I'm very happy that the first citation for my book comes from @michaelherb.bsky.social in this excellent chapter on monarchy as an authoritarian institution. All in the Family was one of the first polisci books I read back in undergrad! academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

The network has an expanding group of researchers who just met for our end of term lunch yesterday! We're looking forward to engaging with more of you in the coming months.

The Oxford Authoritarian Politics Network is looking for submissions for a workshop in April. Please submit if you're interested in what we can learn by bringing scholarship on democracies and autocracies into more direct conversation. Contact me, @annemwolf.bsky.social, or Katerina with questions!

In dozens of other countries and across tens of thousands of survey respondents, we find that people's beliefs about unchecked, powerful executives are correlated with lower leader approval, a greater willingness to protest, and a worse view of their country's democracy. 5/n

In the US/democratic context, but not in Egypt, leaders can reduce the penalty of unilateralism by appealing to majority opinion, another dimension of democratic norms alongside process. 4/n

People's commitments to democratic process matter a lot in explaining their distaste for unilateralism, in both the US and Egypt. Meanwhile, other considerations about policy effectiveness and durability matter less and work in different directions depending on the country. 3/n

Our main evidence is from two survey experiments conducted in the US and Egypt. Negative reactions to unilateralism exist for a range of domestic and foreign policy issues, even when the citizen and leader are co-partisans, and other important conditions. 2/n