Variation in subnational electoral authoritarianism: evidence from the Russian Federation

Despite the burgeoning comparative literature on electoral authoritarian regimes, fewer studies have accounted for the emergence of hegemonic and competitive authoritarian regimes at the subnational level. This article examines the variation in subnational electoral authoritarianism with data from the Russian Federation. First, the article shows that by using a comparative regime classification most Russian subnational cases can be classified as electoral authoritarian between 1991 and 2005. Yet, there are considerable differences in competitiveness between the electoral authoritarian regimes. The article accounts for this variation by drawing on both comparative electoral authoritarianism literature as well as more context-specific explanations. Statistical analysis on 192 subnational electoral authoritarian cases shows that the determinants of Russian subnational authoritarian stability are rather similar to those found in cross-national studies. Subnational (non)competitiveness in Russia appears to be related to the structure of the regional economy and natural resource rents, and to a lesser degree to the specific Russian federal context. Authoritarian “know how” also plays a role in authoritarian regime building. The findings of the article contribute to the literature on electoral authoritarianism, subnational democratization and Russian subnational politics.     

Economic foundations of subnational authoritarianism: insights and evidence from qualitative and quantitative research

A growing body of subnational comparative research on democracy has focused attention on ‘subnational authoritarianism’, in tandem with increasing interest in local politics across the developing world. Unsurprisingly, this evolving field of study has been characterized by a diversity – if not a dichotomy – of approaches, with quantitative and qualitative research proceeding along parallel and sometimes intersecting tracks. But scholars working in diverse contexts and with diverging approaches have begun to converge on a set of explanations for the patterns of variance observed in subnational authoritarianism within and across national settings. Drawing on studies of Russia, the United States, southern Italy, Argentina and West Africa, this article shows how scholarship has identified the underlying economic foundations of subnational authoritarianism. Combining the findings of recent qualitative and quantitative studies with the author's own research in the Philippines, this article spells out a set of hypotheses which may help to explain patterns of variance in subnational authoritarianism. Variance in subnational authoritarianism, it is suggested, stems from varying local economic conditions and possibilities for accumulation and maintenance of control over local economies. Further ‘mapping’ of subnational authoritarianism thus requires local fieldwork to complement the strengths – and overcome the limitations – of quantitative research.     

Explaining incumbent re-election in authoritarian elections: evidence from a Chinese county

Despite the burgeoning comparative literature on authoritarian elections, less is known about the dynamics of competition in authoritarian subnational elections where opposition is not allowed to organize into parties. Local elections without partisan competition in single-party authoritarian regimes provide considerable advantages to the incumbents and may well turn the incumbent advantage common in liberal democracies into incumbent dominance. What economic factors can break incumbent dominance in such competition without parties? With quantitative and qualitative evidence from grassroots elections in China, this article illustrates that economic growth and industrial economic structure offering more economic autonomy help to break incumbent dominance and increase the prospects of successful challenge to incumbency by non-party outsiders. The examination of the findings in a broad context in China and against the backdrop of local democratization in the developing world suggests that though we may observe successful challenge to incumbency, liberalization of the political system requires not only competition, but also a relatively autonomous economy to sustain liberalization prospects. The findings contribute to the literature on electoral authoritarianism, subnational democratization and China’s grassroots elections.     

Explaining Myanmar's regime transition: the periphery is central

In 2010, Myanmar (Burma) held its first elections after 22?years of direct military rule. Few compelling explanations for this regime transition have emerged. This article critiques popular accounts and potential explanations generated by theories of authoritarian “regime breakdown” and “regime maintenance”. It returns instead to the classical literature on military intervention and withdrawal. Military regimes, when not terminated by internal factionalism or external unrest, typically liberalize once they feel they have sufficiently addressed the crises that prompted their seizure of power. This was the case in Myanmar. The military intervened for fear that political unrest and ethnic-minority separatist insurgencies would destroy Myanmar's always-fragile territorial integrity and sovereignty. Far from suddenly liberalizing in 2010, the regime sought to create a “disciplined democracy” to safeguard its preferred social and political order twice before, but was thwarted by societal opposition. Its success in 2010 stemmed from a strategy of coercive state-building and economic incorporation via “ceasefire capitalism”, which weakened and co-opted much of the opposition. Having altered the balance of forces in its favour, the regime felt sufficiently confident to impose its preferred settlement. However, the transition neither reflected total “victory” for the military nor secured a genuine or lasting peace.     

