The neopatrimonial trend as the main vector of modern political development

The main purpose of this article is to prove that the democratic decline in the modern world and the rise of authoritarian populism are caused by the strengthening of a single neo-patrimonial trend that replaced the democratic “wave” of the 1990s. The reason for this trend is the crisis of Western liberal democracy, which is systemic in nature and is associated with the erosion of rational and legal institutions of the modern administrative state. Such attitudes determined the novelty and relevance of this study, in which the author carried out a comparative analysis of the political processes taking place today in the countries of the historical West and a number of states of the “nonWestern” world integrated into the international BRICS association. The empirical basis of the study was made up of data from the World Bank and other international organizations, as well as annual reports on the state of democracy in the world published by a number of research centers. As a result, the author came to the conclusion about the global nature of the modern neo-patrimonial “wave” that swept through various countries of the world at the beginning of the 21st century, regardless of the specifics of their political systems and the nature of political regimes.

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