Based on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized.
Today, electoral authoritarianism represents the most common form of political regime in the developing world - and the one we know least about. Filling in the lacuna, this book presents cutting-edge research on the internal dynamics of electoral authoritarian regimes.
Although most authoritarian regimes nowadays hold competitive elections, the actual level of competitiveness of these elections varies greatly: while some autocrats win (or cheat) by comfortable margins, others must work hard in order to win, and a few step down following an electoral defeat. The three papers that compose this dissertation investigate how economic conditions, subnational elections, player's expectations about the future and their capacity to formulate credible commitments affect the competitiveness of authoritarian elections.The first paper of the dissertation examines the origins of ruling party defections and opposition coalitions in authoritarian elections. Using a formal model, I show that (a) defections and coalitions depend on the interaction between players' electoral strength and their capacity to make credible commitments; and (b) defections from the ruling party increase the opposition's incentives to behave opportunistically, thus making coalitions less likely. I support this claim with an analysis of executive elections in authoritarian regimes between 1980 and 2014.The second paper of the dissertation studies how the economy and elections affect authoritarian survival. In regimes that do not hold competitive elections, the government will be vulnerable to coups or protests whenever economic conditions are sufficiently bad. When elections are held regularly, on the other hand, there is a trade-off: Since elections make it easier to coordinate against the government, these regimes should be especially vulnerable to bad economic conditions in election years; at the same time, the anticipation of future elections will dissuade protests and coups in no-election periods, making the regime more resilient to short-term economic conditions. I examine this claim on a panel of 214 authoritarian regimes between 1952 and 2012.The last paper of the dissertation investigates whether subnational elections can contribute to the development of opposition parties from the bottom up. I argue that opposition parties can use subnational governments as "springboards" from which to increase their electoral support in neighboring districts in future elections, i.e. opposition parties should do better in municipality m at time t if they already captured some of m's neighbors at t-1. Using data from municipal elections in Mexico between 1984 and 2000, I find evidence of such diffusion effects for the PAN, though not for the PRD.
This volume offers a major new theory of authoritarian politics. It studies regime struggles between government and opposition under electoral authoritarianism and argues that autocracies suffer from institutional uncertainties.
This book generates a wealth of new empirical information about Latin American party systems and contributes richly to major theoretical debates about party systems and democracy.
Dictatorship is not what it was once. Military and single-party regimes have been withering away. Today, most dictators organize multiparty elections. The Politics of Uncertainty presents an analytical framework and empirical data that allow us to understand the distinctive political dynamics of these new electoral authoritarian regimes. It argues that all autocracies suffer from institutional uncertainties: their hold on power is never secure. They also suffer from informational uncertainties: they can never know for sure how secure they are. The author identifies these uncertainties as the central axes of regimes conflicts under dictatorship. The "politics of uncertainty" comprises the struggle between rulers and dissidents over these twin uncertainties. In electoral autocracies, it unfolds primarily as competition over electoral uncertainty. The study of electoral authoritarianism is a vibrant growth industry in political science and this book is required reading for all students of elections, authoritarianism, and democratization. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
This book examines how opposition groups respond to the dilemma posed by authoritarian elections in the Arab World, with specific focus on Jordan and Algeria. While scholars have investigated critical questions such as why authoritarian rulers would hold elections and whether such elections lead to further political liberalization, there has been comparatively little work on the strategies adopted by opposition groups during authoritarian elections. Nevertheless, we know their strategic choices can have important implications for the legitimacy of the electoral process, reform, democratization, and post-election conflicts. This project fills in an important gap in our understanding of opposition politics under authoritarianism by offering an explanation for the range of strategies adopted by opposition groups in the face of contentious elections in the Arab World.
