SEVA GUNITSKY

 

RESEARCH

 

 

TEACHING

 

 

LINKS

 

MEDIA

 

CV

 



 




PUBLICATIONS

Forthcoming. Democratic Waves in Historical Perspective. Perspectives on Politics.

There have been a number of distinct bursts of democratization since the late 18th century. How do we compare them to each other, and what lessons can they offer about the evolution of democracy?

2015. Corrupting the Cyber-Commons: Social Media as a Tool of Autocratic Resilience. Perspectives on Politics 13(1), Spring 2015.

Autocracies have increasingly moved beyond simply suppressing online discourse, and are instead shifting toward proactively subverting and co-opting social media for their own purposes. Namely, social media is now being used to cheaply gather information about falsified public preferences, to undermine the opposition, and to subtly shape the contours of public discussion. Social media is therefore becoming not merely an obstacle to autocratic rule but another potential tool of regime durability. I lay out four mechanisms that link social media co-option to autocratic resilience: 1) counter-mobilization, 2) discourse framing, 3) preference divulgence, and 4) elite coordination. I then detail the recent use of these tactics in mixed and autocratic regimes, with a particular focus on Russia, China, and the Middle East. The rapid evolution of government social media strategy has critical consequences for the future of electoral democracy and state-society relations.

2015. Lost in the Gray Zone: Competing Views of Democracy Measures in the Former Soviet Republics. In Ranking the World: The Emerging Politics of Ratings and Rankings, edited by Alex Cooley and Jack Snyder. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

I examine some fundamental problems with measures of democracy in the former Soviet republics. I find that indices often disagree about particular countries, and occasionally draw contradictory conclusions from observing the same event. Measures of hybrid regimes are particularly unreliable, and regional comparisons of democratic quality are also highly sensitive to measure choice. These differences, I argue, reflect inherent trade-offs in conceptualizing democratic governance. That is, they arise not only from incorrect specifications but from fundamental normative disagreements about a highly contested concept.

2014. From Shocks to Waves: Hegemonic Transitions and Democratization in the Twentieth Century. International Organization 68(3), Summer 2014. Supplementary materials are available HERE.

What causes democratic waves? This article puts forward a theory of institutional waves that focuses on the effects of systemic transformations. It argues that abrupt shifts in the distribution of power among leading states create unique and powerful incentives for sweeping domestic reforms. A variety of statistical tests reveals strong support for the idea that shifts in hegemonic power have shaped waves of democracy, fascism, and communism in the twentieth century, independent of domestic factors or horizontal diffusion. These “hegemonic shocks” produce windows of opportunity for external regime imposition, enable rising powers to rapidly expand networks of trade and patronage, and inspire imitators by credibly revealing hidden information about relative regime effectiveness to foreign audiences. I outline these mechanisms of coercion, influence, and emulation that connect shocks to waves, empirically test their relationship, and illustrate the theory with two case studies — the wave of democratic transitions after World War I, and the fascist wave of the late interwar period. In sum, democracy in the twentieth century cannot be fully understood without examining the effects of hegemonic shocks.

2013. Complexity and Theories of Change in International Politics. International Theory 5(1):35-63, Spring 2013.

I examine how the principles of complex systems can illuminate mechanisms of change in theories of international relations. I apply the logic of complex systems to two specific puzzles in international politics — the problem of theorizing change in structural realism, and the dynamics of cross-border democratic diffusion. In the first case, by shifting the analysis of anarchy's consequences from state behavior to state attributes, complex systems can illustrate the sources of domestic and international transformations embedded in structural theories. This approach offers a way to think about democratization as a global process of interstate competition and socialization driven by the pressures of anarchy. In the second case, the principles of co-adaptation in complex systems can help reframe diffusion not as the unilinear spread of democracy but as the interplay of self-reinforcing and self-dampening dynamics, whose interaction shapes both actor expectations and democratic outcomes. In both cases, complex systems serve a limited but useful role; although not conducive to theory creation, the approach provides a useful analytical prism for examining patterns of change and continuity in global processes, and highlights concrete ways of improving models of transformations in international politics.


RESEARCH

Work in Progress

Book

Publications

Reviews

Past Publications