Jan 24, 2019
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Dictatorships are rarely transparent. The manner through which a few individuals make decisions that others implement in the absence of decisive elections remains hazy enough that the trite or cliché—the black box, the secret meeting, the hidden network of power—are obvious and ubiquitous for a reason. Each dictator and dictatorship is unique, politically, historically, and culturally, and explorations of these rulers and their dictatorships abound and inform. Scholars looking to compare across nondemocracies, on the other hand, can quickly fall into a morass of detail.