the consolidation of Propuesta Republicana (PRO) as a viable electoral alternative and the continuity of hostile polices, part of the Argentine agrarian elite has engaged in party-building. However, economic cleavages within Argentine agricultural producers continue to undermine the kind of sector-wide party-building effort that we saw in Chile during the democratic transition.

The chapter examines the role of forced displacement in increasing the demand for state intervention and expanding the size of the state bureaucracy in West Germany. It discusses the government elites’ strategies for dealing with the needs of expellees and receiving communities and reviews expellees’ ability to influence government policy. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that counties with a greater proportion of expellees to population had more civil servants per capita.

Chapter 7 identifies and tests implications of the argument for contemporary Brazilian politics. Specifically, I test whether black identifiers with high levels of education exhibit distinct patterns of behavior, mainly in the electoral arena. I compile and analyze high-quality election survey data collected by reputable domestic firms between 2002 and 2018 and show that highly educated, black voters have become a loyal leftist constituency, rallying consistently around the leftist Workers’ Party since 2002. These voters are more ideologically leftist than either their lesser-educated black or better-educated white counterparts. This pattern holds even in the face of political instability stemming from major corruption scandals in 2005 and 2015, as well as the rise of far-right populist leader Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. This chapter illustrates the expectations of the policy feedback literature, showing that policy reforms “feed back” into the political process by altering the identities, interests, and behavior of citizens.

Martin Luther King Jr. argues that means and ends must be commensurable. If one wants to bring about a more equitable society, one must do so by equitable means. This means-ends principle is reiterated in the writings of Gandhi and King, but it has often been treated as something mysterious. A pragmatic case can be made for it if we pay attention to the dynamics of communication. Gandhi and King argue for an approach to social conflict that combines compassion for the needs of their opponents with a resolute opposition to the injustices these opponents perpetrate. Respect and respectability without challenge and protest will not contribute to the development of a more equitable society. But neither will challenge and protest without respect and respectability. By attending to how nonviolent direct actionists combine these two pressures, I develop an alternative to the dominant perspectives in communication ethics, but one that shares their concerns for morality, effectiveness, and nonviolence.

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on labor politics, social movements, and political parties, and locates the main argument in this literature. It operationalizes the two organizational traits, hierarchical relations and factionalism, to show how they produce three strategies. It concludes by laying out the research methods used to carry out the analysis and reach these conclusions.

This chapter shows how the bottom-up organization of CTERA was crucial for movementism. The mark of the activist base on protests is reflected in the fact that protests were organized primarily at the provincial and municipal levels, were widespread across provinces, and recurred over time. The chapter then examines the union’s role in electoral politics. While some union leaders became politicians, the union was not beholden to any political party and it lacked a coherent partisan identity. The last section analyzes the policy dynamics that ensued from movementism and the extent to which the creation of a new national institution of collective bargaining for teachers transformed the union’s political repertoire. It is shown that movementism remained largely in place.

The introduction provides the contextual and theoretical foundations of the book. It introduces the main argument that the Kazakh Spring is not a movement but a field of political possibilities capable of changing the established political value system. The Kazakh Spring has different actors and ideas connected by the common sense of solidarity and the urge for democratization. The book argues that the Kazakh Spring frames democratization hrough the radical remaking of the rules of the game that define the political in Kazakhstan. This means a consistent demand for the change of formal institutions that the regime has monopolized to sustain its powers and durability, namely, the laws, elections, and bodies of the state such as parliament, local municipal bodies, and public offices, but also free and independent media.

This chapter considers insights from the argument that extend to a broader set of cases, given the global scope of teacher mobilization. It analyzes the shadow cases of teachers in Chile (leftism), Peru (movementism), and Indonesia (instrumentalism) to again demonstrate the crucial importance of union organizations. Finally, it considers avenues for future research on education policymaking, interest representation, and labor politics. A more comparative approach to the study of education is needed in political science to illuminate the different dynamics unfolding in public school systems in countries around the world.

In January 2022, mass protests spread quickly across the whole of Kazakhstan, becoming the largest mass mobilization in the country’s modern history. Prior to these events, Kazakhstan was considered a stable authoritarian regime: President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s thirty-year rule established a system of patronal networks, institutionalized corruption, and authoritarianism that crushed any form of dissent and opposition. What, then, led to this unprecedented mass mobilization, which unified the country’s fourteen regions and three major cities in protest against the regime? This chapter analyses the mass protests through the framework of regime–society relations, arguing that a key failure of the regime built by Nazarbayev is its inability to reconcile the regime’s neoliberal prosperity rhetoric with citizens’ calls for a welfare state. It then explores how a tradition of protests has been developing since 2011 and addresses the structural components of regime (in)stability and how they contributed to violence in the protests.

This chapter provides an overview of the book. It presents the outcome of interest: the political strategies of teachers or the different ways that teachers mobilize in politics. These strategies are referred to as instrumentalism (strategic alliances), movementism (recurrent protests), and leftism (alliances with left parties). The chapter explains the significance of these strategies in relation to the labor movement and education politics, and it introduces the main argument. This chapter shows that examining the ways in which teachers mobilize in politics helps to shed light on normative questions about how they shape education policy and democratic governance.