Politics - Parliamentary Elites in Authoritarian Regimes

Supervisor: Dr Felix Wiebrecht

Supervisor bio: Dr Felix Wiebrecht is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics. His research interests include authoritarian regimes, democracy, regime changes (democratization and autocratization), and political institutions. He studies these issues globally and with special emphasis on East and Southeast Asia. He received his PhD in Government and Public Administration in 2022 from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Email: felix.wiebrecht@liverpool.ac.uk

School: Histories, Languages, and Cultures

Department: Politics 

Module code: N/A

Suitable for students of: Politics and International Relations

Desired experience or requirements: You need to be computer literate, able to process information quickly, highly organized, self-motivated, and able to work independently. As part of the project, you will collect data from online sources. For that any experience with MS Excel will be beneficial. You will also get to analyse the data for which prior experience with any statistics software (ideally R) will be beneficial.

Places available: 3

Start dates: 16 June 2025, 7 July 2025

Project length: 4 or 8 weeks

Virtual option: Yes - virtual, hybrid and in-person options

Project description:

Authoritarian regimes pose an increasing challenge to a democratic future and, by some accounts, already comprise most of the world’s political systems. Given that opportunities for the public to influence politics are rare in nondemocracies, elite politics are key to understanding authoritarian regimes as recent cases of elite conflict in Russia and minister dismissals in China show. Nevertheless, comparative work on authoritarian elites and dictators’ approaches in managing them is severely limited due to the lack of global data. Without a comparative study of elite management across authoritarian regimes, we lack broader knowledge of dictators’ strategies for accumulating and maintaining power beyond specific historical and regional contexts. This project remedies this gap by collecting extensive novel data on parliamentary elites in authoritarian regimes. This original resource will be used to analyse the causes and consequences of legislative turnover among authoritarian elites including its effects on leader exits and development outcomes.

Additional requirements: N/A