This week we’re looking at limits on the power of authoritarian rulers. We often suppose that autocrats are free from constraints, but is that true? If not, what limits do they face, where do these come from, and what are the implications for how authoritarian states function?
In today’s episode, we delve into the complex and often misunderstood world of autocratic leadership. At first glance, it might seem like authoritarian rulers wield unchallenged power, free to govern without opposition. After all, the term "autocrat" stems from the Greek for "self-rule." But is that really how it works in practice?
A fantastic new book, 'Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want', challenges this simplistic view. It reveals how modern autocratic leaders operate within a web of constraints that can shape, and sometimes even limit, their power. Intriguingly, these constraints aren’t always by design. Instead, they often emerge from circumstances that are outside the ruler's control—yet they still influence the way states function under authoritarian rule.
To unpack these fascinating insights, I’m joined by two of the book’s authors:
Together, we explore a thought-provoking conversation that examines the mechanisms of modern authoritarianism and its implications for politics worldwide.
Alan Renwick: [00:00:00] Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we're looking at limits on the power of authoritarian rulers. We often suppose that autocrats are free from constraints, but is that true? If not, what limits do they face, where do these come from, and what are the implications for how authoritarian states function?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
We might think that an autocratic ruler has absolute power to govern alone. Indeed, that is the literal meaning of the original Greek word. But autocratic or authoritarian rulers in the modern world, in fact, come in many shapes and sizes. And a new book argues that many of them do operate within constraints.
Indeed, the book goes further, [00:01:00] concluding that such constraints don't always exist just because they provide authoritarian rulers with helpful props or with convenient cover. Sometimes they exist quite beyond those leaders control. and they can meaningfully influence how the state acts. While the book is called Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want, and to explore its findings, I'm delighted to be joined today by two of its authors.
Samer Anabtawi is Lecturer in Comparative Politics here in the UCL Department of Political Science, and Nathan Brown is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington DC. Samer and Nathan, welcome to you both. It's really great to have you both on UCL Uncovering Politics today.
And let's start with the definitional question that I was hinting at there in the introduction. Nathan, do you want to go first? What do we actually mean by an authoritarian [00:02:00] ruler or an authoritarian system?
Nathan Brown: Well, we mean a vast array of different political systems. Uh, you said something very interesting in your introduction when you mentioned autocrats comes from the ancient Greek, and that's not unusual.
A lot of our political vocabulary about regime and regime types comes from the ancient world, democracy and, and, and, and, and so on. That's where we get even dictatorship. That's where we get these words. Authoritarianism is different. Um, autocrat isn't. Right. That's a single ruler, but authoritarianism as a regime type goes back really only about half a century, just a little bit more.
Um, there certainly was, there certainly were authoritarian rulers before that, but the idea that this is a specific regime type is one that really dates to the post war era when people were grappling with how to understand some political system. Juan Linz was the one who seems to have been most influential in introducing it.
And he was talking about Franco Spain, and he was saying, this doesn't quite [00:03:00] look like Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, right? There's an autonomous Catholic church. There isn't the same kind of rigid ideology. There isn't the same kind of mobilization. So when Juan Linz introduced it, he really meant a specific family regime. Since that time, it's expanded. And if you look at how political scientists define authoritarianism today, the ism part, they really define it. It's any political system that is not democratic, a political system in which, uh, with, with, uh, elections with uncertain outcomes, That's a democracy.
And if that, if those don't exist, then it's an authoritarian regime. And that means obviously a vast array of, of political systems. And so authoritarianism really has come to mean non-democracy.
Alan Renwick: And you say though, that there's a great range of different systems within under the heading of authoritarian.
Um, do you want to give a bit of a flavor of, of that range, of the different types of system that we have under there? [00:04:00] Um, Samer, do you want to come in on that?
Samer Anabtawi: Yeah. One of the issues we wanted to tackle in the book here when it comes to conceptualizations, um, happens to be where power is located, right? So a lot of definitions of authoritarianism or typologies of authoritarianism look at who is in power, their interests, who rules, how many people rule, and how they come to power.
The book is trying to look at authoritarianism from the inside out rather from the top down, so we're not necessarily interested in creating typologies or conceptualizations based on who the rulers are, but we're trying to say that there is quite a bit of institutional heterogeneity, there's institutional complexity that drives variations among authoritarian regimes, and we want to look at the political operation of these regimes from the inside and these political systems to say that the differences in policy outcomes sometimes are not just functions of who's at the top, whether it's military versus a civilian [00:05:00] ruler, but rather, um, what relationships do institutions have to the rulers?
