Non-democratic regimes have increasingly moved beyond merely suppressing online discourse, and are shifting toward proactively subverting and co-opting social media for their own purposes. Namely, social media is increasingly being used to undermine the opposition, to shape the contours of public discussion, and to cheaply gather information about falsified public preferences. Social media is thus becoming not merely an obstacle to autocratic rule but another potential tool of regime durability. I lay out four mechanisms that link social media co-optation to autocratic resilience: 1) counter-mobilization, 2) discourse framing, 3) preference divulgence, and 4) elite coordination. I then detail the recent use of these tactics in mixed and autocratic regimes, with a particular focus on Russia, China, and the Middle East. This rapid evolution of government social media strategies has critical consequences for the future of electoral democracy and state-society relations.

What causes democratic waves? This article puts forward a theory of institutional waves that focuses on the effects of systemic transformations. It argues that abrupt shifts in the distribution of power among leading states create unique and powerful incentives for sweeping domestic reforms. A variety of statistical tests reveals strong support for the idea that shifts in hegemonic power have shaped waves of democracy, fascism, and communism in the twentieth century, independent of domestic factors or horizontal diffusion. These "hegemonic shocks" produce windows of opportunity for external regime imposition, enable rising powers to rapidly expand networks of trade and patronage, and inspire imitators by credibly revealing hidden information about relative regime effectiveness to foreign audiences. I outline these mechanisms of coercion, influence, and emulation that connect shocks to waves, empirically test their relationship, and illustrate the theory with two case studies-the wave of democratic transitions after World War I, and the fascist wave of the late interwar period. In sum, democracy in the twentieth century cannot be fully understood without examining the effects of hegemonic shocks.

This article examines how the principles of complex systems can illuminate recurring mechanisms of change in theories of international relations. It applies the logic of complex systems to two specific puzzles in international politicsthe problem of theorizing change in structural realism, and the dynamics of cross-border democratic diffusion. In the first case, by shifting the analysis of anarchy's consequences from state behavior to state attributes, complex systems can illustrate the sources of domestic and international transformations embedded in structural theories. This approach offers a way to think about democratization as a global process of interstate competition and socialization driven by the pressures of anarchy. In the second case, the principles of co-adaptation in complex systems can help reframe diffusion not as the unilinear spread of democracy but as the interplay of self-reinforcing and self-dampening dynamics, whose interaction shapes both actor expectations and democratic outcomes. In both cases, complex systems serve a limited but useful role; although not conducive to theory creation, the approach provides a useful analytical prism for examining patterns of change and continuity in global processes, and highlights concrete ways of improving models of transformations in international politics.

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