Dictatorships

Course Description

Dictatorships carries out a comparative analysis of dictatorships across time and space, with special attention paid to 20th century totalitarian regimes, including those of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. UWF states the analysis focuses on some of the causes for the rise and fall of these dictatorships, their ruling personalities and methods, the costs imposed on their subject populations, and their long-term effects on the politics of their representative countries. Readings range from selections on tyranny from classical political philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Suetonius, and Machiavelli to modern biographical works and empirical analysis pieces, with historical cases from several continents evaluated using scholarly texts, novels, and films.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, CPO is the Comparative Politics prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the Department of Government, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. It is offered at approximately 4 Florida institutions.

⚠ This is an unusually well-specified course description, and the reading range is the most striking thing in it: Plato and Aristotle on tyranny, Suetonius on the Caesars, Machiavelli, modern biography, empirical political science, novels and films. That is a deliberately wide evidentiary net, and it reflects a real methodological problem — closed regimes do not release reliable data about themselves, so the study of them draws on sources a quantitative course would not touch.

The oldest observation in the course is also among the most durable: the classical writers on tyranny identified patterns — the tyrant's isolation, the elimination of rivals, the manufacture of enemies, the corrosion of truthful counsel — that recur across two and a half millennia and radically different technologies. Reading Plato and Suetonius alongside twentieth-century material is what makes that visible.

⚠ Be prepared for genuinely difficult material. UWF names the costs imposed on subject populations as part of the analysis, and that means the Holocaust, the Soviet terror and famines, and the Chinese famine and Cultural Revolution — events involving mass death on an enormous scale. See the note below.

The course is also about the present, whether or not it says so. Democratic backsliding is a live subject in contemporary political science, and the mechanisms by which competitive systems become uncompetitive are among the best-documented findings in the field. A student who has read this material reads the news differently.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, and prerequisites. It does not publish contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived. The figure applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for 3 semester hours. Confirm the meeting schedule and delivery mode with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Define dictatorship, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism and distinguish them.
• Describe classical accounts of tyranny and their recurring observations.
• Describe typologies of non-democratic regimes and their usefulness.
• Distinguish personalist, military, party, and monarchical authoritarianism.
• Describe the conditions associated with the rise of dictatorships.
• Describe how dictatorships come to power, including through legal means.
• Describe the role of crisis, grievance, and institutional weakness.
• Describe mechanisms of authoritarian control including repression and surveillance.
• Describe propaganda, censorship, and the control of information.
• Describe the role of ideology in totalitarian regimes.
• Describe the cult of personality and its functions.
• Describe how dictators manage elites and prevent internal challenge.
• Describe co-optation, patronage, and the distribution of spoils.
• Describe the costs imposed on subject populations.
• Describe complicity, resistance, and the range of individual responses.
• Describe the causes and mechanisms of authoritarian breakdown.
• Describe transitions from authoritarian rule and their variation.
• Describe the long-term effects of dictatorship on subsequent politics.
• Describe transitional justice and how societies address a repressive past.
• Evaluate evidence from closed regimes and assess source reliability.
• Compare cases across time, region, and regime type.
• Relate historical cases to contemporary democratic backsliding.

Optional Outcomes

• Apply the material to a current case or jurisdiction.
• Evaluate competing explanations and weigh the evidence for each.
• Write a sustained argument supported by cited evidence.
• Use AI-assisted tools appropriately and verify every citation.
• Present and defend a position in discussion.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Defining dictatorship, authoritarianism, totalitarianism
• Classical accounts of tyranny
• Typologies of non-democratic regimes
• Personalist, military, party, monarchical rule
• Conditions for the rise of dictatorship
• Routes to power including legal ones
• Crisis, grievance, institutional weakness
• Repression and surveillance
• Propaganda, censorship, information control
• Ideology in totalitarian regimes
• The cult of personality
• Elite management
• Co-optation and patronage
• Costs to subject populations
• Complicity and resistance
• Authoritarian breakdown
• Transitions from authoritarian rule
• Long-term effects on politics
• Transitional justice
• Evaluating evidence from closed regimes
• Cross-case comparison
• Contemporary democratic backsliding

Optional Topics

• Current cases and applications
• Competing explanations and the evidence for them
• Sustained written argument
• Verification and source evaluation
• Discussion and defence of a position

Resources & Tools

• The readings the instructor assigns — ⚠ in a course spanning Plato to empirical political science, the reading list is the course and no external list substitutes for it.
• Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism — the foundational modern treatment, difficult and worth the effort.
• Linz's Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes — the standard typology that most subsequent work argues with.
• Svolik's The Politics of Authoritarian Rule and Levitsky and Ziblatt's How Democracies Die — the contemporary analytical and popular ends of the current literature.
• V-Dem (v-dem.net) — free; tracks autocratisation episodes with country-level data going back over a century, and makes the empirical claims in this course checkable.
• Primary sources in translation — much is free; regime documents, speeches and propaganda materials. ⚠ Reading propaganda as evidence rather than as argument is a specific analytical skill this course teaches.
• Memoir and testimony — Levi, Solzhenitsyn, and the testimony collections of the USC Shoah Foundation (substantially free). Empirical analysis and individual testimony answer different questions, and a serious course uses both.
• A UWF librarian — included in enrolment; an hour on database searching pays for itself across a whole degree, and it is also the fastest way to learn how to verify a source.

