The Regime Durability Variable: Four Frameworks on Ending Authoritarian Capture From Within

A primer for understanding regime durability, how these regimes actually fall, and what we can do about it starting immediately.

A note before we start. This one runs long, as many of my pieces do. I thought about splitting it. I decided not to. Article length is an output of the subject matter, not an input for the algorithm. If you came here for a hot take, there are plenty of places to get one. If you came here to understand how authoritarian regimes survive and how they fall, stick with the piece.

Academics who study authoritarianism for a living have spent decades building frameworks that explain how regimes consolidate, how they fall, and what reverses them. Most of us living through this do not have those frameworks. That gap is part of how authoritarian regimes win. The fix is simple. We learn what the scholars already know. Then we know what to do.

Some of you already have pieces of the picture. You may have encountered Erica Chenoweth’s work and the 3.5 percent rule, though there is far more to her research than the pop science version has shared. Selectorate theory might be familiar if you are a CGP Grey fan or if you have read The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. Steven Levitsky’s name you may know from How Democracies Die or from his more recent work on competitive authoritarianism with Lucan Way. And if you are a regular reader here, you already know the framework I have developed and published academically around Oppositional Federalism and Soft Secession.

Few people in American political discourse have pulled all four into one picture. These are four separate bodies of academic work, built by different scholars across different decades, answering different questions. This piece pulls them together, explains each one clearly, and shows how they connect into a single map of how authoritarian regimes rise, how they fall, and what Americans can do about our homegrown autocrats. All of this should be delivered in language that is clear whether you have a PhD in political science or you are still in high school.

An important definition up top: regime durability is how long a system of power lasts, and what makes it robust or fragile. Political scientists have spent decades studying what keeps authoritarian leaders in place and what finally removes them.

The first framework we will explore is called selectorate theory, and it comes from a 2011 book by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith called The Dictator’s Handbook. The core insight is simple enough to explain over a beer. Every leader, democratic or authoritarian, depends on the loyalty of a specific group of people to stay in power. Bueno de Mesquita calls this the winning coalition. In a functioning democracy, the winning coalition is huge, because you need millions of votes to stay in office, which means you have to deliver things that millions of people actually want, like roads, schools, hospitals, and safe streets. In a dictatorship, the winning coalition is tiny. It might be a few hundred generals, oligarchs, and security service chiefs. The dictator does not need to please the public. He needs to keep those few hundred people both paid off and scared.

Smaller coalitions produce more durable regimes.

This is why Putin has survived twenty-six years of disasters that would have ended any politician. His winning coalition is small, maybe a few hundred siloviki and energy oligarchs, and they are kept loyal through money from Gazprom and Rosneft plus the credible threat that defectors die, often in horrible ways. The Russian public’s approval of him is essentially decorative. If every Russian voter turned against him tomorrow and the FSB stayed loyal, he would still be president.

Now watch what Trump is doing and ask yourself what it looks like in selectorate terms.

The civil service has been purged of non-loyalists. Federal law enforcement got the same treatment. Ethics offices are shut. Loyalists run the FBI, the Pentagon, and the IRS. A Supreme Court majority operates under unitary executive theory, which holds that Republican presidents have unlimited authority while Democrats face every procedural and judicial obstacle the system can manufacture. Each move reduces the number of people whose cooperation he needs to govern. Each shrinks the winning coalition. That is the pattern of a leader building the machinery to not need your vote.

The second framework is called competitive authoritarianism, and it comes from Steven Levitsky at Harvard and Lucan Way at the University of Toronto. Their 2010 book argued that a whole category of modern regimes are neither full democracies nor full dictatorships. Elections happen. Opposition parties campaign. Most of the formal institutions of democracy stay in place. But the incumbent bends the rules hard enough that he almost always wins. He captures the courts and the media. He redraws districts to guarantee his party wins. His enemies face prosecution. He stays in power through elections that international observers call free but not fair.

Hungary under Orbán was their textbook case. And in October 2025, Levitsky told a Harvard Kennedy School forum that the United States has now joined the list. In his own words: “We have very clearly descended into at least a mild form of what I would call competitive authoritarianism.”

Two months later, in a December 2025 piece in Foreign Affairs with Way and Daniel Ziblatt, Levitsky wrote that the United States in 2025 “ceased to be a full democracy in the way that Canada, Germany, or even Argentina are democracies.” He also wrote the line that changes everything: “Trump’s authoritarian offensive is now unmistakable, but it is reversible.”

That word, reversible, is why this piece exists.

Levitsky and Way’s framework is built specifically to explain what selectorate theory explains poorly, which is the cases where authoritarian-leaning incumbents actually lose. They identified three conditions that converge when these regimes fall. First, the opposition unites behind a single credible alternative. Second, international linkage, particularly economic linkage with democracies, constrains how far the incumbent can go in crushing the opposition. Third, the patronage machine loses the money it needs to keep the coalition loyal.

