Murphy Seminar in Political Science: Johannes Gerschewski

In this seminar presentation, Johannes Gerschewski will cover the main material of his recent book, The Two Logics of Autocratic Rule. Gerschewski argues that all autocracies must fulfil three conditions to survive: the co-optation of key elites into their inner sanctum, the repression of potential dissent, and popular legitimation. Yet, how these conditions complement each other depends on alternative logics: over-politicization and de-politicization. While the former aims at mobilizing people via inflating a friend-foe distinction, the latter renders the people passive and apathetic, relying instead on performance-driven forms of legitimation. Gerschewski supports this two-logics theory with the empirical analysis of forty-five autocratic regime episodes in East Asia since the end of World War II. 

 

Johannes Gerschewski is an interim professor (“Vertretungsprofessor”) for Political Theory and History of Ideas at Leibniz University Hannover. He is on temporary leave from my position as research fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and at the Berlin-based Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS),” and is a 2024 fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Losa Angeles. His academic work has been published, inter alia, in the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Democratization.