The article analyzes different types of authoritarian political regimes, the specific order of single-party, military and personalist regimes, the logic of their survival, the traits of authoritarian institutions and the chances of regime change and democratization from the mainstream rational choice perspective.

Globalization and politization of group differences, marketization and consumerism - all these lead to the fragmentation of contemporary polities and challenge universalist nation-state as a basic pattern of political order in Modernity. The article reviews research agenda on the issues of institutional sustainability of fragmented polities and comes to the conclusion that fragmented order is a much more problematic phenomenon than universalist political order of nation-state, since its sustainability is determined by a complex constellation of different factors.

The article explains the theoretical basis of Historic Institutionalism and describes the innovative instrument in institutional analysis, the Evolutionary Institutionalism focused on the genesis, change and stability of institutions. The article suggests that the evolutionary approach to institutional analysis which uses the tools provided by the institutional morphology extends research possibilities for cross-historical and cross-cultural comparative studies.

The article develops a new method for party system classification, based on representing information about the relative sizes of political parties in graphical form. This allows for identifying and classifying 162 democratic party systems that have existed in the world from 1792 through 2009. A new measure of party system fragmentation, the systemic effective number of parties, is introduced. The article arrives at a number of empirical conclusions regarding the regional and chronological distributions of different party system types, and the patterns of their sustainability.

The article analyses the processes of power succession in contemporary Russia and in XX century Mexico in the light of the logic of 'preemnichestvo' that is assumed as a special pattern of power succession. Mexican case allows drawing a variety of specific situations of 'preemnichestvo', many of which are projected clearly on Russia. Nevertheless, while maintaining the typological similarity, Russia realizes its own logic of power succession as 'preemnichestvo'.

The author analyses unintended or unanticipated outcomes of elections in the competitive authoritarian regimes. There is a distinction between four types of outcomes drawing on two dimensions - electoral results (victory or failure) and absence or presence of the mass protests immediately after elections. The non-parametric multivariate regression analysis of 349 cases from 1990 to 2011 allows calculating the statistical probabilities of the occurrence of particular type of unintended outcomes relative to pro-hegemonic scenario.

The article explores the external and internal factors of the «Arab spring» and offers evaluation of its events. In particular, it consistently analyzes the sources of Arab regimes' stability in 1990-2000, Middle East involvement in world politics of democratization and political change brought about by the change of power in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The evaluation of the prospects for democratization is given in the context of «Islamization» of the regional political space.

The article analyzes three routes of political development in the MENA region and distinguishes possible models of regime evolution taking into consideration the balance of forces among domestic groups and the interests of the foreign actors and the trajectory of the Islamic revolution of 1979.

The article analyzes the texts of constitutions adopted in Northern African countries after widespread uprisings which overthrew the Tunisian and Egyptian presidents as well as the parliamentary elections, set up on the basis of new fundamental laws resulting in the empowerment of Islamic parties.

The article analyzes the perils of presidentialism and semi-presidentialism, the conventional institutionalist wisdom about institutions and democratic stability and the present state of empirical research in the field of presidential studies.

The sample of third wave democracies was used to test if parliamentarianism fosters democratic consolidation. Elaborated by Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan concept of five arenas suggests a more fine approach to the complex phenomenon of regime consolidation. Operating consolidation according to this template could help explain the reverse transformation in new democracies. Research results partly support the original idea, but diversity in the third wave democracies warns against more definite confirmation.

This article explores the correlation between incomplete nation building and democratization at the example of inter-war Eastern Europe. The article considers the theories of nation and state building by J. Linz, A. Stepan, Ch. Tilly, D. Rustow, Conceptual map of Europe and Center-Periphery polarity by S. Rokkan, patterns of individual behavior towards formal rules by A. Hirschman and model of nation and state building by S. Bartolini.

The article reviews political science literature on courts in democracy and authoritarianism. Such a review can be useful in two ways. First, we take the classical definition of political science as a science that studies the acquisition and the use of power, and deduce the object of political studies of courts from it. We then check it against the actual empirical studies of courts done in political science. Second, we chart a map of political studies of courts and observe some trends that may later be used to set the agenda for future political research into courts in authoritarian regimes.