Hungary had all three. And on April 12, 2026, the theory’s prediction came true in real time.

Péter Magyar was a former Fidesz insider. His ex-wife Judit Varga had served as Orbán’s justice minister until she was fired in a scandal that, per Kim Lane Scheppele of Princeton, “was probably Orbán’s fault, but that he blamed on her.” Magyar defected in 2024, built the Tisza Party, and won in a landslide earlier this month. Whether his government dismantles the Fidesz machine or becomes a different version of it is a question the next four years will answer, not this article.

What matters for our framework is what the structural moment in Hungary proves. The EU had frozen roughly 28 billion euros of structural funds over rule-of-law violations, starving the Fidesz patronage network that ran on EU money redirected to Orbán’s son-in-law and a handful of connected oligarchs. That is condition three in the Levitsky and Way framework. Hungary’s EU membership meant Orbán could not simply arrest Magyar or disappear him without triggering consequences that would make things worse. That is condition two. And Magyar’s defection from inside the machine, carrying a critique that only an insider could credibly deliver, created the conditions for opposition unity that Hungarian politics had failed to achieve for sixteen years. That is condition one. All three conditions converged, and the regime lost an election it had designed to be unloseable.

The turnout on April 12 hit the highest level since Hungary’s transition to democracy. Magyar won. And Levitsky, asked to comment, said this: “Oppositions can win despite a tilted playing field. Democracies are facing many challenges in many parts of the world, but so are autocracies.”

That is the hopeful part. Here is what he said in the next breath.

Defenders of democracy, he warned, should not take too much comfort from Orbán’s loss, because in some ways Trump has already been more oppressive. He specifically cited Trump’s use of the Justice Department to investigate political opponents and ICE’s shooting deaths of protesters, calling them “steps that Orbán’s government never took.”

The Harvard political scientist whose framework best explains how Orbán fell is telling us that the American case is already worse than the Hungarian one on the specific measures that predict whether a regime consolidates or falls. Scheppele has been making a parallel point for over a year. She noted that Orbán, in the early years of his rule, cut Hungarian university funding by about 40 percent, because universities are the bastion of independent opposition in a hybrid regime. “Orbán’s main weapon of attack against all independent institutions, including the universities, was always financial,” she said. “That’s exactly what we’re seeing here.” Look at what this administration has already done to American universities in one year, and then ask yourself whether we have fifteen years of Orbán’s runway or whether we are already past it.

An important note here that rescinding funding is a powerful tool. When we develop non-tax revenue streams, meaning money a state earns through public banking, investment funds, royalties, and state-owned enterprises rather than through federal grants, we are able to create a shield to protect us from many of the autocratic weapons.

The third framework evaluates tipping points that create regime change. Erica Chenoweth at the Harvard Kennedy School spent years building the largest dataset in the world on how authoritarian regimes fall. With Maria Stephan, they published Why Civil Resistance Works in 2011 and has updated the research since. The core finding has come to be called the 3.5 percent rule. When active, sustained nonviolent participation by 3.5 percent of a country’s population enters the field against an authoritarian regime, that regime essentially always falls. Every case in the dataset that hit the threshold succeeded. In the United States, 3.5 percent is roughly twelve million people.

What Chenoweth measured is not the moral case for nonviolent resistance. They measured the mechanism. In their Harvard Gazette interview, they described four elements that define a successful nonviolent campaign. “The first is a large and diverse participation that’s sustained. The second thing is that the movement needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other elites.” Their research found that at the 3.5 percent threshold, defections from the regime’s pillars begin to happen. Leaders in business, media, and politics start to shift. Police and military personnel become less willing to carry out orders against their own neighbors. Members of the ruling party start to calculate that the regime is going down and they need to be on the right side when it does. That is selectorate theory described from the opposite angle. The winning coalition breaks.

Here is where we actually stand. On June 14, 2025, the No Kings protests drew approximately five million participants across more than two thousand locations. On October 18, 2025, that number rose to approximately seven million. On March 28, 2026, eight million Americans took to the streets across more than 3,300 sites, making it the second-largest single-day protest in American history. The trajectory is climbing. We went from roughly 1.5 percent to 2 percent to approximately 2.4 percent across three successive mobilizations. We are two-thirds of the way to the threshold in single-day turnout. What we have not yet done is sustain it.

If you have looked at the No Kings protests and thought to yourself that this is a useless parade of hashtag resistance, that this is the same crowd marching once and going home while the regime only gets stronger, I want to take that critique seriously. Because Chenoweth takes it seriously too. Their own research has found that nonviolent movements in the 2010s were larger than in previous decades and statistically less effective, and they named the reasons. Movements relied too heavily on protest as the only tactic. They failed to build coalition discipline before mass mobilization. They did not maintain unity across waves. Her updated work explicitly finds that boycotts and strikes often do more damage to an authoritarian regime than street demonstrations, and that movements with higher participation from women have substantially better success rates.

