TY - THES A1 - Pavlova, Marina T1 - Authoritarian Regimes and Financial Crises: Explaining Autocratic Regime Survival and Collapse N2 - The common notion that financial crises pose serious threats to autocratic regime stability has been challenged over the last decades both on theoretical and empirical grounds by the extensive number of authoritarian regimes that seem to be absolutely impervious to financial and economic shocks. So, why do financial crises only sometimes lead to autocratic regime collapse? What mechanisms do (de)stabilize authoritarian regimes during financial crises? And under what conditions is autocratic regime breakdown likely to happen? This dissertation addresses these questions by bringing together insights from the democratization, comparative autocracy, and political economy strands of research. It argues that the relationship between financial crises and autocratic regime breakdown is highly conditional, and depends on a complex interplay of economic and political factors. In three standalone papers, this dissertation scrutinizes the entire process of crises induced autocratic regime instability and regime collapse, and examines the effects of different economic and political factors on the probability of autocratic regime survival and collapse during specific types of financial crises. The key findings of this dissertation demonstrate that the destabilizing effects of financial crises may vary by crisis type, that in response to financial crises, policymakers in autocracies can implement crisis policies that prolong authoritarian rule, and that institutions by which autocracies govern may immunize them from political risks during financial crises, or, by contrast, may precipitate elite defection and regime collapse. Overall, this dissertation provides many new theoretical and empirical insights into the sources of autocratic regime survival and breakdown during financial crises. It also provides one more evidence that economic and political problems do not exist in isolation from one another, rather they are linked together in complex networks of weirdly tangled cause-effects relationships, which we do not yet fully understand. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 04/2022 Y1 - 2022 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-hsog/frontdoor/index/index/docId/4392 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-43929 N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D004 + 2022D004+1 ER -