Career Pathways

• ⚠ Political science is a broad preparation rather than a vocational one, and it is more honest to say so than to imply a pipeline. The trainable skills are reading dense material fast, evaluating contested evidence, and writing a defensible argument — which is why the degree feeds so many destinations and guarantees none.
• Law — political science is among the most common pre-law majors, though law schools accept any major and care about grade point average and LSAT far more than field. Florida has eleven law schools.
• Government at every level (SOC 13-1041, compliance officers; 43-6014, administrative) — Florida's state agencies, 67 county governments and municipalities are large employers, and entry is frequently through analyst and management-trainee routes.
• Federal service — State Department, intelligence community, and the agencies with a presence in Northwest Florida. ⚠ Federal hiring runs on USAJOBS and on its own timetable; the Pathways programmes for students and recent graduates are the realistic entry route and are under-used.
• Legislative and campaign work — Tallahassee during session, congressional district offices, and campaigns. Frequently entered through an internship, which is the single most effective thing a student can do in this field.
• Policy analysis, advocacy and non-profits (SOC 19-3094, political scientist — note the occupation itself generally requires a graduate degree).
• International organisations, NGOs and development work — language competence is usually the binding constraint, and it is worth starting early rather than late.
• Journalism, teaching, business and consulting — common destinations that use the analytical training without requiring the subject.
• ⚠ Two pieces of concrete advice: do an internship, because in this field it substitutes for the vocational content the degree does not have; and learn a research method or a language, because a political science graduate who can also handle data or a second language is in a materially different position.

AI Integration

AI tools are genuinely useful in a reading- and writing-heavy discipline, and genuinely dangerous in specific ways that matter here more than in most fields.

• Where they help: summarising long documents, explaining an unfamiliar concept or institution, suggesting counterarguments to test your own position, drafting an outline, and checking whether your argument is actually followed by your evidence.
• ⚠⚠⚠ Where they fail catastrophically in this field: fabricated citations. Language models invent plausible-looking sources, authors, dates and quotations. Every reference must be verified in the library catalogue or database before it appears in your work — a fabricated citation is an academic integrity finding whether or not you knew.
• ⚠⚠ They are unreliable on anything contested, recent, or non-Anglophone. Political facts about a given country are frequently wrong in detail, out of date, or reflect the framing dominant in the training data. Verify against a country source, an area specialist, or a recognised dataset.
• ⚠ They flatten disagreement. A model will summarise a contested scholarly debate into a tidy consensus that does not exist, which is precisely the opposite of what a social science course is training you to see. Where the field genuinely disagrees, that disagreement is the content.
• They carry the biases of their sources. On politics, religion and economics this is not hypothetical, and a fluent answer is not a neutral one.
• Academic integrity: the course policy governs and policies differ. Read the syllabus, ask if unclear, disclose what you used when asked.
• ⚠ The professional argument for doing the reading yourself is not moralising. The trainable skill in this discipline is judgement about evidence and argument; outsourcing the reading trains nothing, and it is the one thing employers and graduate programmes actually test for.

Special Information

⚠⚠⚠ This course covers atrocity, and that deserves saying plainly

• UWF names the costs imposed on subject populations as part of the analysis. In practice that means the Holocaust, the Soviet terror and the famines, and the Great Chinese Famine and Cultural Revolution — and readings, testimony and films depicting mass violence.
• ⚠ This is not a reason to avoid the course. Understanding how these regimes worked is among the more important things a political education can offer, and the material is handled analytically rather than sensationally. But a student should know what they are registering for.
• ⚠⚠ Students with a personal or family connection to these events may find specific sessions difficult. Tell the instructor privately if that applies — not to be excused from the content, but because instructors can flag what is coming, and knowing in advance is the difference between prepared and ambushed.
• UWF Counseling and Psychological Services is free to students and is the right resource if the material sits badly. That is a normal response to this subject, not a failure of seriousness.
• Pace the reading. Testimony in particular is best read in smaller quantities over longer periods than a deadline encourages.

⚠⚠ Studying regimes you find abhorrent — the analytical discipline

• Explanation is not justification, and the distinction has to be held deliberately. Asking why a regime attracted support, or how it functioned effectively, is not endorsing it — and refusing to ask leaves you unable to recognise the pattern again.
• ⚠ The comfortable explanations are usually the wrong ones. Attributing totalitarianism to uniquely evil individuals or uniquely deficient national characters is both empirically weak and reassuring in a way the evidence does not support. The uncomfortable finding of this literature is how ordinary most participation was.
• ⚠⚠ Evidence from closed regimes requires particular scepticism. Official statistics are produced for political purposes; émigré accounts have their own selection effects; post-hoc testimony is shaped by what came after. Triangulating across source types is the method, and it is a transferable research skill.
• Resist drawing contemporary parallels too quickly. The comparison to present politics is legitimate and it is also where analysis most easily becomes assertion. The discipline is to specify the mechanism you are claiming is present, and then look for evidence of it — not to reason from resemblance.
• Novels and films are on the reading list for a reason and are not decoration: they convey the texture of life under surveillance and fear, which datasets cannot. They are evidence of a different kind, and treating them as such — rather than as illustration — is part of the course.

Transfer, articulation, and how Florida course levels work

In the Florida Statewide Course Numbering System the first digit is the level: 1 and 2 are lower division, 3 and 4 upper division, 5 and above graduate. ⚠ A lower-division course generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement. SCNS equivalency runs on the number and the content, so a course transfers as what it is rather than as what its title resembles.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture and discussion, with substantial reading and written work. ⚠ The reading load is the course, and it is where students most often fall behind irrecoverably.
• Ask about delivery mode. UWF offers substantial online provision; an online section of a discussion-based course demands more self-management, not less.
• UWF publishes no contact hours or terms of offering. Upper-division courses in small departments are frequently offered in alternate years — confirm the pattern with the department before planning a sequence around one.

CPO3055 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida.