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Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism seems to be everywhere in the political world—even the definition of authoritarianism as any form of non-democratic governance has grown very broad. Attempts to explain authoritarian rule as a function of the interests or needs of the ruler or regime can be misleading. Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want argues that to understand how authoritarian systems work we need to look not only at the interests and intentions of those at the top, but also at the inner workings of the various parts of the state. Courts, elections, security force structure, and intelligence gathering are seen as structured and geared toward helping maintain the regime. Yet authoritarian regimes do not all operate the same way in the day-to-day and year-to-year tumble of politics.
In Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want , the authors find that when state bodies form strong institutional patterns and forge links with key allies both inside the state and outside of it, they can define interests and missions that are different from those at the top of the regime. By focusing on three such structures (parliaments, constitutional courts, and official religious institutions), the book shows that the degree of autonomy realized by a particular part of the state rests on how thoroughly it is institutionalized and how strong its links are with constituencies. Instead of viewing authoritarian governance as something that reduces politics to rulers’ whims and opposition movements, the authors show how it operates—and how much what we call “authoritarianism” varies.
In Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want , the authors find that when state bodies form strong institutional patterns and forge links with key allies both inside the state and outside of it, they can define interests and missions that are different from those at the top of the regime. By focusing on three such structures (parliaments, constitutional courts, and official religious institutions), the book shows that the degree of autonomy realized by a particular part of the state rests on how thoroughly it is institutionalized and how strong its links are with constituencies. Instead of viewing authoritarian governance as something that reduces politics to rulers’ whims and opposition movements, the authors show how it operates—and how much what we call “authoritarianism” varies.
- GenresPolitics
318 pages, Hardcover
Published August 13, 2024
24 people want to read
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January 22, 2026
Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want: Institutional Autonomy in Authoritarian Regimes
Julian Waller, Nathan Brown, Steven Heydemann, and Samer Anabtawi's Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy Under Authoritarianism (2024) offers a sophisticated analysis of how government institutions function within authoritarian systems. The book examines parliaments, religious entities, constitutional courts, the bureaucracy, and executive branches across various autocratic regimes, challenging simplistic assumptions that dictators exercise absolute control over all state organs. The authors demonstrate that even in highly repressive systems, institutions can carve out limited spheres of autonomy, though these victories tend toward bureaucratic rather than political significance.
The book's treatment of Russia's Duma provides particularly valuable insight into the dynamics of authoritarian legislative bodies. After three decades of existence, the Duma has achieved only moderate institutionalization, characterized by weak linkages to society and a fundamentally subservient relationship to other state organs. Despite operating within an increasingly personalized regime centered on Vladimir Putin, the Duma has made persistent efforts to increase its internal autonomy and achieve what the authors characterize as "bureaucratic if not political victories."
This distinction between bureaucratic and political autonomy proves crucial to understanding authoritarian institutions. The Duma possesses all the standard privileges of a modern parliament, including deputy immunity, rights of legislative initiative, interpellation (the formal questioning of government ministers), and somewhat weak forms of no confidence votes. Yet these formal powers mask the institution's fundamental weakness. As the authors observe, "the Duma has never fully risen to the occasion as a bastion for forming and expressing the will of the people or even in charting its own careful destiny."
The book traces the Duma's evolution from the chaotic democratic parliament of the 1990s through its transformation into a rubber stamp institution. The 1990s Duma, though often bemoaned as weak and ineffective, still possessed significant internal and mission autonomy. This changed dramatically in the 2000s as the Duma became increasingly hamstrung through a series of electoral laws that eliminated independent and uncooperative opposition political parties. By 2003, Putin's United Russia party had been elected to a popular majority, augmented by defections from other parties and non-affiliated deputies, transforming it into a constitutional supermajority by 2007.
The electoral engineering that consolidated United Russia's dominance had profound effects on the Duma's institutional capacity. In 2007, the electoral system shifted from half proportional representation and half single-member districts to fully proportional representation. While this change eliminated small parties by raising the proportional representation threshold to seven percent, it also undermined the Duma's few remaining linkages to society. Single-member districts had provided at least some connection between individual deputies and specific geographic constituencies. The shift to pure proportional representation severed even these weak ties.