Elections,Election Outcomes,and Democracy in Southern Africa

Elections and election outcomes are widely used as a convenient short cut to measuring democracy. If this were correct, information on elections and election outcomes would be a time- and cost-saving means of identifying regime type. However, this article shows that the influential democracy measures of Beck et al., Ferree and Singh, Przeworski et al., and Vanhanen fail to adequately identify regime type when applied to ten countries in Southern Africa. For most countries, it is not possible to distinguish democracies from non-democracies on the basis of elections and election outcomes. Multi-party elections are not always free, fair, and democratic; dominant parties and dominant party systems are not necessarily undemocratic; large election victories are not by themselves proof of foul play; and not all authoritarian regimes maintain their rule through overwhelming parliamentary or electoral majorities.     

Presidential power and democratization by elections in Africa

Do elections in and of themselves provide mechanisms for democratization? The “democratization by elections” thesis has been challenged, yet scholars still differ over its substantive effect. Some of the disagreement is over the specific outcome of interest, with proponents advocating for a narrower definition of “democratization”. Others want to know more about the factors that condition how elections impact on democracy. This article addresses both points by demonstrating that in Africa the extent of formal presidential power significantly shapes the ability of repeated elections to socialize more broadly democratic behaviour in the form of greater civil and private liberties, more civil society participation, and wider egalitarianism. Using recently available data on African presidents and the democratic qualities of regimes, the article demonstrates the ongoing influence of presidential power in Africa and provides some previously unstudied constraints on the democratization by elections thesis.     

The transformation of political party opposition in Malaysia and its implications for the electoral authoritarian regime

Malaysia's electoral authoritarian system is increasingly coming under pressure. Indicators of this are the metamorphosis of opposition forces since 1998 and, in particular, the results of the 2008 parliamentary elections. From 1957 until 1998 political party opposition was fragmented. An initial transformation of political party opposition began at the height of the Asian financial crisis, after a major conflict within the ruling United Malays National Organization in 1998. However, the regime was able to weaken the opposition, resulting in its poor performance in the 2004 elections. Afterwards, in a second transformation that has continued until the present time, an oppositional People's Alliance (Pakatan Rakyat) has emerged that now has a serious chance of taking over the federal government. This article argues that the increase in the strength and cohesion of political party opposition since 1998 has been caused mainly by five combined factors: the emergence of pro-democratic segments within a multi-ethnic and multi-religious middle class; the intensified interaction of political parties and civil society forces; the impact of new media; the eroded legitimacy of the United Malays National Organization and other parties of the ruling coalition; and the internal reforms within the Islamist Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (Parti Islam SeMalaysia). Consequently it has become conceivable that the country will incrementally democratize in a protracted transition. Although the 1999 and 2008 elections were not foundational, they have been transitional. They may not have inaugurated a new democratic regime, but they have marked important phases in the struggle for democracy in Malaysia.     

Conceptualizing and measuring subnational democracy across Indian states

India is often credited for its success as the world’s largest democracy, but variation in subnational democracy across its states has not been systematically incorporated into scholarship on subnational regimes. This paper develops a conceptualization of subnational democracy based on four constitutive dimensions – turnover, contestation, autonomy and clean elections – and introduces a comprehensive dataset to measure each of the dimensions between 1985 and 2013. The inclusion of India – an older parliamentary democracy with a centralized federal system – broadens the universe of cases for the study of subnational regimes, and reveals variation across constitutive dimensions that has not yet been theorized. The paper shows that threats to subnational democracy come from multiple directions, including the central government and non-state armed actors, that subnational variation persists even decades after a transition at the national-level, and that subnational democracy declines in some states in spite of the national democratic track record.     

Digital dilemmas: the unintended consequences of election technology

Digital technologies are increasingly used in elections around the world. Where the resources and capacity of the state are limited, some have argued that such technologies make it possible to rapidly “leapfrog” to cleaner and more credible elections. This article argues that the growing use of these technologies has been driven by the fetishization of technology rather than by rigorous assessment of their effectiveness; that they may create significant opportunities for corruption that (among other things) vitiate their potential impact; and that they carry significant opportunity costs. Indeed, precisely because new technology tends to deflect attention away from more “traditional” strategies, the failure of digital checks and balances often renders an electoral process even more vulnerable to rigging than it was before. These observations are not intended as a manifesto against the digitization of elections; apart from anything else, we argue that the drivers of the adoption of these new methods are too powerful to resist. But the analysis draws attention to the importance of more careful assessments of the problems, as well as the benefits, of such technologies – and to the need for more careful planning in their deployment.     