What relationships do state institutions have to societal groups among other constituencies and how that matters for policymaking at the end? And so we're not necessarily interested in developing new typologies of authoritarian regimes, but we want to say that there's quite a bit of variation depending on how they operate from the inside out.
Alan Renwick: Okay, great. Could you give us some examples then maybe of ways in which these institutions sometimes have an important role to play within authoritarian systems?
Samer Anabtawi: Yeah, so in my own research, one place where I encounter that happens to be, I'm interested in studying LGBTQ politics, LGBTQ rights, and how those rights are attained, particularly in non-democratic contexts and non-liberal democracies.
Um, in the case of Lebanon, obviously not a liberal democracy, um, I encountered quite a bit of, puzzling variation there in terms of what is dictating when LGBTQ [00:06:00] groups and advocacy organizations win, um, some rights and when they lose. And what was fascinating in that, in that case, is that a lot of times, an awful lot of times, it was the courts in the Lebanese system that delivered rulings in favor of LGBTQ organizations, but once that deviated, significantly from where the rulers of the Lebanese political system were heading, um, in the conversation on LGBTQ rights.
And so that variation seems to suggest that there are other political actors and state actors in that political system who matter beyond just the rulers and, um, kind of the upper echelon of the regime that presides over the state. And so cases where courts or parliaments may deliver policy outcomes that differ from what the regime wants, or at least explicitly wants, um, are cases that kind of prompt us to, to dig deeper into these relationships between state institutions, um, and rulers.
Other systems may not have that distinguished, sort [00:07:00] of distinguished appearance in, in, in differences between rulers and states. So the rulers of some authoritarian states, and the state institutions may all be heading in the same direction, both in discourse as well as in policy, um, policymaking and policy enforcement as well.
Nathan Brown: Let me, if I can, add a little bit, yeah, to, uh, to, uh, uh, Samer's explanation with, sort of a concrete example, um, that I saw, uh, Samer and I are both specialists or empirical workers in the Middle East. So that's where a lot of our examples come from. The book covers a wider variety, wider range. But in, in 2011, right, you had a series of uprisings through the Arab world and, uh, including in Egypt and Libya.
I visited Egypt in the spring of 2011. I had a friend on the constitutional court and I said, you know, could I come by and see you? And he said, well, yes, but I'm extremely busy. And I thought, how could you be busy? The constitutional court should have no business. The, the, the regime has disappeared and there's no [00:08:00] constitution in effect.
So what could you be doing? And in effect, what I learned was that strong Egyptian state institutions that were continuing regardless of the, uh, the nature of the regime. And that, and that actually had a really big impact on subsequent Egyptian politics. In neighboring Libya, when the state disappeared, those institutions basically dissolved with it.
So there seemed to be some real difference in politics that couldn't just be reduced. Both of these were authoritarian systems up until 2011. But, but in Egypt seemed to have very strong institutions and focusing especially on the courts, as Samer mentioned, they were, they were, they were extremely active.
A participant in, in politics after, after the, uh, uprising and, and Libya was, was almost the exact opposite. So that kind of tuned me into this, um, and then I joined, uh, with these colleagues and tried to figure out what was going on, how we could understand how these institutions arose and how much autonomy they had.
Alan Renwick: And we're talk, when we're talking about institutions here, so you've both mentioned examples of [00:09:00] constitutional courts, uh, as being institutions that in some cases, uh, are able to operate with a degree of autonomy. There are other institutions also that you explore in the book. Uh, Samer, do you want to tell us just a little bit about the range of institutions that can come into play in the kind of analysis that you're doing?
Samer Anabtawi: Yeah, so when we think of institutions, we're thinking of all sorts of state bodies. This could range from Ministry of Health. This could be the parliament. This could be courts. This could be the post office. Anything that basically constitutes the bureaucratic body of the state. That is what we mean by institutions in this regard.
In the Palestinian context, which I focus on mostly in my research, the parliament was a really interesting place where we saw some kind of autonomy evolve over time. Um, as the political system was continuing to develop. Uh, parliament, the parliament in the Palestinian context was dominated by the same political party that staffs the rest of the [00:10:00] state and the executive branch.