The 2000s witnessed high rates of turnover among MPs, as the Duma became primarily a stepping stone to later executive appointments rather than a career destination in itself. This pattern meant that procedural knowledge and institutional know-how were poorly retained. The result was what the authors characterize as "a time of rubber stamp mediocrity." Representatives routinely complained they had little to do and often failed to show up for plenary sessions. The fact that MPs were regularly seen driving around Moscow in six-figure German cars did not help efforts to resuscitate society linkages.
The 2011 Duma election marked a critical moment. Despite significant electoral fraud, United Russia achieved only a bare majority in parliamentary seats, not even reaching fifty percent in the official popular vote. On the eve of anti-regime protests, the Duma had rapidly lost what linkages it still maintained to the public. In 2012, opposition parties became highly active in response to widespread dissatisfaction with the regime.
However, the Kremlin proved successful in marginalizing anti-regime protest through flexing its muscles via media control, legal harassment, and vast mobilization efforts during the March 2012 presidential election that returned Vladimir Putin to the presidency. This crackdown effectively contained the political challenge that had emerged from the flawed 2011 Duma elections.
The authors note that the Duma has shown "embarrassing incompetence" in bill drafting, suggesting that even its core legislative function suffers from institutional weakness. The September 2016 parliamentary election brought a massive supermajority to United Russia and installed Vyacheslav Volodin as Duma speaker, though this position represented a demotion for him, signaling the institution's low status within the regime hierarchy.
Despite its political marginalization, the Duma has repeatedly demanded bureaucratic respect from other ministries and agencies. This insistence on procedural dignity, even absent substantive power, illustrates the authors' central argument about institutional autonomy under authoritarianism. The Duma possesses significant nominal constitutional authority but maintains exceedingly low links to society. Its main activity appears to be pursuing goals aimed at hiking its own privileges and control over its own internal affairs rather than representing constituents or checking executive power.
This focus on institutional prerogatives rather than substantive policy or oversight functions reveals the limited nature of autonomy available to authoritarian legislatures. The Duma can assert its bureaucratic dignity and defend its internal procedures, but it cannot challenge the fundamental distribution of power that subordinates it to the executive. This pattern likely characterizes authoritarian parliaments across various regimes, suggesting that formal institutional structures mask very different power dynamics than those found in democratic systems.
The book's broader theoretical framework emerges in its concluding observations. The authors note that authoritarian regimes vary greatly in their institutional configurations, while democracies tend to have similar characteristics. This variation among autocracies reflects different strategies for managing the tension between the need for some institutional capacity and the imperative to maintain centralized control. Some autocrats permit greater institutional autonomy, while others insist on more thorough subordination.
The authors identify the rule of law as requiring autonomy of courts, judicial bureaucratic apparatus, and law enforcement agencies. In authoritarian systems, these institutions may possess technical competence and procedural autonomy in routine matters while remaining fundamentally subordinate to regime interests in politically sensitive cases. This dual character allows autocrats to maintain a veneer of legality while ensuring ultimate control over outcomes that matter to regime survival.
Critically, the book emphasizes that accountability of the executive to the electorate constitutes the defining characteristic of democracy. This observation highlights what distinguishes democratic from authoritarian institutions most fundamentally. Authoritarian parliaments, courts, and bureaucracies may develop significant technical capacity and even limited autonomy in certain domains, but they lack the crucial feature that makes democratic institutions meaningful: the ability to hold executives accountable through electoral mechanisms backed by genuine political competition.
The Russian case demonstrates how authoritarian regimes can maintain parliamentary institutions that superficially resemble democratic legislatures while systematically eliminating the features that would make them effective constraints on executive power. Electoral manipulation, party system engineering, control over media and civil society, and selective repression combine to ensure that the Duma poses no genuine threat to Putin's dominance, even as it maintains the forms of parliamentary procedure.
This analysis has significant implications for understanding contemporary authoritarianism. The book challenges both overly optimistic views that authoritarian institutions inevitably evolve toward democracy and overly pessimistic views that treat all authoritarian systems as equally repressive and unchanging. Instead, the authors demonstrate that authoritarian institutions exhibit real variation in their degree of autonomy and their relationship to both society and other state organs.
