The Dictator's Club: How Regional Organizations Sustain Authoritarian Rule
Autocratic regimes can limit their risk of democratization by joining together in regional organizations, argues Maria Debre in her new book, The Dictators’ Club. Her careful and valuable contribution makes for a specialist’s read, advancing an analyst’s understanding of regime survival strategies and of international organizations. Going explanations for autocracies’ longevity focus primarily on internal factors, often structural. A minority of explanations look outward, considering the disposition of great powers and the effects of geopolitical patrons or aid donors. The role of regional organizations was less well charted before this first effort from Debre, a scholar of international relations at Zeppelin University in Germany.
The book’s strength is original quantitative analysis correlating regime survival with membership in regional organizations. Debre borrowed, combined, and extended several extant references to construct a project-specific dataset characterizing 72 multinational regional organizations that pursued political, economic, or security mandates between 1945 and 2020. A subset of those regional organizations qualified as dictators’ clubs whose member countries averaged low scores on a democracy index.