Getting elections right? Measuring electoral integrity

Holding elections has become a global norm. Unfortunately, the integrity of elections varies strongly, ranging from “free and fair” elections with genuine contestation to “façade” elections marred by manipulation and fraud. Clearly, electoral integrity is a topic of increasing concern. Yet electoral integrity is notoriously difficult to measure, and hence taking stock of the available data is important. This article compares cross-national data sets measuring electoral integrity. The first part evaluates how the different data sets (a) conceptualize electoral integrity, (b) move from concepts to indicators, and (c) move from indicators to data. The second part analyses how different data sets code the same elections, seeking to explain the sources of disagreement about electoral integrity. The sample analysed comprises 746 elections in 95 third and fourth wave regimes from 1974 until 2009. I find that conceptual and measurement choices affect disagreement about election integrity, and also find that elections of lower integrity and post-conflict elections generate higher disagreement about election integrity. The article concludes with a discussion of results and suggestions for future research.     

Observing incumbent abuses: improving measures of electoral and competitive authoritarianism with new data

Electoral and competitive authoritarian regimes have become a major focus of comparative research. Yet, finding measures that distinguish these regimes from democracies is challenging, especially for scholars conducting large-N cross-national research, as this conceptual distinction rests on incumbent abuses that are difficult to systematically observe. This article reviews common measures that simply utilize extant regime indicators to draw the line with democracy, demonstrates their poor performance in mirroring a benchmark from case-based measurement, and illustrates the adverse implications for theory building. The article then shows how data on incumbent abuse from the National Elections Across Democracy and Dictatorship (NELDA) and Varieties of Democracy (VDEM) projects can be utilized to construct alternative measures. A NELDA-based measure far outperforms extant alternatives in mirroring the case-based benchmark. The article then discusses why a VDEM-based alternative should be a superior option once data is available and how one might be constructed.     

Learning to Build a Better Mousetrap

Scholars do not usually test for the duration of the effects of mass communication, but when they do, they typically find rapid decay. Persuasive impact may end almost as soon as communication ends. Why so much decay? Does mass communication produce any long-term effects? How should this decay color our understanding of the effects of mass communication? We examine these questions with data from the effects of advertising in the 2000 presidential election and 2006 subnational elections, but argue that our model and results are broadly applicable within the field of political communication. We find that the bulk of the persuasive impact of advertising decays quickly, but that some effect in the presidential campaign endures for at least 6 weeks. These results, which are similar in rolling cross-section survey data and county-level data on actual presidential vote, appear to reflect a mix of memory-based processing (whose effects last only as long as short-term memory lasts) and online processing (whose effects are more durable). Finally, we find that immediate effects of advertising are larger in subnational than presidential elections, but decay more quickly and more completely. [Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): discussion of methodological issues; results for a alternative specifications of key models; full reports of model results.]     

State of the world 2017: autocratization and exclusion?

This article presents evidence of a global trend of autocratization. The most visible feature of democracy – elections – remains strong and is even improving in some places. Autocratization mainly affects non-electoral aspects of democracy such as media freedom, freedom of expression, and the rule of law, yet these in turn threaten to undermine the meaningfulness of elections. While the majority of the world’s population lives under democratic rule, 2.5 billion people were subjected to autocratization in 2017. Last year, democratic qualities were in decline in 24 countries across the world, many of which are populous such as India and the United States. This article also presents evidence testifying that men and wealthy groups tend to have a strong hold on political power in countries where 86% of the world population reside. Further, we show that political exclusion based on socio-economic status in particular is becoming increasingly severe. For instance, the wealthy have gained significantly more power in countries home to 1.9 billion of the world’s population over the past decade.     

Why do they vote out of habit? Habitual voting under diverse regimes in East Asia

While scholars have shed light on our understanding of elections in less and non-democratic countries, the incentives behind electoral participation in these countries remain unexplored. This paper sets out to investigate how regime structure is associated with voters' incentives of habitual voting. We assert that the formation of voting habits is associated with the relationships of citizens with the state and their expectations about it. Thus, habitual voting reflects voters' understandings about, perceptions of, and concerns with their political environment and system. In democracy, habituated voting behavior is strongly associated with respondents' support for the regime because their sense of civic duty encourages them to vote. In authoritarian regimes, knowing that their ballots are the adornments of the authoritarian government, habitual voting simply reveals citizens' short-term support for the government or their concerns with the vertical accountability of the government. We further test the hypotheses against Asian Barometer Survey data and the analysis evidences our assumptions.     

Subverting autocracy: emancipative mass values in competitive authoritarian regimes

Competitive elections in authoritarian regimes are inherently ambiguous: do they extend regime persistence or, vice versa, operate as subversive events? This article tests Inglehart and Welzel's “emancipatory theory of democracy”, which has not been tested for competitive elections in autocracies: when emancipative values grow strong, autocratic power appears increasingly illegitimate in people's eyes, which motivates subversive mass actions against authoritarian rule. For electoral outcomes this suggestion implies, first, that authoritarian incumbents are more likely to suffer electoral defeat when emancipative values have become more widespread. Second, post-electoral protest against fraudulent elections is more likely when emancipative values have become more widespread. To test these hypotheses, we analyse 152 elections among 33 electoral authoritarian regimes over 21 years from 1990–2011. We find that emancipative values are indeed strongly conducive to incumbent defeat while their effect on post-electoral protest is conditional: it only occurs in elections won by the incumbent. These findings intertwine two separately developed literatures: one on authoritarian regime subversion and the other on emancipatory cultural change.     