The Duma's trajectory suggests that limited institutional autonomy can coexist with personalized authoritarian rule. Putin's regime permits the Duma to assert bureaucratic privileges and maintain internal procedures while denying it any meaningful role in policy formation or executive oversight. This arrangement serves regime interests by maintaining a facade of normal parliamentary politics while concentrating real power in the executive.
For scholars and policymakers seeking to understand authoritarian resilience, the book offers important insights. Authoritarian institutions are not simply facades or transmission belts for dictatorial commands. They possess agency, pursue institutional interests, and can develop limited forms of autonomy. However, this autonomy remains constrained within boundaries acceptable to the regime. When institutions threaten to exceed these boundaries, as the Duma briefly did in 2011-2012, the regime possesses tools to reassert control.
The book would benefit from more extensive comparison across different authoritarian systems. While the Russian case proves instructive, readers would gain additional insight from systematic analysis of how parliamentary autonomy varies across authoritarian regimes with different characteristics. Do single-party authoritarian systems permit more or less legislative autonomy than personalist regimes? How does the presence or absence of oil wealth affect institutional development? What role do historical legacies play in shaping contemporary authoritarian institutions?
Nevertheless, Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want makes a significant contribution to the literature on comparative authoritarianism. The authors demonstrate that understanding authoritarian durability requires attention to institutional dynamics, not just repressive capacity or economic performance. Autocrats must manage relationships with various state organs, balancing the need for institutional capacity against the imperative of maintaining control.
The book's title captures this tension perfectly. Autocrats cannot always get what they want because they govern through institutions populated by individuals and organizations with their own interests and agendas. Managing this complexity requires skill, resources, and attention. Even highly personalized regimes like Putin's Russia must negotiate with institutional actors, though from a position of overwhelming strength.
For those seeking to understand how authoritarianism functions in practice rather than theory, this book provides essential insight. The authors move beyond simple dichotomies between democracy and dictatorship to examine the messy reality of institutional politics under authoritarian rule. Their analysis of the Duma reveals how formal institutional structures can persist while being drained of substantive political significance, maintaining democratic forms while serving authoritarian functions.
The book ultimately argues for a more nuanced understanding of authoritarian governance. Institutions matter, even in dictatorships, but they matter differently than in democracies. Authoritarian institutions can develop bureaucratic autonomy and technical capacity while remaining fundamentally subordinate to regime interests. This limited autonomy serves regime purposes by providing venues for managing elite interests and maintaining appearances of normal governance, all while ensuring that no institution can effectively challenge executive supremacy.
Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want succeeds in demonstrating that authoritarian institutions deserve serious study as objects in their own right, not merely as pale imitations of democratic counterparts or cynical facades. The Duma's struggle for bureaucratic respect, even absent political power, reveals the complex dynamics of institutional life under authoritarianism. For scholars, policymakers, and informed citizens seeking to understand contemporary authoritarian regimes, this book offers valuable analytical tools and empirical insight into how dictatorships actually govern.
Julian Waller, Nathan Brown, Steven Heydemann, and Samer Anabtawi's Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy Under Authoritarianism (2024) offers a sophisticated analysis of how government institutions function within authoritarian systems. The book examines parliaments, religious entities, constitutional courts, the bureaucracy, and executive branches across various autocratic regimes, challenging simplistic assumptions that dictators exercise absolute control over all state organs. The authors demonstrate that even in highly repressive systems, institutions can carve out limited spheres of autonomy, though these victories tend toward bureaucratic rather than political significance.
The book's treatment of Russia's Duma provides particularly valuable insight into the dynamics of authoritarian legislative bodies. After three decades of existence, the Duma has achieved only moderate institutionalization, characterized by weak linkages to society and a fundamentally subservient relationship to other state organs. Despite operating within an increasingly personalized regime centered on Vladimir Putin, the Duma has made persistent efforts to increase its internal autonomy and achieve what the authors characterize as "bureaucratic if not political victories."
This distinction between bureaucratic and political autonomy proves crucial to understanding authoritarian institutions. The Duma possesses all the standard privileges of a modern parliament, including deputy immunity, rights of legislative initiative, interpellation (the formal questioning of government ministers), and somewhat weak forms of no confidence votes. Yet these formal powers mask the institution's fundamental weakness. As the authors observe, "the Duma has never fully risen to the occasion as a bastion for forming and expressing the will of the people or even in charting its own careful destiny."
