Chapter 8 reviews the primary benefits, costs, and limitations of participatory technologies for nondemocracies. It then addresses how participatory technologies may contribute to democratic erosion and explores the broader implications of this study for the understanding of authoritarian regimes.

This chapter begins by highlighting that public anger over corruption can have punishing political effects, making curbing it a critical issue for powerholders everywhere. I note that existing scholarship on corruption control focuses heavily on democracies and does not explain under what conditions authoritarian regimes combat and reduce corruption. I discuss the conventional wisdom about how autocrats do not have incentives to curb corruption and how my book challenges this view by showing a surprising number of meaningful anti-corruption efforts by authoritarian regimes. I lay out my argument for when and why authoritarian regimes are most likely to curb corruption, describe this book’s main cases in China, South Korea, and Taiwan, and introduce my novel scoring system for anti-corruption efforts. I then discuss the various theoretical implications of my argument for the broader study of authoritarian politics and governance. Finally, I give a chapter-by-chapter outline of the book to come.

Chapter 3 tests the book’s central macro-level implication: that electoral autocracies tend to emerge in the wake of deep security, economic, and political crises – circumstances that allow such regimes to compellingly justify their rule as necessary to preserve order and stability. Based on a comprehensive cross-national analysis of regime transition and survival patterns for 1960-2014, this chapter demonstrates that socioeconomic and security crises are the best predictors of transitions to electoral authoritarianism. In contrast, other factors emphasized in the literature, including economic development, resource rents, state repressive capacity, and geopolitical and democratization pressures, do not consistently explain how these regimes emerge. The analysis also demonstrates that those electoral autocracies that are preceded by the deepest economic crises, and that subsequently manage to make the greatest progress toward restoring prosperity, have the lowest risk of democratization.

Having made the empirical case for the utility of the hegemonic strategy model in explicating regional order since the end of the First World War, this concluding chapter draws out some of the book’s broader theoretical implications and the questions it raises for understanding trajectories of change in the Middle East.