Maria Stephan, her co-author on Why Civil Resistance Works, put it plainly. What the research found to be decisive, Stephan wrote, was “not simply a few mass demonstrations that brought a lot of people out into the streets, but sustained campaigns that drew together diverse groups of people from different parts of society; that were able to expand the repertoire of nonviolent actions beyond symbolic protests and street demonstrations to include sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, and other acts of non-cooperation; that integrated what Gandhi referred to as the ‘constructive program’ of self-governance and community care.”

“Could you imagine,” Chenoweth asked in their Harvard Gazette interview, “if 11.5 million people were doing something like mass noncooperation in a sustained way for nine to 18 months? Things would be totally different in this country.”

The prescription is mass noncooperation sustained for nine to eighteen months. We fill those institutions. Everyone does, in some capacity. A governor in a different way than a city clerk, a city clerk in a different way than a resident. Sustained refusal from the people inside the machinery can break it.

This is why the No Kings March numbers are and also why they are insufficient on their own. A country that can put eight million people in the streets on a single day has the raw capacity to generate the 3.5 percent threshold Chenoweth measured. But raw capacity is not the same as organized, sustained, diversified resistance. We have answered whether Americans will show up. We answered it three times in less than a year, each time in larger numbers. What we are still answering is what happens in between the marches, though millions of Americans are showing up in increasing numbers for the boycotts, strikes, refusals, parallel institutions, legislative pressure campaigns, that represent sufficient sustained noncooperation and opposition to break a regime before the world is destroyed.

The fourth framework is my own work, published academically on state-federal postures in response to federal authoritarian capture, with more scholarship in progress. The first three frameworks are theories of how authoritarian power operates and how it falls. Mine is the bridge from that theory to 250 years of American constitutional law and federalism in action.

Every posture in this framework has been sitting in the American constitutional order since the founding, and most of them have been used, by states across the ideological spectrum, in response to federal policies those states judged wrong, illegal, or incompatible with the safety of their residents. Governors have always held emergency powers and National Guard authority. State attorneys general have always held independent criminal authority under dual sovereignty doctrine . Mayors have always been able to refuse federal cooperation. State supreme courts have invalidated federal laws on state constitutional grounds and released federal prisoners. What did not exist was a map. The framework sorts the postures into tiers and shows how they can be concurrently applied, so that a governor in California and a district attorney in Philadelphia and a sheriff in Vermont can all represent influential pressure points against the same autocratic problem. There are a lot more of us than there are of them, and this applies that logic to the thousands of governmental agencies and levers that exist at the state, local, and even personal level.

The baseline is cooperative federalism. Call it tier zero. States share data with federal agencies, state law enforcement assists federal enforcement, state administrators implement federal policy. Most states on most days and in most ways. The framework starts counting at the point of departure from that baseline.

Tier one is uncooperative federalism. The state withholds cooperation with federal enforcement. A sheriff declines to hold a person for ICE. A state jail refuses to let federal agents operate inside it. A state legislature passes a law directing state police to leave federal enforcement to federal officers. Northern states did this throughout the 1840s and 1850s with Personal Liberty Laws that refused to let state officials or state jails assist federal slave-catchers. California did it in 1996 when it legalized medical cannabis while federal law still classified every gram as a Schedule I felony. Eleven states are doing it right now with laws limiting ICE partnerships, and the Trump DOJ has publicly listed those jurisdictions specifically to apply pressure. The posture is not partisan. Second Amendment sanctuary counties refuse to enforce federal gun laws they consider unconstitutional. Marijuana sanctuary states do the same in the other direction. What ties them together is the decision by a state government that its people are better served by the state declining to be a limb of federal enforcement. Many Democratic governors, legislatures, mayors, and city council members are currently engaged in Tier 1 response. Think of it as “we don’t have to help you do things.”

Tier two is soft secession, also known as financial independence. The state builds parallel financial and social infrastructure to protect its residents from federal corruption, aggression, and exploitation. Twenty-four states built entire legal cannabis markets, with state licensing agencies, state tax stamps, state testing requirements, and state retail regulations, creating a parallel commercial system where the federal one refused to exist. California has positioned its state-run banking infrastructure, its independent climate compacts with other states, and its separately negotiated trade relationships with other countries as exactly this kind of parallel system. Every state with a Medicaid expansion covering people the federal government tried to leave behind is doing tier two work. When the federal government becomes a threat to the people living in a state, the state builds what its residents need outside the federal government’s reach. Think of this tier as “we don’t need you and won’t let you hold us back.”

