Stabilizing Authoritarian Rule: The Role of International Organizations - Christina Cottiero, Stephan Haggard

Drawing on an original dataset of the activities of authoritarian ROs and illustrative cases, we demonstrate the prevalence of forms of cooperation postulated in the theory. [...] IGCC Working Paper | July 2022 13 In Appendix 3, we assess robustness of our results to several variants of our IAS measure, including using the value of the most authoritarian RO of which a country is a member, the inverse-standard deviation weighted IAS, and the GDP-weighted IAS instead of the average score. [...] The concerns of the East German party leadership over defections to the West were a pivotal factor in the escalation of the second Berlin crisis in 1958-61, which ultimately ended with the construction of the wall. [...] The Soviet intervention and the subsequent articulation of the Brezhnev doctrine recapitulated norms made clear in 1956: that domestic political reforms could not threaten the stability of authoritarian rule among the members of the “socialist commonwealth.” Again, the path of V-Dem polyarchy scores comports with expectations: a process of partial liberalization that began in the 1950s was swiftly. [...] The organization’s 5th anniversary statement spoke of an “independent role in safeguarding stability and security in the region” and made a commitment in the case of emergencies to “immediate consultation on effectively responding to the emergency to fully protect the interests of both the SCO and its members” (Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 2006).