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This paper compares police reforms during democratization in Poland, Hungary, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It analyses the changes to the structure of the democratic control of the police in each reform, paying special attention to the decentralization versus centralization aspect of it. The research question of this paper is: Why are some states decentralizing the democratic control of the police, while others are centralizing it, both with the aim of democratization? The theoretical background of this study are theories about policy diffusion and policy transfer. Therefore this study can be categorized as part of two different research areas. On the one hand, it is a paper from the discipline of International Relations. On the other hand, it is a paper from the discipline of Comparative Politics. The combined attention to international and national factors influencing police reform is reflected by the structure of this paper. Chapter 3 examines police structures and police reforms in established democracies as possible role models for new democracies. Chapter 4 looks at international and transnational actors that actively try to influence police reform. After having examined these external factors, three cases of police reform in new democracies are examined in chapter 5.
Clubs of autocrats
(2021)
While scholars have argued that membership in Regional Organizations (ROs) can increase the likelihood of democratization, we see many autocratic regimes surviving in power albeit being members of several ROs. This article argues that this is the case because these regimes are often members in "Clubs of Autocrats" that supply material and ideational resources to strengthen domestic survival politics and shield members from external interference during moments of political turmoil. The argument is supported by survival analysis testing the effect of membership in autocratic ROs on regime survival between 1946 to 2010. It finds that membership in ROs composed of more autocratic member states does in fact raise the likelihood of regime survival by protecting incumbents against democratic challenges such as civil unrest or political dissent. However, autocratic RO membership does not help to prevent regime breakdown due to autocratic challenges like military coups, potentially because these types of threats are less likely to diffuse to other member states. The article thereby adds to our understanding of the limits of democratization and potential reverse effects of international cooperation, and contributes to the literature addressing interdependences of international and domestic politics in autocratic regimes.
Civil society is either considered as a motor of democratization or stabilizer of authoritarian rule. This dichotomy is partly due to the dominance of domains-based definitions of the concept that reduce civil society to a small range of formally organized, independent and democratically oriented NGOs. Additionally, research often treats civil society as a ‘black box’ without differentiating between potential variations in impact of different types of civil society actors on existing regime structures. In this thesis, I present an alternative conceptualization of civil society based on the interactions of societal actors to arrive at a more inclusive understanding of the term which is more suited for analysis in non-democratic settings. The operationalization of the action-based approach I develop allows for an empirical assessment of a large range of societal activities that can accordingly be categorized from little to very civil society-like depending on their specific modes of interactions within four dimensions. I employ this operationalization in a qualitative case study including different actors in the authoritarian monarchy of Jordan which suggests that Jordanian societal actors mostly exhibit tolerant and democratically oriented modes of interaction and do not reproduce authoritarian patterns. However, even democratically oriented actors do not necessarily take on an oppositional positions vis-à-vis the authoritarian regime. Thus, the Jordanian civil society might not feature a high potential to challenge existing power structures in the country.