Elections Under Authoritarianism (original) (raw)
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Electoral Authoritarianism in the Third Wave of Democratization: Concepts and Regime Trajectories
2011
During the past decade, scholars have plunged back into the issue of authoritarian politics, proposing new concepts such as hybrid regimes, electoral authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism, and dominant party authoritarian regimes, to demonstrate how authoritarianism can function via ostensibly democratic institutions. This article will review four academic works in order to solve the following questions: Why has the focus of literature shifted from democratization to authoritarian studies? What new concepts have scholars established? What are the similarities and differences across each new concept? What is the boundary between new concepts and the more traditional concepts of democracy and authoritarianism? Why do some electoral authoritarian regimes persist while others collapse? What crucial factors have scholars presented in this regard? This paper yields three findings. Firstly, the trend towards studies of authoritarianism is a reflection upon existing literature on the third wave of democratization. Many regimes have adopted democratic institutions but incumbents continue to employ authoritarian methods to tilt elections in their favor. These regimes should be classified as neither democratic nor conventionally authoritarian, but can instead be considered electoral authoritarianism. Secondly, electoral authoritarianism and hybrid regimes are two interchangeable concepts which overarch competitive authoritarianism. The dominant party authoritarian regime type is relatively narrower in scope. Finally, three factors which may account for regime trajectories have been receiving great attention in academia: (1) international factors (Western leverage and linkage); (2) the authoritarian state/party"s characteristics (organizational cohesion, economic control, repression capacity); and (3) the opposition"s coalition and strategy.
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Does pre-election protest have an effect on the outcomes of authoritarian elections? Electoral authoritarian regimes use elections to consolidate their power and claim democratic legitimacy. Nonetheless, on some occasions authoritarian incumbents lose elections despite their advantages and a democratic breakthrough is achieved. I propose that pre-election protest contributes to such election results. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on the effectiveness of post-election upheavals, but the effects of pre-election protest are still theoretically and empirically understudied. This paper proposes a theory for why pre-election contention has an independent effect on incumbent defeat of authoritarian regimes and democratization. I present empirical support for the association between pre-election protest activities, incumbent defeat, and democratization using data from 190 elections across 65 countries with non-democratic regimes. The findings of this analysis have important implications for studies of social movements, authoritarian politics, and democratization.
The Dictator’s Dilemma at the Ballot Box
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Chapter 1. Introduction 3 1.1. Twin Puzzles of Autocratic Elections 3 1.2. Argument in Brief 6 1.3. Contributions 11 1.4. Research Design, Key Empirical Findings, and the Organization of the Book 24 Chapter 2. A Theory of Autocratic Elections 32 2.1. Introduction 32 2.2. Fundamental Problems of Autocratic Rule and the Roles of Elections in Dictatorships 34 2.3. The Electoral Dilemma in Dictatorships 36 2.4. The Game of Autocratic Elections: The Dictator, Ruling Elites, and the Opposition 40 2.5. The Dictator's Tools at the Ballot Box: Electoral Manipulation and Economic Maneuvering 47
Election turnout in authoritarian regimes
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What explains election turnout in authoritarian regimes? Despite the significant energy, resources, and time ruling parties devote to improving the participation rates of citizens, there exists extraordinary variation both within and across authoritarian regimes. This paper hypothesizes that election turnout is explained by contes-tation, coercion and clientelism. To test this theory, the paper uses an original dataset capturing turnout rates for 548 legislative elections in 108 countries between 1960 and 2011. The resulting empirical analysis confirms these Hypothesis-with one notable exception. Instead of encouraging turnout amongst citizens, clientelism discourages it. This counterintuitive finding occurs because citizens lack the optimum incentives for participation and ruling parties lack effective monitoring strategies of that behavior. The conclusion of the paper addresses its implications for existing theories of authoritarian politics and proposes several avenues for further research on election turnout under authoritarianism.
World Politics, 2016
Do elections reduce or increase the risk of autocratic regime breakdown? This article addresses this contested question by distinguishing between election events and the institution of elections. The authors propose that elections stabilize autocracies in the long term but at the price of short-term instability. Elections are conducive to regime survival in the long run because they improve capacities for co-optation and repression but produce short-term instability because they serve as focal points for regime opposition. Drawing on data from 259 autocracies from 1946 to 2008, the authors show that elections increase the short-term probability of regime failure. The estimated effect is retained when accounting for the endogeneity of autocratic elections; this finding is critical, since some autocrats may or may not hold elections because of perceived effects on regime survival. The authors also find that this destabilizing effect does not operate in the long term. They find some, a...
Authoritarian-Led Democratization
Annual Review of Political Science
Authoritarian regimes become more likely to democratize when they face little choice or little risk. In some cases, the risk of democratization to authoritarian incumbents is so low that ending authoritarianism might not mean exiting power at all. This article develops a unified theory of authoritarian-led democratization under conditions of relatively low incumbent risk. We argue that the party strength of the authoritarian incumbent is the most pivotal factor in authoritarian-led democratization. When incumbent party strength has been substantial enough to give incumbent authoritarian politicians significant electoral victory confidence, nondemocratic regimes have pursued reversible democratic experiments that eventually culminated in stable, thriving democracies. Evidence from Europe's first wave of democratization and more recent democratic transitions in Taiwan and Ghana illustrate how party strength has underpinned authoritarian-led democratization across the world and acr...
2013
Since the end of the Cold War, comparativists have radically reexamined the role that elections play in authoritarian contexts. One group argues elections are congruent with authoritarianism and actually help to stabilize non-democratic forms of rule. A second group has challenged this reasoning by arguing that elections can function as a mechanism for democratization of authoritarian regimes. In this paper we test whether elections have functioned as a mechanism of change or of neo-authoritarian stability in the postcommunist world. We generally find that elections neither promote democracy nor strengthen authoritarianism. However, we do find that in energy-rich states elections promote authoritarianism, though of a somewhat more benign sort. We also find that the mechanisms of electoral competitiveness thought to promote democracy function differently in the postcommunist context and explore this in greater detail through a paired case study of electoral mobilization in Slovakia and Belarus.