Nevertheless, over time, we saw some kind of resistance and a greater push for autonomy, both for the parliament itself, but also for the judicial, um, sector, um, and that push was coming from parliamentarians who come from the same political party as the president. And so this is not necessarily some enclave of opposition that survived, but rather an institution where those who are staffing it may share a lot of interest with the executive or with the autocrat or with the rulers at the top, but they also began thinking and conceptualizing their own interests their own Institutional identity. What do they want for themselves? How do they want their parliament to operate? What kinds of budgets they wanted to set for themselves what protections they wanted for their own tenure and so forth, and so they began actually pushing for more autonomy and independence from the regime.
They wanted to solidify the little bit of freedom that they had in how they operate, and that continued to evolve over time. And they did pose quite a bit of a [00:11:00] problem for the Palestinian president. One of the examples that we give in this book, um, is about constitutional courts. So the Palestinian president thought that he could create a constitutional court that would be a rubber stamp that would give him the legitimacy to rule by decree, um, and rule on the constitutionality of the, the laws that he was passing, in such a manner. Um, nonetheless, it took about 10 plus years for the Palestinian president to actually get the court that he wanted. And so there's a lot of pushback. Um, if we are to understand autocracy or authoritarianism in the way that it is commonly described in the literature, the Palestinian case in that regard would make very little sense because if the Palestinian president who presides over that regime is that powerful and if power is that centralized within the executive and within the hands of the autocrat and the people around him, then it would be really hard to make sense of why did the president struggle or take more than a decade to set up the court that he wanted to set up.
Even if he was doing [00:12:00] so by decree, why was there such a delay? And the answer there lies in some limited degree of autonomy that the Palestinian Parliament was able to exercise simply because they wanted to push for their own privileges and their own vision of what that institution was supposed to be doing.
And that was not coming from some kind of ideological opposition in any way.
Alan Renwick: And Nathan, you also have a chapter in the book that explores the role of what you call religious establishments.
Nathan Brown: Um, yeah, that was an interesting place to look because an awful lot of comparative politics sort of um, uh, focuses on comparing institutions, but there's often an implicit, let's start with, uh, European and American style institutions, parliaments and, uh, and, uh, ministries and, and, and, and that sort of thing.
And there's reason in courts, ones that we know from those settings and, and in fact, they exist globally. So they're, they're, they're, uh, good to compare. Religious institutions are actually an important part of the state apparatus in a lot of different [00:13:00] systems, actually, sometimes some, some, some European ones.
Uh, but. Uh, uh, uh, in the Middle Eastern cases, which, uh, Samer and I both specialize in, they can be, they can be very, very big, but they're not a place where, uh, uh, comparative politics specialists usually tend to look. So we thought these would be important institutions, um, a little bit understudied, uh, but also if you really understood, want to understand how people experience governance, you know, in the Middle East, anytime you want to get married, anytime you want to get divorced when you're born and when you die, you run into things that are overseen by by religious establishments or when you go to school, you get taught by curricula that are overseen by them.
So, so, so they were an important area of governance, which people don't really look at, you know, they talk about authoritarianism, they often go straight to security services, or the military. We're not saying those aren't important, but we wanted to get sort of at the broad range of governance rather than just at the, uh, at the, at the nastier bits.
Alan Renwick: So interesting. Thank you. So a large part of what the book [00:14:00] does and what, what I find really interesting is just exploring the roles of these institutions and pointing out how important they are and the ways in which they can impact upon what states actually do. Um, but another aspect of the book that, uh, that you're really interested in is around explaining the existence of these autonomous institutions within authoritarian systems.
And essentially you explore two different approaches, uh, to that explanation. Um, Samer, uh, what are the approaches, why should we care about them, how do they differ from each other?
Samer Anabtawi: One of the approaches that seems to dominate most of the literature on authoritarianism, at least in the last decade or so, is what we describe as the functionalist approach.
And this is an approach to studying, um, Authoritarian politics and authoritarian institutions in particular by trying to probe the interests and the motivations of the regime of any autocratic regime. And often there's an assumption there that what [00:15:00] autocrats do, how they create, set up, and operate institutions is dictated by the kinds of interests that they have.
And the interests that they have are predominantly dictated by their desire for survival and prolonging, um, the legitimacy and the durability of their regimes. Um, we find that this kind of approach to be inadequate, um, it is not entirely wrong in many cases, it is adequate and correct, but it is not one that can actually, um, adequately capture the complexity we see in an autocracy.
