Dr. Alexander Schmotz

Former Staff Member of the Research Department

Research Fellow of the Research Department

Research fields

Comparative authoritarianism and international politics | International drivers of democratic backsliding | Quantitative Methods

CV

Alex is a senior fellow in the Department of Global Governance since April 2023. He works on authoritarian international politics and international drivers of democratic backsliding, primarily using quantitative methods. He has worked as a postdoc (2017-2022) and PhD candidate (2011-2014) in WZB’s democracy units, and at King’s College London (2014-2017) as a postdoc in the ERC-project “International Dimensions of Authoritarian Rule”. He received his PhD from Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences at Humboldt-University Berlin for a thesis on institutional sources of the survival of hybrid regimes. His work has appeared in Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, and Democratization, among others.

Selected Publications

Schmotz, Alexander/Tansey, Oisín (2023): "Do Institutions Matter in a Crisis? Regime Type and Decisive Responses to Covid-19". In: Democratization, Vol. 30, No. 5, S. 938-959.

Schmotz, Alexander (2020): "Demokratische Legitimität und Democratic Backsliding". In: Sascha Kneip/Wolfgang Merkel/Bernhard Weßels (Hg.): Legitimitätsprobleme. Zur Lage der Demokratie in Deutschland. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, S. 365-386.

Schmotz, Alexander (2019): "Hybrid Regimes". In: Wolfgang Merkel/Raj Kollmorgen/Hans-Jürgen Wagener (Eds.): The Handbook of Political, Social, and Economic Transformation. Oxford/ New York, NY: Oxford University Press, S. 521-525.

Schmotz, Alexander/Tansey, Oisín (2018): "Regional Autocratic Linkage and Regime Survival". In: European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 57, No. 3, S. 662-686. (vorab online publiziert 15.09.2017)

Tansey, Oisín/Koehler, Kevin/Schmotz, Alexander (2017): "Ties to the Rest. Autocratic Linkages and Regime Survival". In: Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 50, No. 9, S. 1221-1254. (vorab online publiziert 08.09.2016)

Schmotz, Alexander (2015): "Vulnerability and Compensation. Constructing an Index of Co-optation in Autocratic Regimes". In: European Political Science, Vol. 14, No. 4, S. 439-457.

Projects

The International Diffusion of Democratic Backsliding

Head

Dr. Alexander Schmotz

Staff

Lisa-Marie Selvik, Ph.D.

Duration: 2023-2025

Funding: Fritz Thyssen Foundation

Abgeschlossene Projekte:

Critical Junctures and the Survival of Dictatorships. Explaining the Stability of Autocratic Regimes

Head

Wolfgang Merkel