Institutional stepping stones for democracy: how and why multipartyism enhances democratic change

Scholars of electoral authoritarianism and comparative institutions have emphasized how authoritarian regimes implement multiparty elections to stabilize authoritarian rule and diffuse political opposition. Consequently, the literature has advised against the notion that multiparty elections constitute a general lever for democratization. This article presents evidence in support of a more positive understanding of multipartyism and democracy. We argue that multiparty elections create an institutional space for oppositional parties, instrumentally motivated to promote further positive democratic change. We hypothesize that multiparty regimes are (1) generally more likely to experience positive democratic change, and (2) more importantly, more likely to do so when faced by internal or external regime threats. We test these hypotheses using cross-section time-series data on 166 countries in the period 1973–2010. Our results show a general positive effect of multipartyism for democratic change, and that multiparty regimes are more likely to improve their levels of democracy when faced with demonstrations and economic crisis.     

Minority representation in a semi-democratic regime: the Georgian case

This article suggests that in most semi-democracies, the same solution might not be that favourable to minorities. Many semi-democratic countries either restrict party competition or limit parties of ethnic minorities, including: Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kirgistan, Cameron, Equatorial Guinea, Tanzania, Gabon, Kenya, Mauritania, and Congo (Brazzaville). This article highlights the impact of the electoral system and the importance of political plurality and electoral district design in such contexts. The article argues that the interests of minorities are best protected if they can elect their representatives in small, ethnically homogeneous electoral districts. Plurality or majority voting systems offer minorities the possibility to run with independent candidates. The case study in this article elections to municipal councils in Georgia in 2006 under a mixed electoral system seem to reflect the hypothesized pattern.     

When do electoral institutions trigger electoral misconduct?

Drawing on two complementary mechanisms, this article explores the question of whether electoral institutions and conditions of electoral competition create incentives to promote electoral misconduct in young or developing democracies. The first mechanism explains how majoritarian institutions like disproportional electoral systems are more likely to trigger electoral fraud than consensus electoral institutions like proportional representation. However, for this mechanism to be activated, the incumbent must feel effectively threatened by the opposition. To better understand the way this mechanism works, the electoral history of the country also needs to be taken into consideration. Democracies which have a historical record of running clean elections are less likely to experience fraud than countries with a history of electoral misconduct. I test these theoretical claims using a dataset that contains relevant information for 323 parliamentary elections in 59 new or developing democracies in the period between 1960 and 2006. The empirical analysis shows a strong and robust empirical support for the two mechanisms.     

Democracy and Human Rights in the Mexican States: Elections or Social Capital?

Why does the relationship between a government and its citizens deteriorate to violence? Large-N cross-national quantitative analyses of human rights violations have found an inverse relationship between democracy and violations. These analyses, however, have not been able to address the central finding of an influential subnational analysis of democracy that stresses the importance of a single dimension of democracy, social capital. In this article we combine these two streams of research with fresh data from the Mexican states to investigate how and why democracy inhibits violations. Theoretically, we connect a policy interest in protecting human rights to politicians' office-seeking goals and to the level of social capital. Empirically, our data allow us to disentangle two principal components of democracy, elections and social capital, and include important control variables, notably ethnic diversity, which have been largely left out of the cross-national analyses. Our central finding is that the electoral components rather than social capital produce important consequences for the protection of citizens' human rights.     

Familiarity breeds contempt? Knowledge and understanding of democracy,support for democratization,and global city residence in Russia

Using Russian survey data from 2011 to 2012, this article examines public understanding of and support for democratization in a semi-authoritarian context. When knowledge of democracy is weak, and conceptual understanding of democracy is mixed—as in Russia—traditional measures of democratic support inadequately capture demand for democratization; that is, for more democracy than currently perceived. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Russians who adhere to “textbook” political definitions of democracy are more, not less, likely to advocate democratization. Residence in global cities increases support for democracy and democratization, while education fosters the latter but not the former. Other traditional indicators of middle-class status, such as income and urbanization, lack consistent effects. Based on these results we re-evaluate the mechanism linking modernization and support for democracy in developing, non-democratic societies. Rather than exert social-psychological or normative effects, modernization works primarily by raising exposure to global political discourses that define and promote democratic government.