The emergence of anti-democratic movements is a central puzzle to social science. We study a novel and rich dataset covering Swedish municipalities during the interwar years and find a strong link between the presence of a military garrison and the emergence of fascist parties. We interpret...

First, we demonstrate that structural explanations based on socio-economic factors are insufficient to account for authoritarian regression in two of collapsology’s “crucial cases” – inter-war Germany and post-communist Russia. Instead, (a) a dearth of pro-democratic actors on the elite,...