https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1727-234X
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ABSTRACT
The establishment of electoral autocracy through gradual and “electoral” means by democratically elected leaders has recently emerged as one of the most researched phenomena in comparative politics. The literature and some of the most widely discussed cases suggest that this process typically takes place on the basis of majoritarian levels of popular support, often combined with an anti-establishment narrative. In this article, we show that this representation fails to capture the diversity characterizing these transitions and that general conclusions on these processes may have been influenced by the analysis of only a part of existing cases. Through the analysis of the universe of cases since 2000 and using V-Dem ERT and V-Party data, first we show that widely discussed cases are not representative of gradual transitions to electoral autocracy and describe the existence of alternative patterns to electoral autocracy, including an overlooked pattern that is opposite to the more discussed majoritarian-anti-establishment path. Then, we discuss and provide preliminary evidence of how different patterns to electoral autocracy can influence the types of strategies adopted by incumbents, and, as a consequence, the elaboration of potential countermeasures to contemporary attacks on democracy.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Cassani and Tomini, “Reversing Regimes and Concepts.”
2 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization.”
3 Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding.”
4 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization,” 9, 11, 13.
5 Levitsky and Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism,” 109.
6 Gamboa, “Opposition at the Margins,” 457, 459.
7 Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” 14.
8 Kneuer, “Unravelling Democratic Erosion.”
9 Schedler, “Again, What Is Populism?”.
10 E.g. Castaldo, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism in Turkey”; Levitsky and Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism.”
11 We use the term “continuist” in accordance with the concept of continuismo, defined by the The Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy), “Continuismo” as the “Tendency to extend a situation, a practice or a behavior, attempting to avoid possible changes.” Authors’ translation of “Tendencia a prolongar una situación, una práctica o un comportamiento, tratando de evitar posibles cambios.” https://dle.rae.es/continuismo (accessed November 27, 2022). For similar applications of the term in the democratization literature, see, for example, Haggard and Kaufman, “The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions.”
12 See also Cianetti and Hanley, “The End of the Backsliding Paradigm”; and Tomini, “Don’t Think of a Wave!”.
13 Edgell et al., Episodes of Regime Transformation Dataset (v13.0).
14 Lindberg et al., Varieties of Party Identity and Organization (V-Party) Dataset V2.
15 Edgell et al., Episodes of Regime Transformation Dataset (v13.0).
16 Maerz et al., “Episodes of Regime Transformation,” 4.
17 An episode is coded when the V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index experiences both an initial and total change equal or higher than 0.01 and 0.1, respectively. The episode is “ongoing as long as the EDI score (i) changes at least once every five consecutive years (tolerance), (ii) does not have a reverse annual change of 0.03 or greater (annual turn), and (iii) does not experience a cumulative reverse change of 0.10 over a five-year period (cumulative turn),” Maerz et al., “Episodes of Regime Transformation,” 6.
18 The case of El Salvador under Bukele is not included because of data availability: specifically, the V-Party dataset, which we use to identify the pattern of our cases (see below), does not record data for Bukele’s party New Ideas during the transition year (i.e. 2021) due to the dataset’s time coverage (2019 is the last coded year), and New Ideas did not participate in previous legislative elections.
19 Lindberg et al., Varieties of Party Identity and Organization (V-Party) Dataset V2; Lindberg et al., “Codebook Varieties of Party Identity and Organization (V–Party) V2.”
20 Of the 18 cases considered, 13 had a unicameral parliamentary structure in the year considered to measure the percentage of seats in the lower chamber (“v2lgbicam” variable in Coppedge et al., “V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v13”). Among the other cases, in India the upper chamber is not popularly elected while in Madagascar the Senate had not yet been created in 1998 in spite of constitutional provisions and was later composed in part by members elected through indirect elections, in part through presidential appointments (Senat de Madagascar, “Histoire du Sénat de Madagascar”). In the remaining cases (the two Philippine cases and Bolivia), the majoritarian or minoritarian character of these cases was also confirmed by the electoral results in the upper chamber (See COMELEC, “National and Local Elections – Senators”; ABS-CBN, “Halalan 2016”; Órgano Electoral Plurinacional, “Elecciones generales 2019”).
21 Lindberg et al., “Codebook Varieties of Party Identity and Organization (V–Party) V2.”
22 Regarding the transition to electoral autocracy under Duterte in the Philippines, the V-Party dataset does not code data for Duterte’s party (Democratic Party – Power of the Nation) in 2016 (the year to be considered according to our criteria). We therefore reported the percentage of seats won during the 2016 election from a different source (Hicken, “The Political Party System”) and used V-Party’s anti-elitism data from the following election (i.e. 2019).
