Authoritarian Elasticity: How Autocracies May Effectively Mobilize for Crisis Management

Current studies on authoritarian resilience have yet to fully explain how autocracies can effectively cope with crises that threaten regime survival. To fill the gap, we introduce the concept of “authoritarian elasticity” to theorize how an autocracy may dramatically transform, expand, and repurpose its institutions for crisis management, fine‐tune its response to crisis development, and scale back mobilization when conditions permit to sustain the crisis management mode for an extended time. We argue, the agile institutional maneuvering capacity, which differs from the long‐term institutional adaptability highlighted in the current literature, explains not only how an autocracy can swiftly mobilize its resources during a crisis, but more importantly why such exhaustive mobilization may last longer than one would normally expect. We illustrate our theory empirically by examining how China elastically mobilized its Grid Management System during different phases of the COVID‐19 pandemic.