Tier three is oppositional federalism. The state uses its sovereign authority to go on offense against federal officers who break state law. During Prohibition, state courts let murder prosecutions proceed against federal agents who had shot into cars they claimed were transporting liquor, in cases like Castle v. Lewis and Ex parte Huston. In 1906, the Supreme Court allowed Pennsylvania to prosecute two federal soldiers for killing a civilian at a federal arsenal. Today, Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown is suing the sheriff of Adams County for cooperating with ICE in violation of state law. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has said on the record that any ICE agent committing a crime in his jurisdiction will be charged and prosecuted under state law that no presidential pardon can reach. A state attorney general indicting a federal agent is not hypothetical. It is American constitutional practice with a paper trail going back over a century. Think of this tier as “Hey, bad guys. We are coming for you.”

Tier four is constitutional non-compliance. The state uses its sovereign authority to nullify federal law within its borders and, when the situation demands, uses state power to stop federal action on state soil. Wisconsin did this in 1854.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the federal Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional, ordered federal prisoners released through state writs of habeas corpus, and freed Joshua Glover from federal custody. The federal government used the identical constitutional posture in 1957, when Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne into Little Rock to enforce school desegregation over the resistance of the governor. Same tier, same constitutional mechanism, wielded by different sovereigns, both in the direction of protecting people. Twenty-four states are operating in this tier right now on cannabis, licensing and regulating conduct the federal Controlled Substances Act defines as a felony, and the federal government has chosen not to enforce because the political cost of enforcement is too high.

That is what tier four looks like when a state is willing to use it and the federal government is not willing to pay to stop it. What a state should do with this posture today, against mass detention without due process or the operation of federal concentration camps within its borders, is not a new question. It has American precedent pointing toward protecting people. Think of this tier as “there are literal concentration camps, whether it’s me, or me and my friends, or the mayor ordering the city police, or the governor activating the national guard, we are using every power we have to stop horrific things from happening.”

The tiers stack and overlap. A state can, currently is, and definitely should be operating in multiple tiers simultaneously, because the federal regime is operating across multiple pressure vectors simultaneously. A state that licenses cannabis, limits ICE cooperation, builds its own banking infrastructure to fund universal healthcare, and charges a federal agent who commits assault is operating in tiers one, two, two, and three all at once. California is currently operating to various degrees in all three tiers. It isn’t yet at the sufficient pitch, but it is a necessary start.

The framework does not hand anyone new authority. The authority has always been there. What the framework does is make the patchwork legible so actors can plan their moves, so that a governor can see which tier to operate in and what escalation looks like, a district attorney can plan prosecutions that stack with what his state attorney general is doing, and a sheriff can see that his daily cooperation decisions are part of a larger structure and adjust them accordingly.

The American constitutional order has been operating in this taxonomy for 250 years. Most Americans have never seen the map. The map is what turns thousands of disconnected decisions by governors and attorneys general and mayors and sheriffs into a coordinated national strategy for reversing authoritarian consolidation and ultimately restoring democracy without needing to wait for a single, and stealable, election.

Now put all four frameworks on the table at the same time. What comes next is the synthesis. It is an argument, built from the academic scholarship, rather than a claim any of the four scholars has made in exactly these terms.

Selectorate theory tells us what the regime is trying to do. Shrink the coalition until only a few hundred people matter, and use the tools of government to make every other American irrelevant to staying in power. Competitive authoritarianism tells us that this kind of regime falls when three conditions converge, which are opposition unity, international constraint, and patronage collapse. Chenoweth’s research tells us what the public mobilization piece of opposition unity has to look like in numbers, which is 3.5 percent sustained, and tells us the mechanism is defection from the regime’s pillars. The Oppositional Federalism framework is the bridge from that theory to American practice, mapping the sovereign postures city, local, and state governments already hold onto a structure that tells every actor which tier their moment requires and what the next move is.

This is regime durability as a fight. The regime is trying to extend its life by shrinking its coalition. We are trying to cut its life short by breaking the coalition it has already built. Every executive order, every firing, every state AG filing, every protest you attend or skip, every billionaire who stays silent or speaks up. Every one of those moves is a deposit or a withdrawal from the regime’s durability, and now you can see the ledger.

Levitsky’s warning is the one that should shape every decision we make from here. Trump is already doing things Orbán never did. We do not get to copy the Hungarian playbook and wait for 2028, because the 2028 election may not look anything like the April 2026 election in Hungary, and we cannot count on the rigging being only partial by the time we get there. The work has to be happening now, at every level, in every state, in every institution. Ten thousand complaints filed with fifty state attorneys general is progress. State legislatures passing non-cooperation bills bring us closer still. District Attorneys investigating and charging high level members of the regime is even more progress still. Every institutional refusal, every citizen complaint, every sustained nonviolent action adds up into the combined force that breaks the regime’s coalition before the regime can finish shrinking it.

We are the durability variable now.

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