Product Description: Somit and Peterson seek to explain two apparently contradictory yet well-established political phenomena: First, throughout human history, the vast majority of political societies have been authoritarian. Second, notwithstanding this pattern, from time to time, democracies do emerge and some even have considerable stability...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In Political Cleavages in the 1990s: Issues, Parties, and the Consolidation of Democracy, Alejandro Moreno argues that the political split between authoritarian and democratic ideologies is the main determinant of party competition in less-developed, relatively new democracies...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Despite the much-vaunted "triumph of democracy," much of the world's population continues to live under political or military dictatorships. This book provides comprehensive coverage of the modern non-democratic regimes that, in the form of fascist, communist, and military dictatorships, have dominated much of the 20th century and still play a major role in world affairs...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: The democratic surge in the past twenty years has led many Americans to assume that all societies are, or should be, making progress toward becoming practicing democracies. Many in the United States approach countries such as China, Iran, and Vietnam with impatience and bewilderment...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: The Stars Down to Earth shows us a stunningly prescient Adorno. Haunted by the ugly side of American culture industries he used the different angles provided by each of these three essays to showcase the dangers inherent in modern obsessions with consumption...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: During the 1990s, international democracy promotion efforts led to the establishment of numerous regimes that cannot be easily classified as either authoritarian or democratic. They display characteristics of each, in short they are semi-authoritarian regimes...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: For generations, influential thinkers--often citing the tragic polarization that took place during Germany's Great Depression--have suspected that people's loyalty to democratic institutions erodes under pressure and that citizens gravitate toward antidemocratic extremes in times of political and economic crisis...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The psychologist reports on the proceedings and results of his experiments on obedience to authority

Product Description: Coercion, it seems, like poverty and prejudice, has always been with us. Political thinkers and philosophers have been arguing its more direct and personal consequences for centuries. Today, at a point in history marked by dramatic changes and challenges to the existing military, political, and social order, coercion is more at the forefront of political activity than ever before...read more

Product Description: This provocative book presents compelling evidence that the fundamental problem behind environmental destruction―and climate change in particular―is the operation of liberal democracy.

Product Description: What induces groups to commit political suicide? This book explores the decisions to surrender power and to legitimate this surrender: collective abdications. Commonsensical explanations impute such actions to coercive pressures, actors’ miscalculations, or their contamination by ideologies at odds with group interests...read more

The author argues that the existing conceptual frameworks of political and social theory restrict both theorists and empirical researchers to a narrow definition of authoritarianism that focuses on governmental structure and fails to take account of forms of social control exercised outside the governmental sphere. Rather than define authoritarianism primarily by contrast to liberal democracy, Sciulli argues, we need to broaden our conception of authoritarianism to include "social authoritarianism," referring to social control imposed by private organizations and institutions, such as business corporations and professional associations. In this book, Sciulli develops an alternative conceptual framework, which he calls the theory of societal constitutionalism, and he explains how the theory can be used to assess whether social order in a society, whether democratic or authoritarian in political rule, is characterized by some degree of social authoritarianism. The book will be important reading for theorists in sociology, political science and legal studies.

Product Description: Erica Frantz and Natasha Ezrow argue that dictatorships are not regimes driven by the whims of a single individual, revealing how leader-elite relations are strongly influenced by the nature of the political institutions in a regime, and in turn how those relations profoundly affect both domestic and foreign policy...read more

Product Description: A historical study of the research on the authoritarian personality.

Product Description: This book had its origins in conversations held at various meetings of the International Society of Political Psychology. The editors and con­ tributors are grateful for the forum that has given us the opportunity to discuss these topics over the last 10 years...read more