Illiberal Nondemocracies: Focus on Eastern Europe and Asia

As of 2016, only 11% of the countries in the world are liberal democracies. Some insight about how illiberal regimes function is a must to understand what is going on in the world. In this course, we explore illiberal and/or nondemocratic regimes of Eastern Europe and Asia—a perfect laboratory for the subject. We develop nuanced ideas about key concepts such as elections, representation, party rule, dictatorship, populism, patronalism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism as well as the dilemmas of freedom, security, corruption, and development. We study the regimes of countries such as Hungary, Russia, Turkey, China and follow the news to see how political regimes evolve in real time.