Do All Bad Things Go Together? Electoral Authoritarianism and the Consequences of Political Change Short of Democratisation^*

* This paper is part of a research project on ‘The economic, social and political consequences of democratic reforms. A quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis’ (COD), funded by a Starting Grant of the European Research Council (Grant Agreement no. 262873, ‘Ideas’, 7th Framework Programme of the EU).

ABSTRACT

The article surveys the literature on electoral authoritarianism, paying special attention to the social consequences of the phenomenon. Autocrats have learnt to use elections, legislatures and multipartyism to their own advantage. Hence, nominally democratic institutions can turn into instruments of authoritarian consolidation, rather than citizen emancipation. Challenging this overly pessimistic scenario, recent research reveals that bad things do not necessarily go together. Electoral authoritarian rulers have both the incentives and the capabilities to improve citizen living conditions. Political change short of democratisation, that is, transition from closed to electoral forms of authoritarian rule, may thus generate mutual returns, and benefit both rulers and citizens, at least from a strictly socio-economic viewpoint. Yet this area of study is only in its infancy. The paper identifies and discusses a few issues that future research should address.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

* This paper is part of a research project on ‘The economic, social and political consequences of democratic reforms. A quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis’ (COD), funded by a Starting Grant of the European Research Council (Grant Agreement no. 262873, ‘Ideas’, 7th Framework Programme of the EU).

1 In the following sections, descriptive empirical evidence and statistics will be provided to support the discussion. This has purely illustrative purposes, without pretension to demonstrate or test the validity of competing hypotheses. Countries are classified as electoral authoritarian if they fulfil the following criteria: (1) executive and legislative offices are selected through universal suffrage elections in which multiple parties run; (2) a multi-party legislature exists in which opposition is represented; (3) executive elections do not meet standards of freedom and fairness. The fulfilment of criteria 1 and 2 is recorded based on data collected from DD (Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland 2010), and LIED (Skaaning, Gerring, and Bartusevičius 2015). The electoral process is considered free and fair only if countries score 8 in the POLITY IV ‘exrec’ concept variable (Marshall, Jaggers, and Gurr 2011). Regimes that fulfil criteria 1 and 2, and hold free and fair elections, are democratic. Differently from Diamond (2002), no distinction is made between electoral and liberal democracies, given the focus of the paper. Regimes that do not hold free and fair elections, and fail to meet either rule 1, 2 or both, are closed autocracies. Consistently with Diamond’s classification (2002), competitive and hegemonic autocracies are subtypes of electoral authoritarianism. Hence they meet criteria 1–3. They differ from each other based on opposition strength, which is measured by the electoral performance of the opposition vis-à-vis the ruling party, using the DPI (Beck et al. 2001). Electoral autocracies in which the ruling party gains less than 75% of seats (or votes in executive elections) are classified competitive (cf. Brownlee 2009), in particular.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council [262873, “Ideas”, 7FP].