And sometimes some of the assumptions that this approach, um, implies or makes explicitly even, uh, may not always be correct. It assumes that, um, if we observe an autonomous institution or an autonomous court in a certain autocratic system, it must be there because the regime had some vision in mind for that court that it would fulfill, um, for its own purposes.
Um, we're saying that this is kind of reading history backwards. Instead of looking at [00:16:00] some of the positive, perhaps unintended consequences of these autonomous institutions on the regime, and thinking that is what they must have had in their minds all along, even before the creation of these institutions, we might actually want to go back and look at the historical development of the institutions themselves alongside the regime.
The fact is, a lot of the state institutions that we describe as autonomous often predate the regime itself, um, and so we can't really say that the regime created them, and even in cases where the regime creates them, sometimes they can take a little bit of autonomy and these institutions take a life of their own, um, and regimes are not always calculating things in a strategic manner as they're often described in the literature, and so we can't reduce every political outcome, we can't reduce all of the institutional complexities we observe in those systems just to what the dictator at the top wants to see.
As we say in the title of the book, autocrats, autocrats can't always have what they want. Sometimes they [00:17:00] get what they want, but not always. And we're interested in the cases where autocrats actually don't get away with the kinds of things that they want to do. And we want to probe sources of autonomy that have nothing to do with the will or the whims of the rulers themselves.
So when we see autonomy, we don't want to say that this is what the regime wanted all along. We're trying to take history. We're trying to take institutional evolution a bit more seriously, um, as predictors of where the autonomy comes from.
Alan Renwick: Nathan, do you want to pick that up any further? I guess it would be particularly useful here just to go into some concrete examples again.
So if there are some examples, Nathan, that you would want to highlight, then please do. But if you want to explore the, the theoretical underpinnings a bit more as well, then, then do go for it.
Nathan Brown: Uh, yeah, no, thank, thank you. Um, this is an audio cast, so, uh, listeners can't see that my hair is white and Samer's is not.
Um, I'm, a generation older than Samer, and I'm a reformed functionalist in a sense, when I began looking at these [00:18:00] institutions, um, and my work was on the, uh, on the Arab world, I came across, uh, courts or constitutions, and the first thing I asked was, why are they there? Oh, it must've been created by Gamal Abdel Nasser or Anwar Sadat, or it was in Egypt, or it was Palestine, Yasser Arafat must've built this, or the, you know, the British mandate, or somebody built this for for reason and it serves their purpose. Um, but Samer suggests sometimes that's true. And sometimes that's not true political scientists, are often attracted to variation. So we're trying to explore the variation Why is it that they sometimes matter and and and and and and sometimes not and that's one reason for the for the range of institutions, so you know when we're looking at religious structures, one of the cases is um, uh, Thailand the Thai government has been authoritarian for very long periods. It didn't create Buddhist religious structures. It deals with them and they have varying degrees of autonomy over time. The Catholic church has, uh, [00:19:00] we, you know, we look at the role of the Catholic church in, in, in, in Germany.
And even at times when it has had a better relationship with, with the regime, it still had some kind of autonomy. And at other times, um, Um, Protestant church sometimes had, had, had, uh, or Catholic church sometimes had less. So we're really interested in trying to explain the, the, the, the, the, the variation and sometimes we find, very often we find, uh, you can't simply look at the current regime and its interest in, in maintaining itself any more than a democratic system. You could explain all politics by the desire of a politician to get reelected. It explains some things, but, but, but, but not everything. Um, and so we were, we were interested as, as Amish said about looking at this from the inside, what are these institutions like?
Where do they come from? How, how do they see their own missions? Are they able even to conceive of their own missions? Uh, those are the kinds of questions we ask.
Alan Renwick: And can each of [00:20:00] you just kind of pick a concrete example and run us through it just so that we can see how this sort of story works in practice.
Nathan, why don't you keep going and go first.
Nathan Brown: Okay, so, uh, I'll start with, uh, where I'm most familiar. That's, uh, Egypt, and I'll start with religious institutions, because that's what I got, uh, uh, fascinated with. Al Azhar is, on one hand, it's a mosque that's over a thousand years old, but it accumulated a degree of, of, uh, uh, educational functions, of, you could say, kind of theological functions, that is, teaching and designing, uh, doctrine, uh, and so on.