The book traces the Duma's evolution from the chaotic democratic parliament of the 1990s through its transformation into a rubber stamp institution. The 1990s Duma, though often bemoaned as weak and ineffective, still possessed significant internal and mission autonomy. This changed dramatically in the 2000s as the Duma became increasingly hamstrung through a series of electoral laws that eliminated independent and uncooperative opposition political parties. By 2003, Putin's United Russia party had been elected to a popular majority, augmented by defections from other parties and non-affiliated deputies, transforming it into a constitutional supermajority by 2007.
The electoral engineering that consolidated United Russia's dominance had profound effects on the Duma's institutional capacity. In 2007, the electoral system shifted from half proportional representation and half single-member districts to fully proportional representation. While this change eliminated small parties by raising the proportional representation threshold to seven percent, it also undermined the Duma's few remaining linkages to society. Single-member districts had provided at least some connection between individual deputies and specific geographic constituencies. The shift to pure proportional representation severed even these weak ties.
The 2000s witnessed high rates of turnover among MPs, as the Duma became primarily a stepping stone to later executive appointments rather than a career destination in itself. This pattern meant that procedural knowledge and institutional know-how were poorly retained. The result was what the authors characterize as "a time of rubber stamp mediocrity." Representatives routinely complained they had little to do and often failed to show up for plenary sessions. The fact that MPs were regularly seen driving around Moscow in six-figure German cars did not help efforts to resuscitate society linkages.
The 2011 Duma election marked a critical moment. Despite significant electoral fraud, United Russia achieved only a bare majority in parliamentary seats, not even reaching fifty percent in the official popular vote. On the eve of anti-regime protests, the Duma had rapidly lost what linkages it still maintained to the public. In 2012, opposition parties became highly active in response to widespread dissatisfaction with the regime.
However, the Kremlin proved successful in marginalizing anti-regime protest through flexing its muscles via media control, legal harassment, and vast mobilization efforts during the March 2012 presidential election that returned Vladimir Putin to the presidency. This crackdown effectively contained the political challenge that had emerged from the flawed 2011 Duma elections.
The authors note that the Duma has shown "embarrassing incompetence" in bill drafting, suggesting that even its core legislative function suffers from institutional weakness. The September 2016 parliamentary election brought a massive supermajority to United Russia and installed Vyacheslav Volodin as Duma speaker, though this position represented a demotion for him, signaling the institution's low status within the regime hierarchy.
Despite its political marginalization, the Duma has repeatedly demanded bureaucratic respect from other ministries and agencies. This insistence on procedural dignity, even absent substantive power, illustrates the authors' central argument about institutional autonomy under authoritarianism. The Duma possesses significant nominal constitutional authority but maintains exceedingly low links to society. Its main activity appears to be pursuing goals aimed at hiking its own privileges and control over its own internal affairs rather than representing constituents or checking executive power.
This focus on institutional prerogatives rather than substantive policy or oversight functions reveals the limited nature of autonomy available to authoritarian legislatures. The Duma can assert its bureaucratic dignity and defend its internal procedures, but it cannot challenge the fundamental distribution of power that subordinates it to the executive. This pattern likely characterizes authoritarian parliaments across various regimes, suggesting that formal institutional structures mask very different power dynamics than those found in democratic systems.
The book's broader theoretical framework emerges in its concluding observations. The authors note that authoritarian regimes vary greatly in their institutional configurations, while democracies tend to have similar characteristics. This variation among autocracies reflects different strategies for managing the tension between the need for some institutional capacity and the imperative to maintain centralized control. Some autocrats permit greater institutional autonomy, while others insist on more thorough subordination.
The authors identify the rule of law as requiring autonomy of courts, judicial bureaucratic apparatus, and law enforcement agencies. In authoritarian systems, these institutions may possess technical competence and procedural autonomy in routine matters while remaining fundamentally subordinate to regime interests in politically sensitive cases. This dual character allows autocrats to maintain a veneer of legality while ensuring ultimate control over outcomes that matter to regime survival.
