RELIGN M132 Chapter Notes - Chapter N/A: Authoritarianism, Mohamed Morsi

• School: UCLA
• Department: Religion, Study of
• Course: RELIGN M132
• Professor: Kathlyn Cooney

Document Summary

This book is intended to put readers on more solid footing for understanding authoritarian politics. To do so, it describes how politics works in authoritarian contexts and how this, in turn, influences outcomes we care about. Chapter 1 introduced the book and specified its major themes. It explained why authoritarianism matters and highlighted the challenges inherent in studying authoritarian rule. It also set the stage for one of the book"s central themes, which is the importance of looking at trends over time in our analyses of authoritarian politics. Today"s dictatorships behave in ways different from those of the past. While it is important to identify broad commonalities across the authoritarian regimes that have existed throughout history, it is also important to bring to the fore those developments and features that are unique to contemporary dictatorships. Chapter 2 provided some basic information about authoritarian politics to guide the discussion to follow.