And in the 20th century, it had a variety of relationships with a series of Egyptian regimes. And so, so at some points, the El Azhar leadership was seen as a narrow tool of the regime. The regime wanted a specific religious interpretation or wanted an endorsement of this policy. Sometimes it could get it.
And sometimes. It didn't. The current Egyptian leadership, political leadership, is led [00:21:00] by a former, uh, former commander of the military, and there's a very famous, uh, scene, it's, you can watch it on YouTube, where in, um, in, uh, the president is giving a speech, and the leader of Al Azhar is in the audience, and the, the, the, the president basically is calling on the religious institution to combat terrorism and to make changes in, in family law, and the leader of the religious institution starts shaking his head.
And the president says, you're wearing me out, and this is on public television, um, and, and again, a recorded moment, um, there was clearly something that the, the, it, it wasn't as if the, the, the leader of the religious institution was an opposition leader, you know, established that that's not what was going on, he wasn't trying to overthrow the regime, he was just saying, you're a good general, you're a good president, This is religion.
Stay in your lane, and I'll stay in mine.
Alan Renwick: Great. Thank you. Samer, what example would you want to pick out?
Samer Anabtawi: As a good [00:22:00] comparativist, I'll actually use the same institution in a couple of different contexts, Palestine and Lebanon courts, again. The example I mentioned earlier in Lebanon, uh, military courts basically decided to acquit, uh, four soldiers, um, a number of years ago in Lebanon who were accused of, um, homosexuality.
Basically, that was, they were, they were charged of having relations that violated, um, the, the Lebanese law. It went to the military court, and the military judge basically dismissed the cases and acquitted them. Um, this went in sort of opposition is an opposition of what the defense minister was saying, which is we can't have an army or military where people who are accused of homosexuality can be serving within it.
So, why then we would see this in this context? Is it, why is it that the military court being independent? Is it that it's autonomous? Is it that it's trying to provoke the regime in some way? The answer is not. Um, the judge at the time [00:23:00] explained that his rationale was just, he was doing his job. He was trying to give an interpretation of the law as it was handed to him, as he was reading it, and in a way that was consistent with some of the civil courts that have ruled on this in the last four or five years before then.
So, he just wanted to be consistent with the rest of the judicial body, and he just thought this was not a political matter. So, it was not something that would provoke those who are at the top as much, so it was one area where he thought he would prioritize exercising his own role and responsibility as a judge rather than anything else.
We did not necessarily think of this as a political moment. Um, so in that case, we've seen that the, the, the explanation for autonomy here is not one where you can say this court is acting in a manner that the regime had dictated because it got it some kinds of benefits at the end. Um, if you move over to the Palestinian context, um, there's a great case for functionalism, which is, um, the, the approach that we're discussing here.[00:24:00]
The constitutional court, ultimately, once it was created by the Palestinian president, Mohammed Abbas, um, ended up basically delivering every verdict that he's wanted since its creation. Um, it was very clear that what the president wanted, the president got. In a case like this, we don't really need additional theories.
I think what we're seeing in front of us is pretty much explained by functionalist approaches that we've seen up to, you know, up to this point is that this is a, an autocrat that has consolidated power in his hands, in the hands of the executive. And now he's able to dictate the outcomes that he wants on other institutions.
And the reason we have a constitutional court in place, the reason it operates, the reason it stands as a significant actor in that system is only because the president wants it to. The moment he does not want that institution to operate anymore, he actually has a lot of leeway to just kind of rein it in.
And this is what we see, um, so far. This is not true for other [00:25:00] institutions of that caliber and other political systems.
Alan Renwick: And I find it really interesting here that both of you have highlighted differences between different countries and the degree to which these institutions do have autonomy. So, Samer, you've just contrasted the situation in Lebanon and the situation in Palestine.
And earlier, Nathan, you talked about the difference between institutions in Egypt and institutions in Libya. Um, am I right in understanding you that the, you're saying that the origins of these differences can be very different in different cases and we should try to avoid generalizing about the origins of these differences?
Or is there some way in which we can kind of draw out general lessons about what explains these different outcomes in different countries? Who wants to go first on that? Nathan, you go first.
Nathan Brown: Sure. So, so we definitely see, uh, uh, variation over countries and we also see sometimes variation in the same country over time, or sometimes from one institution to another.
