Introduction

Authoritarianism is often labelled by liberal political commentators as fascist, communist, totalitarian, tyrannical, or populist. It is important to study political participation in non-democracies so we can form better conceptions and understand mechanisms of authoritarianism and impact on people’s political life in these contexts and know how ‘authoritarian’ ideas may gain traction in contemporary democratic states. Political participation and democratic capability thus occur in different and unique contexts of ‘public’ in which ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ manifest. The concept of democratic capability therefore is based on the people’s thoughts and actions rather than exclusively institutional principles that supposedly indicate spaces for participation. The framework is developed for research cross-nationally but also contextualised to account for a society’s trajectory of political experience. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.