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ABSTRACT
This article introduces the concept of authoritarian backsliding as a class of strategies for the concentration of incumbent political power in hybrid regimes. Such actions include manipulating elections, violating civil liberties, creating an extremely uneven playing field for the opposition, and reducing the institutional constraints on executive power. While often falling short of a full regime change, backsliding can significantly alter the level of political competition in a country and reduce the quality of its political life. This article develops a theoretically-grounded strategy to identify and measure backsliding events since 1989, showing that they have been much more common than is typically appreciated. The article also shows the utility of the concept of backsliding for better understanding regime stability. Using cross-national analysis of backsliding events from 1989–2004, we find that threats such as opposition electoral gains or economic crises in resource-dependent regimes create incentives for authoritarian backsliding.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Paul Musgrave, Michael Weintraub, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Ms Jennifer Raymond Dresden is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on democratization in fragile contexts and her work has been published in Democracy & Society and Conflict Management and Peace Science (forthcoming).
Dr Marc Morjé Howard is professor of Government and Law at Georgetown University. In addition to numerous journal articles, he is the author of The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe and The Politics of Citizenship in Europe, both published by Cambridge University Press.
Notes
1. Puddington, “Pushback.”
2. Lindberg, “A Theory of Elections,” 317.
3. See Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm”; and Roessler and Howard, “Post-Cold War Political Regimes.”
4. Gandhi, Political Institutions; Brownlee, “Portents of Pluralism”; and Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.
5. Lust-Okar, Structuring Conflict; and Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy.
6. Levitsky and Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” 51.
7. For example, McFaul, “Fourth Wave.”
8. Howard and Roessler, “Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes”; Brownlee, “Portents of Pluralism”; Lindberg, Democracy and Elections in Africa.
9. Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm”; and Diamond, “Elections Without Democracy.”
10. Corrales and Penfold, “Venezuela”; Manning, “Mozambique's Slide into One-Party Rule”; McFaul and Petrov, “What the Elections Tell Us”; Way, “Authoritarian State Building.”
11. Franz, Geddes, and Wright, “Autocratic Rule.”
12. Ottaway, Democracy Challenged; and Gandhi, Political Institutions.
13. We can think of backsliding as a sort of family resemblance concept. While classical approaches to categorization with fixed, hierarchical criteria remain the most common form of conceptualization in political science (see, for example, Sartori, “Concept Misformation”; and Collier and Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives”), other approaches to defining and identifying categories have become increasingly widespread (Gerring and Barresi, “Putting Ordinary Language to Work”; and Ragin, Fuzzy Set Social Science). Family resemblance approaches identify concepts via a set of features, but do not require that all category members share all of these features in common (Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited”).
14. Backsliding in a hybrid regime is also distinct from authoritarian consolidation, which has a much narrower range of outcomes. The power concentration involved in backsliding frequently results in political systems that still retain space for political opposition to compete, even if this space is less open than in previous periods. Authoritarian consolidation removes this space altogether and leaves the incumbent with a greater monopoly on political power.
15. Hafner-Burton et al., “Election Violence.”
16. Snyder, “Beyond Electoral Authoritarianism,” 220.
17. Davenport, “State Repression.”
18. Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development; and Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism.”
19. Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation.
20. Aleman and Yang, “Democratic Transitions and Authoritarian Backslides.”
21. Svolik, “Learning to Love Democracy.”
22. Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism.”
23. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.
24. Levitsky and Way present a framework that defines competitive authoritarian regimes. With the addition of our fourth criterion (reductions in executive constraints), this framework is applicable to all electoral authoritarian regimes, a category that includes both competitive authoritarian and hegemonic authoritarian regimes. See Howard and Roessler, “Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes.”
25. Ibid., 365.
26. Ibid., 365–368.
27. This last condition approximates Levitsky and Way's contention that elections in competitive authoritarian regimes must be meaningful and that opposition actors must be able to operate in the public arena. A reduction in the formal constraints placed on executive action erodes both of these baseline conditions.
28. Devdariani, “Georgia”; and King, “Potemkin Democracy.”
29. National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, “Pre-Election Report.”
30. OSCE, “Republic of Georgia.”
31. Ibid., 7, 17.
32. Hyde and Marinov, “Which Elections Can be Lost.”
33. We include only elections in which the office of the incumbent leader is being contested, including presidential elections and parliamentary elections where there is no separate popular election for head of government. While elections for the executive leadership are meaningful across electoral systems, the importance of legislative elections varies widely. Without a separate indicator to weigh the power of legislatures vis-à-vis executives, we cannot reliably use the change in quality from a legislative election to an executive election as a measure of the fundamental quality of the system as a whole.
34. We use the aggregate score in this way in order to account for possible trade-offs among strategies of manipulation within the category. A similar approach is taken for the other forms of backsliding.
35. Beck, “Senegal's ‘Patrimonial Democrats.’”
36. Amnesty International, “Senegal: Mass Arrests”; and Amnesty International, “Senegal: Comments.”
37. Freedom House, “Freedom of the Press.”
38. Cingranelli, Richards, and Clay, “CIRI.” The Human Rights Dataset is coded so that lower values indicate more restrictive policies. Accordingly, we invert their measures for both the “freedom of association” measure and the “physical integrity index” measure.
39. The findings in are not driven by the selection of this cut point for the civil liberties backsliding measure. Reducing the cut point from 0.5 to 0.375 does not alter the core findings.
40. Both Unfair Elections and Uneven Playing Field are coded by executive electoral cycle rather than by year. The issues at stake in these conditions relate specifically to the conduct of elections, and coding them by year would generate a misleading set of false positives in which standard, cyclical increases in opposition harassment in the pre-election period would be mistaken for the much more robust changes underlying our concept of backsliding.
