SOC 211 - Demagogues and Dictators

This course introduces students to the sociological study of authoritarianism focusing on demagogues, dictators, and their political systems around the world. Observing the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, many social scientists were once convinced that liberal democracy would eventually spread to every corner of the world. However, according to the Democracy Index in 2018, compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, only half of the world population lives under full or flawed democracy (though the index itself is often criticized as undemocratic). The supposed harbinger of liberal democracy, the United States, does not even make the list of top 20. Rather than treating demagogues and dictators as the remnants of “traditional” society or irrational anomalies of modernity against evident historical progress, this course explores the dynamics and characteristics of the exercise of governmental power at the macro level: how and why person-centered political regimes emerge, who and what sustains them, why many side with them, and how and why they wither away. In the process, larger questions of distributive injustice and the construction and perpetuation of structural inequalities are explored.

Satisfies Sociology major requirement.
Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought requirement.