Political Regimes: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and Totalitarian Rule — Volume I

A comparative study of democracy and authoritarianism, built around a question that institutional charts cannot answer alone: how political power is organized, and how it is lived. Students examine direct, representative, liberal, electoral, and illiberal democracies and compare them with military, personalist, bureaucratic, electoral, and party-based authoritarian regimes. The comparison follows authority and legitimacy, participation and opposition, law and rights. It also asks how fear and conformity, political belonging, and the demand for order shape the relationship between individuals and regimes.

For instructors, the volume links the institutional analysis of comparative politics to the philosophical and human questions that classifications alone cannot reach. Historical cases let students test concepts against political experience and see how regimes actually function behind their formal constitutions. The book can anchor substantial units on democracy and authoritarianism in comparative politics and courses on political regimes, while also serving as a focused text for courses on democracy and dictatorship, democracy and autocracy, authoritarianism, and authoritarian politics.