41. Pitcher, Party Politics, 146–186.
42. Carter Center, “Mozambique,” 14–16, 26.
43. Kelley, Monitoring Democracy.
44. Marshall, Gurr, and Jaggers, “Polity IV.”
45. Political Instability Task Force, “Tajikistan.”
46. We have excluded cases of military coups d’état from our list. These are generally accepted as a type of regime change, rather than a within-regime shift. Coup d’état data was taken from the Coup d’État Events List (Marshall and Marshall, “Coup d’État Events”).
47. The Supplemental Appendix provides a list of all cases of backsliding in hybrid regimes for the period 1989–2004. Due to time limitations in the data used to code backsliding, our list does not include backsliding episodes that begin after 2004. While attention to the phenomenon has grown in the wake of prominent events occurring after 2004, and demonstrate that backsliding had been a relatively common occurrence in countries around the world for at least the preceding decade. We acknowledge the limitations of our data, but political events in countries from Venezuela to Zimbabwe that occurred after our sample period suggest that our findings likely retain external validity.
48. A number of countries also oscillate between liberalization and backsliding on several of our measures, helping to account for the repeated number of backsliding events in our relatively brief time period. A complete investigation of this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this study, but provides a potentially fruitful avenue for future work.
49. We operationalize hybrid regimes as those systems in which there are multiple parties (at least one of which is not aligned with the party in power), as coded by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (“Democracy and Dictatorship”), and in which the overall Polity IV score is between −5 and 5, corresponding to the Polity definition of “anocracy.” Alternative codings are discussed in the Supplemental Appendix.
50. It is also true that several of these types of backsliding are endogenous to one another. Reductions in institutional executive constraints give an incumbent latitude to reduce the space for civil liberties, for example. For our purposes, this does not change our analysis of whether backsliding has occurred. We do not distinguish between a backsliding episode that occurs in one area and one that occurs in multiple areas because we are concerned in this study with evaluating the occurrence and not the type or the degree of authoritarian backsliding.
51. See, for example, the PARREG and PARCOMP components of the Polity IV index.
52. Ottaway, Democracy Challenged; and Lust-Okar, Structuring Conflict.
53. Stoner-Weiss, “Comparing Oranges and Apples,” 255; and Vreeland, “Political Institutions and Human Rights.”
54. Dahl, Polyarchy, 15.
55. Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development; Ulfelder and Lustik, “Modeling Transitions”; Svolik, “Learning to Love Democracy.”
56. Ross, “Does Oil Hinder Democracy”; Aslaksen, “Oil and Democracy.”
57. Goldberg, Wibbels, and Mvukiyehe, “Lessons From Strange Cases.”
58. Dunning, Crude Democracy; Haber and Menaldo, “Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism?”; Liou and Musgrave, “Refining the Oil Curse.”
59. Greene, “Political Economy.”
60. Case, “Manipulative Skills”; Lust-Okar, “Divided They Rule.”
61. Bunce and Wolchik, “Defining and Domesticating the Electoral Model,” 145.
62. Howard and Roessler, “Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes.”
63. Magaloni, “The Game of Electoral Fraud.”
64. Brownlee, “Portents of Pluralism.”
65. Schedler, “The Menu of Manipulation.”
66. Carter and Signorino, “Back to the Future.”
67. Successive years of backsliding are dropped from the model such that only the first year of a multi-year event is coded. A country re-enters the data set after a backsliding episode once there is a full year without any backsliding activity. Following Carter and Signorino, we cluster standard errors by country. Clustering standard errors by the episode to distinguish among multiple regime “phases” within a single country does not alter the results.
68. Both variables are taken from the World Development Indicators (World Bank, “World Development Indicators”).
69. This is taken from the NELDA data.
70. Boix and Stokes, “Endogenous Democratization”; Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy”; Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development.
71. This variable is taken from the World Bank (“World Development Indicators”). In an additional robustness check, we re-run Model 2 in but interact GDP per capita with a country's Polity score. The results (not reported) are not significant and do not change the findings.
72. We also run the model with a dummy variable for any election year (results not reported). This does not change the findings.
73. Paralleling the approach taken by Beck, Katz, and Tucker (“Taking Time Seriously,” 1272), we adopt the “primitive” solution for multiple backsliding episodes within a country and include a count variable (Prior Backslides) to account for the number of prior episodes of backsliding within a single country. We believe that the results from including repeated events are valuable and so report the models that include them in .
74. The primary findings from Model 2 of are robust to a number of robustness checks, including running the models with only the time polynomial and prior backsliding count variable as controls. The core findings remain the same. They are also robust to the inclusion of controls for the prior year's Polity IV score, foreign aid, and trade with Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Model 1 correctly predicts the outcome for 83.96% of observations, while Model 2 correctly predicts 84.17% of observations, with some under-prediction of actual backsliding events consistent with the data structure. Although the inclusion of the interaction term in Model 2 does not dramatically increase the percentage of observations correctly predicted, a comparison of the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and Bayesian information criterion (BIC) for both models supports Model 2 as the preferable specification.
75. Predicted probabilities are based on Model 2 in .
76. US State Department, “Burkina Faso.”
77. Howard and Roessler, “Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes”; and Magaloni, “The Game of Electoral Fraud.”
78. Bunce and Wolchik, “Defining and Domesticating the Electoral Model,” 145.
79. Unfortunately, our dichotomous measure does not offer us the ability to compare the effects of small opposition gains with more significant electoral advances. However, this offers a possible avenue for future research.
80. Schedler, “The Menu of Manipulation.”