So, so, so [00:26:00] how do we explain this? Um, we're not just saying all general, all generalizations are false. We're trying to find some patterns and, and what we argue is that a couple things help institutions, in authoritarian conditions, gain autonomy. And one thing is when they have some kind of what we call internal autonomy, that is to say, do they, can they hire their own personnel?
Do they have some discretion over their own budgets? If this is micromanaged by the outsider, especially from the regime, they're going to have an awful lot, lot, lot, lot less. And the other thing that matters is do they have linkages to other institutions? So religious institutions would be a great, uh, example here.
Are there ways, you know, Al Azhar, which I just referenced, has a network of primary schools that educate about 10 percent of the Egyptian population, has its own university system. So there's this kind of group of alumni of Al Azhar who it's sort of this powerful constituency for. The regime can, often get what it wants, if it really, really, really, [00:27:00] really wants it, but there's costs to offending a good portion of the population.
Religious institutions are often like this. I mean, you can think of, of, of, of churches, uh, uh, Christian churches in a, you know, in a wide variety of settings. Again, they, they tend to organize people a little bit outside of the state or sometimes perhaps in a state licensed institution, but in a way that gives, gives the, um, gives that institution some kind of, of, of social basis, or sometimes even connections within the state apparatus itself, where other institutions are, are kind of form, form, uh, alliances or form linkages with it.
So those are the sorts of things that allow institutions, um, to attain autonomy. And yes, they, they, they, they vary over time, they vary over place, um, and they vary even within the same society from one institution to another.
Alan Renwick: Thank you.
Samer Anabtawi: Samer, would you add to that? Yeah, I just wanted to say that In our book, we're trying to come up with, with some patterns that others may find [00:28:00] helpful.
And what we find here, at least our theory is that authoritarian state institutions are most likely to develop some degree of autonomy, whether that is internal, as Nathan mentioned, that's the ability to, um, to control their own affairs, dictate budgets and so forth, or whether it's their mission autonomy, that is the capacity of institutions to pursue their own policies or policy goals and missions.
Both of those, um, are more likely to occur to institutions are more likely to be autonomous in those settings if one of two conditions or both are met. One is if the institution is able to develop strong linkages to basically either supportive state institutions, societal groups or any international constituencies that can basically be mobilized to come to its rescue, should the regime feel provoked by its autonomy and want to retaliate against it. So the availability of these linkages to constituencies that can support the institution matter. So when those linkages are present, we should [00:29:00] expect that autonomy is more likely. And the second condition is what we call institutionalization. And by that, we mean a number of conditions, adaptability, complexity, coherence, hierarchy in, in a sense, an organization, a bureaucratic organization within the state, if it had existed for a long time, if it has its own norms, if it's got its own internal policies, it can use what it has. The complicate things for the regime at times or to exercise its own influence, given these sort of structural resources that it has as at its disposal.
This is not true, obviously, for an institution that has been created by the regime. Very recently, where it may not have that level of complexity, there's not necessarily, um, a set of norms that guide how that institution operates. And so older institutions, ones that are more rooted, more embedded within the political system that have proven themselves valuable to how the country operates, um, those are ones that are more difficult to dislodge and takes a longer time for the dictator or [00:30:00] a set of rulers to kind of, um, take aim at and manage to neutralize over time.
So these are the two generalizations. Does the institution have access to supportive constituencies? And the second one is how long has it been an operation? How rooted is it within the political system?
Alan Renwick: This is so interesting. I guess I'm thinking, are there sometimes cases that go in quite a different direction where you have strong institutions but then rulers are able to capture those institutions and by virtue of their success in capturing them they're able to actually exercise greater power over the system as a whole than would have been been the case, had those strong existing institutions not already existed.
You know, I'm thinking of Nazi Germany being able to capture the power of the church, for example, and thereby being able to extend its power. But I'm sure there are many other examples of things like that. Or, or, or am I, am I going off on a wrong track? Nathan, what do you, what would you say?
Nathan Brown: I [00:31:00] think you're going off on a good track.
It's not one that we explore systematically in the book, uh, but it does occur. I mean, the, the, the, the example of churches, Protestant and Catholic under, uh, uh, uh, Nazi rule is, is one of them. I'm not sure it actually strengthened them, but they asked, but, but, but, but the regime was absolutely able, uh, to, to, I mean, our comparison is between essentially how the German empire handled these church at versus how Nazi Germany did, and there's certainly variation there.
