The available choices of political responses to disruption in the global climatic system depend in part on how the problem is conceptualized. Researchers and policymakers often invoke a “climate crisis” or “climate emergency,” but such language fits poorly with current knowledge of the problem's physical causes and social impacts. This article argues that climate change is instead more like a political epic. It involves neither sudden onset, as in the concept of emergency, nor decisive resolution, as in the concept of crisis, but rather a protracted ordeal of (temporally) obscure origins and uncertain outcomes. This alternative ontology of climate change highlights its novel temporal properties, including unusually slow-moving or time-lagged causal dynamics, with unsettling implications for academic research on the climatic-institutional nexus. Normatively, it undermines arguments for democracies’ environmental superiority over autocracies that rely on the former's general superiority at resolving crises and responding to emergencies. At the same time, some new arguments for democratic distributions of power become possible within the epic frame. More broadly, embracing the assumption of epic climate change may redirect attention from Promethean, managerial, or technocratic solutions to questions about which values or identities deserve preservation amid presumptively interminable and imperfectly remediable sources of disorder.

Local state officials impact authoritarian systems through the mediation they perform. Desrosiers and Mahé argue that these local functionaries fulfill a number of mediating functions, including translating and representing authoritarian systems at the local level. By enacting these two roles, however, local officials do not straightforwardly reproduce the system. Instead, their interpretations and choices fundamentally influence the imprint authoritarianism has on society, from how the regime is experienced at the local level to its groundings and resilience. They demonstrate this argument by looking at pre-genocide Rwanda and Sudan under President Omar al-Bashir.

Claims that colonial political institutions fundamentally affected the probability for democratic governance in the post-colonial period are probably among some of the most contested in institutional analysis. The current paper revisits this literature using a previously unused source of empirical information – the Statesman's Yearbook – on a large number of non-sovereign countries in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Our analysis shows that neither the size of the European population nor the existence of institutions of higher education appear to be important for the subsequent democratisation of countries decolonised during the latter half of the 20th century, while the existence of representative political bodies during the late colonial period clearly predicts the existence and stability of democracy in recent decades. Successful transplants of democracy to former colonies thus seem to crucially depend on whether recipients had time available to experiment around and adjust the imported institutions to local practices.

Corruption is widely believed to have an adverse effect on the economic performance of a country. However, many East-and-Southeast-Asian countries either achieved or currently are achieving impressively rapid economic growth despite widespread corruption – the so-called East-Asian-Paradox. A common feature of these countries was that they were autocracies. We re-examine the corruption-growth relationship, in light of the East-Asian-Paradox. We examine the role of political regimes, in mediating corruption–growth relationship using panel data over 100 countries for the period 1984–2016. We find clear evidence that corruption–growth relationship differs by the type of political regime, and the growth-enhancing effect of corruption is more likely in autocracies than in democracies. The marginal effect analysis shows that in strongly autocratic countries, higher corruption may lead to significantly higher growth, while this is not the case in democracies. Alternatively, democracy is not good for growth if there is a high level of perceived corruption. We provide suggestive evidence that the mechanism by which corruption is growth-enhancing in autocracies is through the perceived credibility of the commitment of ruling political elites to economic freedom, thereby providing confidence to the firms to invest, leading to long-term growth.

Political economists have paid increasing attention to distinctions between exporting and nonexporting firms, particularly with regard to their preferences on trade policy liberalization. A multitude of past studies focusing on economically advanced democracies characterized exporters as a small, elite group of large and highly productive firms, but this profile of a prototypical exporter is not necessarily representative of the body of firms operating under different domestic contexts. Using current and methodologically consistent cross-national surveys of firms conducted by the World Bank, this paper re-evaluates the link between certain firm-level characteristics and firms’ propensity to export, taking into account how national-level political, economic, and geographic conditions affect these relationships. The pooled sample of firms from approximately 100 countries spanning different political regimes and levels of development confirms that, generally speaking, exporters are large, productive, and innovative. However, in less democratic and less developed settings, productivity and innovation do not appear to be a prerequisite to export orientation. When developing generalizable theories of firms’ participation in the policymaking process, we must therefore be careful not to treat export behavior as an unqualified predictor of pro-free-trade attitudes.

Do democracies and autocracies differ when it comes to whether and how they provide third-party support to warring parties in civil wars? We argue that the political institutions of potential third-party states have important consequences for both questions. We emphasize how three particular institutional characteristics of democratic polities constrain decision-makers. This makes democracies less likely than autocracies to intervene in intra-state conflicts in general, and less likely to provide combat-intensive support specifically. An empirical analysis of incidents of third-party support to actors in civil wars in the period 1975–2009 corroborates the overall argument, although the results regarding support types are less clear. These results have important implications not only for our understanding of civil wars but also for how foreign policy decisions are made across different regime contexts.

Popular protest, which repeatedly occurred in Communist regimes, turned into massive mobilizational waves in the late Communist period. Why did some protests result in state cooptation and particularist nationalism (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union), and others in state-society polarization (Poland) and protest containment (China), when these states shared important historical, political, and institutional legacies? Political regimes with origins in indigenous popularly-based revolutionary movements are more resilient to popular protests and other major crises than other authoritarian regimes. Protracted ideological armed struggle largely overlaps with broader patriotic causes, such as liberation wars or struggles against foreign intervention. The revolutionary regimes thus acquire patriotic credentials, while boundaries between partisan and patriotic identities become blurred, which strengthens their elite unity and popular base. Popular protests thus facilitate a complex political game of old and new actors that may result in regime survival or transformation. In other regimes, popular unrest tends to produce state-society polarization and, ultimately, regime delegitimation and breakdown. Popular contention in complex multinational institutional settings, if there is no major external threat, highlights old and triggers new conflicts along these structural and institutional divides and, where dual political identities prevail, facilitates identity shifts in particularist direction.

The article investigates the dynamics of budgeting and its explanatory factors in Hungary based on a new database. Previous work for the period between 1991 and 2013 demonstrated that year-on-year changes in budgetary allocations by policy topics show a leptokurtic distribution. This distribution of policy changes is generally associated with the notion of punctuated equilibrium. We extend this analysis to cover over 155 years of Hungarian budgetary history. Our investigation of a database of 2580 spending category observations (covering the period between 1868 and 2013) lends support for the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We also analysed the impact of political regimes on budgetary dynamics. Here we provided empirical evidence for the validity of the informational advantage hypothesis which states that democracies will show lower level of kurtosis than other political regimes. This finding is also in line with the results of available comparative studies.

Today many governments that seek to perpetuate their power operate hybrid regimes, manipulating institutions yet holding regular elections. In this way, governments gain some legitimacy for their extended incumbency through the residual competitiveness that this regime type allows. However, recent studies show that voters may sometimes grow so activated that they make new use of this competitiveness, however limited, and turn elections into the means by which they can finally change the regime and the government that operates it. This article examines this thesis in Southeast Asia, a region in which hybrid politics have long been practiced. Its main finding is that while change has sometimes taken place, voters—participating only as voters—have never been central.