Critically, the book emphasizes that accountability of the executive to the electorate constitutes the defining characteristic of democracy. This observation highlights what distinguishes democratic from authoritarian institutions most fundamentally. Authoritarian parliaments, courts, and bureaucracies may develop significant technical capacity and even limited autonomy in certain domains, but they lack the crucial feature that makes democratic institutions meaningful: the ability to hold executives accountable through electoral mechanisms backed by genuine political competition.
The Russian case demonstrates how authoritarian regimes can maintain parliamentary institutions that superficially resemble democratic legislatures while systematically eliminating the features that would make them effective constraints on executive power. Electoral manipulation, party system engineering, control over media and civil society, and selective repression combine to ensure that the Duma poses no genuine threat to Putin's dominance, even as it maintains the forms of parliamentary procedure.
This analysis has significant implications for understanding contemporary authoritarianism. The book challenges both overly optimistic views that authoritarian institutions inevitably evolve toward democracy and overly pessimistic views that treat all authoritarian systems as equally repressive and unchanging. Instead, the authors demonstrate that authoritarian institutions exhibit real variation in their degree of autonomy and their relationship to both society and other state organs.
The Duma's trajectory suggests that limited institutional autonomy can coexist with personalized authoritarian rule. Putin's regime permits the Duma to assert bureaucratic privileges and maintain internal procedures while denying it any meaningful role in policy formation or executive oversight. This arrangement serves regime interests by maintaining a facade of normal parliamentary politics while concentrating real power in the executive.
For scholars and policymakers seeking to understand authoritarian resilience, the book offers important insights. Authoritarian institutions are not simply facades or transmission belts for dictatorial commands. They possess agency, pursue institutional interests, and can develop limited forms of autonomy. However, this autonomy remains constrained within boundaries acceptable to the regime. When institutions threaten to exceed these boundaries, as the Duma briefly did in 2011-2012, the regime possesses tools to reassert control.
The book would benefit from more extensive comparison across different authoritarian systems. While the Russian case proves instructive, readers would gain additional insight from systematic analysis of how parliamentary autonomy varies across authoritarian regimes with different characteristics. Do single-party authoritarian systems permit more or less legislative autonomy than personalist regimes? How does the presence or absence of oil wealth affect institutional development? What role do historical legacies play in shaping contemporary authoritarian institutions?
Nevertheless, Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want makes a significant contribution to the literature on comparative authoritarianism. The authors demonstrate that understanding authoritarian durability requires attention to institutional dynamics, not just repressive capacity or economic performance. Autocrats must manage relationships with various state organs, balancing the need for institutional capacity against the imperative of maintaining control.
The book's title captures this tension perfectly. Autocrats cannot always get what they want because they govern through institutions populated by individuals and organizations with their own interests and agendas. Managing this complexity requires skill, resources, and attention. Even highly personalized regimes like Putin's Russia must negotiate with institutional actors, though from a position of overwhelming strength.
For those seeking to understand how authoritarianism functions in practice rather than theory, this book provides essential insight. The authors move beyond simple dichotomies between democracy and dictatorship to examine the messy reality of institutional politics under authoritarian rule. Their analysis of the Duma reveals how formal institutional structures can persist while being drained of substantive political significance, maintaining democratic forms while serving authoritarian functions.
The book ultimately argues for a more nuanced understanding of authoritarian governance. Institutions matter, even in dictatorships, but they matter differently than in democracies. Authoritarian institutions can develop bureaucratic autonomy and technical capacity while remaining fundamentally subordinate to regime interests. This limited autonomy serves regime purposes by providing venues for managing elite interests and maintaining appearances of normal governance, all while ensuring that no institution can effectively challenge executive supremacy.
Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want succeeds in demonstrating that authoritarian institutions deserve serious study as objects in their own right, not merely as pale imitations of democratic counterparts or cynical facades. The Duma's struggle for bureaucratic respect, even absent political power, reveals the complex dynamics of institutional life under authoritarianism. For scholars, policymakers, and informed citizens seeking to understand contemporary authoritarian regimes, this book offers valuable analytical tools and empirical insight into how dictatorships actually govern.
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