authoritarianism – Active Learning in Political Science ©

Last year, Dr. Brooklyn Walker (UT Knoxville) wrote a guest post for ALPS, presenting her new game/class exercise, titled “The World’s Best (Worst) Dictator” Game/Exercise. The learning objectives focused on students’ understanding of authoritarian systems, the durability of authoritarian leaders’ powers, and what an authoritarian playbook looks like.

Since I am teaching Comparative Politics for the first time in a long time this semester, I wanted to try Dr. Walker’s game and implement a fun exercise in my syllabus. Below I discuss and reflect how I adapted the game to a twenty-five person classroom, what worked, and what interesting moments the students experienced.

Today’s guest post comes from Dr. Brooklyn Walker at Hutchinson Community College, Kansas!

In my introductory Comparative Politics class I want my students to relate how nondemocratic regimes maintain political control. Specifically, I do not want them to walk away from the class thinking that authoritarianism systems are a residual category or a black box. Instead, I want them to see authoritarian systems as regime types in which politics occur in (somewhat) predictable ways. This also includes them identifying specific strategies employed by elites desiring to establish more authoritarian control, a skill that could aid in identifying democratic backsliding. Lastly, my students should be able to point to real-world examples of these strategies.

I developed an activity called ‘The World’s Best (Worst) Dictator’, modeled after a hot air balloon debate format. Imagine a group of dictators is in a hot air balloon together and the balloon begins to lose altitude: Which dictator should be pitched overboard to lighten the weight? Students take on the role of a dictator, negotiating amongst themselves, making the case for why they are the best dictator while the others in the balloon failed. Two elements are necessary for this type of deep student discussion: (1) Students need to understand strategies of authoritarian control, and (2) they need to learn about the dictators in the balloon.

Tag: authoritarianism

The World’s Best (Worst) Dictator: Unpacking Durable Authoritarianism