23 Kneuer, “Unravelling Democratic Erosion.”
24 Schedler, “Again, What Is Populism?”.
25 E.g. Levitsky and Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism” and Mudde, “The Populist Zeitgeist.”
26 As an example of the tendency of the literature to equate contemporary gradual democratic demises with only certain patterns, Kneuer (Kneuer, “Unravelling Democratic Erosion”) considers the constitutive features of the majoritarian-anti-establishment pattern and what we describe as its likely strategic implications as standard elements of the “slow death” of democracy.
27 E.g. Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding.”
28 Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm.”
29 Quimpo, “The Philippines.”
30 The non-explicitly anti-establishment platform of the ruling parties in these three countries is also confirmed by the V-Party variable “v2paanteli_osp” that measures a party’s level of anti-elite rhetoric.
31 See Balderacchi, “Participatory Mechanisms.”
32 See Freedom House, Freedom in the World: Côte d’Ivoire.
33 Coronado, “Sin tecnicismos.”
34 Gjoni and Less, “Why Macedonia’s Discredited Rulers Will Win Again.”
35 Hall, “Learning from Past Experience.”
36 Hinfelaar, Rakner, and van de Walle, “Zambia,” 193.
37 Elkins, Ginsburg, and Melton, “Chronology of Constitutional Events.”
38 Edgell et al., Episodes of Regime Transformation Dataset (v13.0).
39 According to the V-Dem variables “Occurrence of obligatory referendum this year,” “v2ddyror,” which excludes all citizens-initiated referendum and codes only mandatory constitutional referendums, and the variable “Occurrence of plebiscite this year,” “v2ddyrpl” which counts the number of government and/or legislature-initiated plebiscites (Coppedge et al., “V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v13” and “V-Dem Codebook v13”).
40 The V-Dem variable Mobilization for autocracy “v2caautmob” (Coppedge et al., “V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v13” and “V-Dem Codebook v13”) measures the frequency and size of “mass mobilization for pro-autocratic aims.” It includes events that can be organized by non-state or state actors. This index has been computed by calculating the mean of this variable during the autocratization period (indicated by Edgell et al., Episodes of Regime Transformation Dataset (v13.0)) occurring under the ruling forces in power at the time of the transition from democracy to electoral autocracy.
41 See Freedom House, Freedom in the World: Macedonia.
42 Marusic, “Macedonia Tapes.”
43 Gorodnichenko, Goriunov, and Mylovanov, “Fraud in the Ukrainian election?”.
44 The index is an aggregated mean of two V-Dem indicators: “Election vote buying,” (“v2elvotbuy”), measuring vote and turnout buying, and “Election other voting irregularities,” (“v2elirreg”), indicating “other intentional irregularities by incumbent and/or opposition parties, and/or vote fraud” (Coppedge et al., “V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v13” and “V-Dem Codebook v13”). Together, they concern vote frauds during the election, thus excluding forms of pre-electoral manipulation. The data refer to the electoral years that have been used in and , with the only exceptions of India, Nicaragua, Serbia, Ukraine, and Zambia. For these cases we used, respectively, the electoral years 2019, 2011, 2016, 2012, and 2015, since these are the first elections where the party under whom democracy died was in control of the national executive. Guatemala is not included because data concerning this first election (held in 2023) are not available.
45 Freedom House, Freedom in the World: Madagascar.
46 Kneuer, “Unravelling Democratic Erosion”; Cianetti and Hanley, “The End of the Backsliding Paradigm.”
47 Tomini, “Don’t Think of a Wave!”.
48 E.g. Gamboa, “Opposition at the Margins”; Somer, McCoy, and Tuncel, “Toward a New Transition Theory”; Tomini, Gibril, and Bochev, “Standing up against Autocratization across Political Regimes.”
49 Tomini, “Don’t Think of a Wave!”; Cianetti and Hanley, “The End of the Backsliding Paradigm”; Balderacchi, “Overlooked Forms of Non-democracy?”.
50 Levitsky and Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Claudio Balderacchi
Claudio Balderacchi is a Postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Florence. He previously served as faculty member in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Universidad del Norte, Colombia. His research interests include hybrid political regimes, regime change, and processes of autocratization and democratization.
Luca Tomini
Luca Tomini is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and FNRS Research Associate. His research focuses on the comparative analysis of autocratization and democratization and on mixed-method research design.