Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way - Elections Without Democracy - The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism
Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way - Elections Without Democracy - The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism
Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way - Elections Without Democracy - The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism
Journal of Democracy, Volume 13, Number 2, April 2002, pp. 51-65 (Article)
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Elections Without Democracy
The post–Cold War world has been marked by the proliferation of hy-
brid political regimes. In different ways, and to varying degrees, polities
across much of Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbab-
we), postcommunist Eurasia (Albania, Croatia, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine),
Asia (Malaysia, Taiwan), and Latin America (Haiti, Mexico, Paraguay,
Peru) combined democratic rules with authoritarian governance during
the 1990s. Scholars often treated these regimes as incomplete or transi-
tional forms of democracy. Yet in many cases these expectations (or
hopes) proved overly optimistic. Particularly in Africa and the former
Soviet Union, many regimes have either remained hybrid or moved in
an authoritarian direction. It may therefore be time to stop thinking of
these cases in terms of transitions to democracy and to begin thinking
about the specific types of regimes they actually are.
In recent years, many scholars have pointed to the importance of
hybrid regimes. Indeed, recent academic writings have produced a vari-
ety of labels for mixed cases, including not only “hybrid regime” but
also “semidemocracy,” “virtual democracy,” “electoral democracy,”
“pseudodemocracy,” “illiberal democracy,” “semi-authoritarianism,”
“soft authoritarianism,” “electoral authoritarianism,” and Freedom
House’s “Partly Free.”1 Yet much of this literature suffers from two
important weaknesses. First, many studies are characterized by a de-
mocratizing bias. Analyses frequently treat mixed regimes as partial or
“diminished” forms of democracy,2 or as undergoing prolonged transi-
1) The electoral arena. The first and most important arena of contes-
tation is the electoral arena. In authoritarian regimes, elections either do
not exist or are not seriously contested. Electoral competition is elimi-
nated either de jure, as in Cuba and China, or de facto, as in Kazakhstan
and Uzbekistan. In the latter, opposition parties are routinely banned or
disqualified from electoral competition, and opposition leaders are of-
ten jailed. In addition, independent or outside observers are prevented
from verifying results via parallel vote counts, which creates widespread
opportunities for vote stealing. As a result, opposition forces do not
Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way 55
4) The media. Finally, the media are often a central point of conten-
tion in competitive authoritarian regimes. In most full-blown autocracies,
the media are entirely state-owned, heavily censored, or systematically
repressed. Leading television and radio stations are controlled by the
government (or its close allies), and major independent newspapers and
magazines are either prohibited by law (as in Cuba) or de facto elimi-
nated (as in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan). Journalists who provoke
the ire of the government risk arrest, deportation, and even assassina-
tion. In competitive authoritarian regimes, by contrast, independent
media outlets are not only legal but often quite influential, and journal-
ists—though frequently threatened and periodically attacked—often
emerge as important opposition figures. In Peru, for example, independ-
ent newspapers such as La República and El Comercio and weekly
magazines such as Sí and Caretas operated freely throughout the 1990s.
In Ukraine, newspapers such as Zerkalo nedeli, Den, and, more recently,
Vicherni visti functioned as important sources of independent views on
the Kuchma government.
Independent media outlets often play a critical watchdog role by in-
vestigating and exposing government malfeasance. The Peruvian media
uncovered a range of government abuses, including the 1992 massacre
of students at La Cantuta University and the forgery of the signatures
needed for Fujimori’s party to qualify for the 2000 elections. In Russia,
Vladimir Gusinsky’s Independent TV was an important source of criti-
58 Journal of Democracy
Inherent Tensions
Authoritarian governments may coexist indefinitely with meaning-
ful democratic institutions. As long as incumbents avoid egregious (and
well-publicized) rights abuses and do not cancel or openly steal elec-
tions, the contradictions inherent in competitive authoritarianism may
Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way 59
Conceptualizing Nondemocracies
We conclude by echoing Thomas Carothers’ call to move beyond
what he calls the “transition paradigm.”19 It is now clear that early hopes
for democratization in much of the world were overly optimistic. Many
authoritarian regimes have survived the “third wave” of democratiza-
tion. In other cases, the collapse of one kind of authoritarianism yielded
not democracy but a new form of nondemocratic rule. Indeed, a decade
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the majority of the world’s inde-
pendent states remained nondemocratic. Yet whereas an extensive
literature has emerged concerning the causes and consequences of de-
mocratization, emerging types of democracy, and issues of democratic
consolidation, remarkably little research has been undertaken on the
emergence or persistence of nondemocratic regimes.
