This course is an advanced introduction to the politics of authoritarian regimes. Historically, most of the world's political regimes have been authoritarian. To date, authoritarian regimes still control nearly 40% of all countries, and over half of the planet's population lives under the nondemocratic rule. Thus, learning the development and process of authoritarian regimes become the key to understanding the foundation of comparative politics.

We will begin the course by examining conceptual and operational differences between authoritarian and democratic regimes. The course then proceeds to examine the question of 'who governs' in authoritarian regimes.  The course then moves to consider how authoritarian governments maintain and exercise their power. We will examine issues related to ideology, coercion, cooptation, electoral manipulation, patronage distribution, etc. The third part of the course discusses theories and measurements of democracy and democratization, the dynamics of democratization, and different forms of democratic and hybrid regimes. We will apply the theories and evaluates the democratic transitions in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East as case discussion.

Although acquiring factual knowledge is not the main objective of the seminar, our survey of the literature will be integrated with discussions of important events, facts and, processes.