After competitive authoritarianism hybrid regime legacies and the quality of democracy in Croatia

ABSTRACT

The impact of ‘authoritarian legacies’ on successor democracies has been widely researched with reference to every type of non-democratic regime. However, scant attention has been devoted to hybrid regimes legacies, despite the growing relevance acquired by these regimes in the last decades. This paper deals with the legacies of Levitsky and Way’s Competitive Authoritarian model, evaluating their impact on successor democracies through an analysis of the Croatian case. The research shows that the legacies of the Tuđman’s regime significantly affected the Quality of Democracy in Croatia. The innovative capacity of the former regime and the continuous nature of the transition explain this relevant impact, only partially moderated by the influence of important international actors (EU).

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarian legacies
• hybrid regimes
• competitive authoritarianism
• quality of democracy
• Croatia

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Matthijs Bogaards, Alessandro Cama, Marcelo Camerlo, Luís De Sousa, Erica Harris, Andrés Malamud and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán for their feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. Any remaining mistakes are alone our responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Levitsky and Way (2010) provide these data in the appendix of their book, and in the description of each case.

2. Discontinuous legacies may strongly affect new democracies, like the denazification process in Germany after World War II (Castaldo 2014; Castaldo and Di Sotto 2011).

3. Three cases that regressed to autocracy are not included: Nicaragua (hard-door transition) and Macedonia and Ukraine (rotten-door transitions). The twelve remaining cases are divided as follow: Croatia, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Guyana, Mexico, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Taiwan are hard-door transitions; Benin, Mali, Peru are rotten-door cases.

4. During the 1997 presidential campaign, the main HRT evening news program, Dnievnik, devoted to Tuđman 90% of the presidential elections’ coverage (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) 1997).

5. Only in 2010, the government changed the constitution in order to affirm that privatization crimes committed during the Homeland war do not have an expiration date (NIT 2011).

6. ‘[…] analysts suggest that large national companies, both state-owned and semiprivate […] are hiding parallel internal networks that are […] closely connected […] to the government. […] the general system of public tenders remains nontransparent, noncompetitive, and awarded mostly through pre-established arrangements and political connections’ (NIT 2008).

7. ‘[…], the EU has had little experience or expertise in using its leverage to bolster the rule of law and the fight against corruption among candidate states since these anchors of competent governance are addressed only indirectly by the existing acquis communautaire.’ (Vachudova 2014, 123).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia [SFRH/BPD/101442/2014,UID/SIC/50013/2013].