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100 Iowa L. Rev. 1673 (2014-2015)
Stealth Authoritarianism

handle is hein.journals/ilr100 and id is 1725 raw text is: Stealth Authoritarianism Ozan 0. Varol* ABSTRACT: Authoritarianism has been undergoing a metamorphosis. Historically, authoritarians openly repressed opponents by violence and harassment and subverted the rule of law to perpetuate their rule. The post- Cold War crackdown on these transparently authoritarian practices provided significant incentives to avoid them. Instead, the new generation of authoritarians learned to perpetuate their power through the same legal mechanisms that exist in democratic regimes. In so doing, they cloak repressive practices under the mask of law, imbue them with the veneer of legitimacy, and render anti-democratic practices much more difficult to detect and eliminate. This Article offers a comprehensive cross-regional account of that phenomenon, which I term stealth authoritarianism. Drawing on rational- choice theory, the Article explains the expansion of stealth authoritarianism across dfferent case studies. The Article fills a void in the literature, which has left undertheorized the authoritarian learning that occurred after the Cold War and the emerging reliance on legal, particularly sub-constitutional, mechanisms to perpetuate political power. Although stealth authoritarian practices are more prevalent in nondemocracies, the Article illustrates that they can also surface in regimes with favorable democratic credentials, including the United States. In so doing, the Article aims to orient the scholarly debate towards regime practices, rather than regime types. * Associate Professor of Law, Lewis & Clark Law School. Many friends and colleagues shared their thoughts on this Article, and I particularly thank Richard Albert, Alexander Blum, Ed Brunet, Joel Colon-Rios, A.E. Dick Howard, David Fontana, Leah Gilbert, Tom Ginsburg, Samuel Issacharoff, Jeremy Kidd, David Landau, David Law, Eugene Mazo, Bertil Emrah Oder, Ana Ibarra Olguin, John Parry, William Partlett, Erin Ryan, Christopher Schmidt, Kim Lane Scheppele, Juliet Stumpf, Kathy Varol, Yurdanur Varol, Tacettin Varol, Mila Versteeg, Adrien Wing, and the participants at workshops and conferences held at Cornell Law School, the Center for the Constitution atJames Madison's Montpelier (the Montpelier Roundtable in Comparative Constitutional Law), Lewis & Clark Law School, Koc University Law School in Istanbul, Turkey, and the Third Annual Conference of the Younger Comparativists Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law. For outstanding research assistance, I thank Eric Brickenstein, Brandon Hawkins, Philip Thoennes, and Lynn Williams. 1673

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