Opportunities for non-electoral participation in politics are one of the hallmarks of democracy. However, participatory institutions are better understood as dual-use institutions: they can deepen accountability or sabotage it, depending on their design. This paper argues that whether a participatory institution equips citizens to hold authorities accountable - or instead frees them from that accountability - is conditioned upon two structural features: whether they encourage individual or collective participation and whether they enable primarily vertical or multidirectional information flows. When institutions combine individualized participation with vertical information flows, they are ill-equipped to facilitate the preference aggregation and collective action this capacity requires - even when they deliver genuine participatory benefits to citizens. I term these elite-enabling participatory institutions and illustrate their development through the cases of Russia and Venezuela. These findings have implications for scholarly understanding of authoritarian learning, democratic backsliding, and the conditions under which participatory institutions strengthen or undermine democratic governance.
This article examines how gendered power operates at the highest levels of executive politics to constrain women's political authority, even in contexts characterised by strong formal commitments to gender equality. Drawing on a feminist institutionalist framework, it analyses the political trajectory of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, one of South Africa's most experienced post-apartheid leaders, to interrogate why sustained executive competence does not translate into access to the highest political office. Through qualitative discourse analysis of speeches, policy documents, and media representations, the article shows how Dlamini-Zuma's authority was constructed through a technocratic-caretaker gender frame emphasising administrative competence and institutional stewardship. Deploying the concepts of the double bind and gender frames, it demonstrates how formal institutional positioning and informal norms constrain political pathways. By foregrounding executive leadership as a gendered institutional site, the analysis highlights how strategies that enhance women's acceptability within patriarchal political contexts may simultaneously limit their substantive political power.
Why do currency swap arrangements survive deteriorating political relations? Financial statecraft explains their formation better than their persistence. Swap arrangements are formally reciprocal yet asymmetric in practice, leaving the weaker-currency side an implicit borrower and the other an implicit lender. We argue that durability under political pressure depends less on the borrower's level of demand than on the political price it will pay to keep the arrangement. Federal Reserve access supplies direct claims on the primary reserve currency and a stabilising signal. Once a borrower is shown eligible, its other arrangements are demoted to supplementary insurance and its willingness to absorb political costs falls. Survival then rests with the lender. Lenders with system-level objectives such as currency internationalization cannot let arrangements lapse without damaging credibility across their partner network, while bilateral or regional interests face no comparable constraint. We test this argument against Korea's arrangements with Japan and China.
Why do some authoritarian regimes build strong information control despite rapid digital proliferation? The political effects of digital uptake in autocracies are known to be context-specific, but how digital technologies become embedded in authoritarian control remains understudied, as existing work focuses on the effects of digital repression rather than its mechanisms. This paper argues that differences in state capacity shape the type of bureaucratic response to digital uptake, which in turn determines a regime's overall level of information control. Using process-tracing across Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (2005 to 2024), drawing on secondary sources and 30 semi-structured interviews, the study finds that Kazakhstan's strong financial and network capacities enabled proactive digitalization of surveillance, while Kyrgyzstan's weak financial and regulatory capacity produced a fragmented response. Information control is also increasingly assetized by domestic and international private actors, decentralizing repression. The study highlights the value of process-oriented institutionalist explanations for authoritarian digital transformation.
