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Andreas Schedler, “Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition"

A specter is haunting the developing world—the specter of electoral authoritarianism. The good thing is that scaring off specters is an easy assignment, in particular for those who fail to believe in scary metaphysical creatures. The bad thing is that the specter is a metaphor, while electoral authoritarianism is a reality. A large number of political regimes in the contemporary world, ranging from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, from Russia to Singapore, from Belarus to Cameroon, from Egypt to Malaysia, have established the institutional facades of democracy, including regular multiparty elections for the chief executive, in order to conceal (and reproduce) harsh realities of authoritarian governance. Although in historical perspective the authoritarian use of elections is nothing new, contemporary electoral authoritarian regimes take the time-honored practice of electoral manipulation to new heights.

This book contains original comparative research into the conflictive interaction between rulers and opposition parties in the central arena of struggle under electoral authoritarianism—the electoral battlefield. This introductory chapter addresses three analytical core issues with which the emergent comparative study of electoral authoritarian regimes is grappling: the concept of electoral authoritarianism, its observation and measurement, and its endogenous dynamic. The first section, on conceptual issues, explains how students of comparative democratization have responded to the proliferation of political regimes that couple formal democratic institutions (multiparty elections) with authoritarian practices. In addition, it offers and justifies a formal definition of electoral authoritarian regimes that looks at both constitutional properties and democratic qualities of electoral processes. The second section, on issues of measurement, discusses a fundamental methodological problem: in electoral authoritarian regimes, official election results are the combined outcome of two unknown and unobservable variables—popular references and authoritarian manipulation. We can resolve this observational problem either by using the competitiveness of opposition parties as a proxy for authoritarian manipulation, or we may seek to gather extensive knowledge about the case at hand in order to reach a comprehensive judgment about the overall democratic quality of a given electoral process. The third section, on the endogenous dynamic of electoral authoritarianism, analyzes authoritarian elections as "creative" institutions that constitute a certain set of actors (citizens, opposition actors, and ruling parties), endow them with certain sets of strategies, and push them into a conflictive "nested game" in which the competition for votes within given rules takes place alongside the competitive struggle over the rules of the game.

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