The post–Cold War Western liberal hegemony, global economic
change, developments in media and communications technologies, and
the growth of international networks aimed at promoting democracy
and human rights all have contributed to reshaping the opportunities
and constraints facing authoritarian elites. As a result, some forms of
authoritarianism, such as totalitarianism and bureaucratic authoritari-
anism, have become more difficult to sustain. At the same time, however,
several new (or partially new) nondemocratic regime types took on
greater importance in the 1990s, including competitive authoritarian-
64 Journal of Democracy
NOTES
The authors thank Jason Brownlee, Timothy Colton, Michael Coppedge, Keith Darden,
Jorge Domínguez, Steve Hanson, Marc Morjé Howard, Rory MacFarquhar, Mitch
Orenstein, Maria Popova, Andreas Schedler, Oxana Shevel, and Richard Snyder for
their comments on earlier drafts of this article.
1. Terry Lynn Karl, “The Hybrid Regimes of Central America,” Journal of Democ-
racy 6 (July 1995): 72–87; William Case, “Can the ‘Halfway House’ Stand?
Semidemocracy and Elite Theory in Three Southeast Asian Countries,” Comparative
Politics 28 (July 1996): 437–64; Richard A. Joseph, “Africa, 1990–1997: From Abertura
to Closure,” Journal of Democracy 9 (April 1998): 3–17; Larry Diamond, Developing
Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999);
Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76 (November–
December 1997): 22–41; Thomas Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning
Curve (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999); Gordon
P. Means, “Soft Authoritarianism in Malaysia and Singapore,” Journal of Democracy 7
(October 1996): 103–17; Andreas Schedler, “Mexico’s Victory: The Democratic Rev-
elation,” Journal of Democracy 11 (October 2000): 5–19; and M. Steven Fish,
“Authoritarianism Despite Elections: Russia in Light of Democratic Theory and Prac-
tice,” paper prepared for delivery at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political
Science Association, San Francisco, 30 August–2 September 2001.
2. See David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives: Concep-
tual Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics 49 (April 1997): 430–51.
3. See Jeffrey Herbst, “Political Liberalization in Africa after Ten Years,” Com-
parative Politics 33 (April 2001): 357–75; Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition
Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13 (January 2002): 5–21.
5. See Scott Mainwaring, Daniel Brinks, and Aníbal Pérez Linan, “Classifying Po-
litical Regimes in Latin America, 1945–1999,” Studies in Comparative International
Development 36 (Spring 2001). This definition is consistent with what Larry Diamond
calls “mid-range” conceptions of democracy (Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy,
13–15).
6. Obviously, the exact point at which violations of civil and political rights begin
to fundamentally alter the playing field is difficult to discern and will always be open
to debate. However, the problem of scoring borderline cases is common to all regime
conceptualizations.
and Iran,” paper presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Sci-
ence Association, San Francisco, 30 August–2 September 2001.
10. In Kenya, government-backed death squads were responsible for large-scale vio-
lence, particularly in ethnic minority areas. See Joel Barkan and Njuguna Ng’ethe,
“Kenya Tries Again,” in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., Democratization in
Africa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 185. Substantial violence
against opposition forces was also seen in Serbia and Zimbabwe in the 1990s.
11. See Keith Darden, “Blackmail as a Tool of State Domination: Ukraine Under
Kuchma,” East European Constitutional Review 10 (Spring–Summer 2001): 67–71.
14. These dilemmas are presented in an insightful way in Andreas Schedler, “The
Nested Game of Democratization by Elections,” International Political Science Re-
view 23 (January 2002).
15. For a more developed explanation, see Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “Com-
petitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regime Change in Peru and Ukraine in Comparative
Perspective,” Studies in Public Policy Working Paper No. 355 (Glasgow: University of
Strathclyde Center for the Study of Public Policy, 2001).
16. On obstacles to authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union, see Philip G. Roeder,
“The Rejection of Authoritarianism,” in Richard Anderson, M. Stephen Fish, Stephen
E. Hanson, and Philip G. Roeder, Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
17. Andrew Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of Bor-
derlands From Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2000), 97–99.
18. Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa:
Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 100.
20. See Richard Snyder, “Does Lootable Wealth Breed Disorder? States, Regimes,
and the Political Economy of Extraction,” paper presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting
of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 30 August–2 September
2001. See also Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, 37.