But the example, I think, that proves your point the most comes up in our Constitutional Court chapter, um, and actually even subsequent to the publication of the book, even more so, where you had a Constitutional Court that did develop a very high degree of, um, uh, of autonomy. And it was that autonomy essentially was really annoying to the regime.
As I mentioned before, the, the president telling to, uh, telling the leader of Al Azhar, you know, you're wearing me out a similar [00:32:00] kind of dynamic with the constitutional court. They were just a headache and they kept on issuing inconvenient rulings, not necessarily threatening, but just inconvenient rulings.
Um, and finally they went too far. Uh, and, and, and, and the regime began basically, modifying appointment procedures placing its own loyalists at the head of the court um, and then most recently taking the head of the military courts the Egyptian military courts and placing them on the constitutional court and so constitutional adjudication which had developed some degree of I would say professionalism and distance from the regime, not opposition to the regime, um now is operating a little bit more like the Palestinian constitutional court that Samer described one where the regime if it wants something even something small it will get it. So in essence constitutional adjudication has moved from being something that the regime can only crudely manipulate to something that it can now micromanage
Alan Renwick: We're coming to the end of [00:33:00] our time, all too soon, as always.
Um, Samer, how would you sum all of this up? Um, what, what are the kind of overall lessons, the overall takeaways that you would want, uh, readers of the book or listeners to this podcast to go away with after listening to what you've, what you've done, what you've analyzed?
Samer Anabtawi: I think there are a number of things that we take away from this book.
Um, one is conceptual, and that is, it is acceptable for us right now because that is the norm in the discipline to think of all non-democratic systems as belonging to one category that is autocracy is authoritarianism. That's fine terminal in terms of terminology, but we should not lose sight of the complexities in the varieties of institutional configurations that operate in authoritarian within authoritarian politics, right because most of politics happens in the struggles between rulers and the types of institutions that they have.
So that's one um, we should be, more attuned to not just those who are at the top in [00:34:00] what they're doing, we should also be paying attention to the agency of other political actors within the system. That does include different bodies within the state that also includes civil society groups, um, tribal groups, ethnic groups, any powerful constituency that exists within the political system that can actually give some backing to state institutions to operate in the way that we would expect them to in a more independent or democratic system.
Um, so that's one thing that we, um, encourage our listeners to, to, to pay close attention to. And that is the agency of other political actors. And finally, I just wanted to highlight that the story you were telling here is not necessarily one that says power is always fragmented or infinitely fragmented in authoritarian politics.
Not always. Sometimes autocrats do hold a lot of power, um, against most other political actors in the system, and they don't always capture them. That's when we start seeing autonomy kind of arising, um, but there are also moments in which [00:35:00] there is capacity for autonomy, yet that autonomy is not exercised.
This is typical for autocracies where powerful institutions may be given that power, may have that power. Nonetheless, they may choose to not exercise it, especially in policy areas that matter for the regime, um, simply because they want to align themselves with the rulers at the top. We should not interpret that as institutions lacking the capacity for autonomy.
So they have the capacity, they can use it, or they may choose not to at a specific time. So there is temporal variation that is worthy of explaining. And some of those explanations have to come from somewhere outside of just things in autocracies happen the way they do only because the dictators or the rulers at the top wanted them to happen that way.
Things are not that simple in autocracies and politics should get a second and a third look from, um, students of authoritarianism to poke a little bit beyond just regime interests and regime whims.
Alan Renwick: That's really great. Thank you so [00:36:00] much. Uh, so fascinating to listen to both of you, uh, talking about this work.
And I have to confess it's work that I have a lot of sympathy with. The goal of generalizing, but not oversimplifying, uh, seems to be so important if we're going to understand the, the real nature of the political world. And it's been really great to explore this with you both today. So thank you to Samer and Nathan, and we have been discussing the book Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want, State Institutions and Autonomy Under Authoritarianism by Nathan J. Brown, Stephen D. Schaaf, Samer Anabtawi, and Julian G. Waller. The book was published just a few months ago in August 2024 by the University of Michigan Press. And as ever, we'll put full details in the show notes for this episode.
Now this is the final episode of UCL Uncovering Politics for 2024. We'll be off on our winter break over the next few weeks, but worry not, our back catalogue is out [00:37:00] there waiting for you to explore.
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I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Kaiser Kang and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening and have a very happy Christmas. [00:38:00]