The literature on hybrid regimes has a new and undisputed heavyweight champion. Eight years after their widely cited Journal of Democracy article first unveiled “competitive authoritarianism” as a distinctive type of hybrid regime, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have constructed a volume that theorizes and traces the trajectories of the countries that have fit into this category since the Cold War's end—all thirty-five of them. While the theoretical ambition of Competitive Authoritarianism stakes the book's rightful claim to the title of hybrid-regime champion, the book's voluminous empirics unmistakably place it in political science's heavyweight class.
One must appreciate the awesome sweep and heft of Levitsky and Way's empirical contribution before critically assessing their theoretical contribution. Not only do the authors show how international and domestic factors shaped the trajectories of every single competitive authoritarian case within their personal expanses of expertise—the Americas (six total cases) for Levitsky and the former Soviet Union (six more) for Way—they also conduct similarly detailed process analysis in Asia (three cases), Eastern Europe (six), and Africa (fourteen) to boot. This yields a book of over five hundred pages, a bibliography of over one hundred pages, and footnotes totaling well over three thousand. If “[i]nference is the process of using the facts we know to learn about facts we do not know” (Gary King et al., Designing Social Inquiry [1994], 46), then Competitive Authoritarianism does not engage in inference at all. It aims to evade inferential perils entirely by studying every case in its defined population.
Not since Samuel Huntington's The Third Wave (1991) has a book attempted such a “whole-population” qualitative analysis of political regimes. Whereas The Third Wave conceptualized and illuminated an epochal wave of democratization, Competitive Authoritarianism does likewise for the “wave of hybridization” (p. 20) that followed the Cold War. By their very nature, such books are historically selective and delimited: they are “period pieces.” Levitsky and Way invite such a reading when they insist that competitive authoritarian regimes—defined as “civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents' abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents” (p. 5)—are almost exclusively “a post-Cold War phenomenon” (p. 17). If this is true, Competitive Authoritarianism risks not being able to travel outside the regime type's particular epoch, much like a book on fascist regimes becomes a book about the interwar period, and a book about communist regimes becomes a book about the Cold War era.
It might seem like hitting the champ below the belt to raise the question of temporal portability from the get-go. Yet to their considerable credit, Levitsky and Way invite such a dialogue by pitching their arguments at a theoretical level. Unlike Huntington's Third Wave, which commences with the disclaimer that it is an explanatory more than a theoretical work, Competitive Authoritarianism tries mightily to be both. To be sure, any fair assessment must begin by gauging what Levitsky and Way teach us about their own epoch and hybrid regime type of interest. Yet their book's championship status ultimately depends on how much it teaches us about authoritarianism and democratization more generally.
Levitsky and Way's causal account hinges on three factors: (1) Western linkage, (2) the organizational power of authoritarian regimes, and (3) Western leverage. These three variables do not so much causally interact as they unfold in a logical sequence (p. 72), which serves to sort their thirty-five cases into the outcomes of democratization, stable authoritarianism, and unstable authoritarianism (or “turnover without democratization” [p. 5]). At the first stage of their argument, Western linkage, or the density of ties and flows between a country and the United States and European Union, is determinative. In regions where it is high, as in the Americas and Eastern Europe, democratization has everywhere been the result (call this D1, for democratization at stage one of the argument), except in the borderline case of Albania.
Only in the lower-linkage regions of Africa, Asia, and the former Soviet Union do cases make it to the second stage of Levitsky and Way's causal argument. Here, the fate of competitive authoritarianism rests first and foremost on internal regime capacity, particularly the scope and cohesion of ruling parties and coercive state institutions. Where regimes' organizational power is high, we see durable competitive authoritarianism across the board (call this A2, for authoritarianism at stage two of the argument), with the exception of a single electoral hiccup in Belarus.
At its first two stages, then, Levitsky and Way's argument is essentially monocausal, deterministic, and unidirectional. (With its branches shooting in one direction rather than two, their causal diagram on p. 72 looks less like a tree than a comb.) High linkage produces democratization, but lower linkage does not directly produce authoritarianism (there is no A1). High organizational power ensures durable authoritarianism in lower-linkage regions, but lower organizational power does not necessarily mean democratization (there is no D2 either).
It is in the cases that lack both the high Western linkage that predictably produces democratization (D1) and the high organizational power that firmly secures authoritarianism (A2) where things get far more contingent. Here, Levitsky and Way bring in their third causal variable: Western leverage, which is defined, perhaps a touch tautologically, as a country's “vulnerability to Western democratizing pressure” (p. 24). Where such leverage is high, authoritarianism is predicted to be unstable, since regimes will be relatively constrained against using coercion. This makes them more likely to experience turnover, if not democratization. Where Western leverage is lower, competitive authoritarian regimes are expected to be more stable, since leaders are freer to crush opposition challenges.
Herein lies the main peculiarity of Levitsky and Way's causal framework: not only is there no D2 (democratization through authoritarian weakness), but there is no D3 (democratization absent, or even through effective Western pressure). In other words, Western linkage is the only causal factor theorized to explain the democratization of competitive authoritarian regimes in the post–Cold War era. To anyone familiar with Levitsky and Way's first-rate individual work on the domestic dimensions of comparative politics, such a starkly internationalist account of democratization is rather jarring. To any comparativist or theorist who believes that democracy is not simply a Western construct or export—or that strong Western ties are as likely to strengthen dictatorships as to weaken them—it will likely come across as even worse than jarring. By declining to systematically theorize the conditions under which countries with competitive authoritarian regimes might democratize through their own devices, Levitsky and Way give the phrase “exogenous democratization” a whole new meaning.
The upshot is that Competitive Authoritarianism—far from teleologically over-predicting democratization—actually under-predicts it. In five of the seven cases where Levitsky and Way's framework fails to predict the correct outcome—Benin, Ghana, Mali, Peru, and Ukraine—we see democracy rather than their expected outcome of unstable authoritarianism. This would seem to be a nontrivial number of cases that experience democratization through a different causal pathway than high Western linkage (D1). Why, then, did these ostensible outliers democratize? And might their “surprising” democratization tell us something more general not only about competitive authoritarian regimes, but authoritarian regimes tout court?
There appear to be at least four intriguing theoretical possibilities, all of which are consistent with Levitsky and Way's general gestalt if not their final framework. One is that Western linkage was in fact key, though not in exactly the way Levitsky and Way conceptualize it. Especially in Ghana and Ukraine, democratization appears to have been driven in large measure by the same kind of concerns with a country's international standing that Levitsky and Way highlight in cases such as Mexico, Taiwan, and Slovakia. A more expansive and dynamic understanding of Western linkage might seem to be in order.
Such a focus on international “status anxiety” also promises to help us theorize how Western power and interventionism might actually shore up authoritarianism (A1). In cases such as Russia, North Korea, China, Cuba, Burma, and Zimbabwe, status anxiety revolves around fears of Western domination more than ostracism. Especially in regions that have experienced colonialism or military confrontation with the West more recently than have Eastern Europe or Latin America, rulers and oppositionists are more likely to be discredited for being seen as Western puppets, than as Western pariahs. The relevant difference across cases and regions may not simply be levels of linkage, but how linkage to the West has been experienced historically.
A second possible way to theorize Levitsky and Way's democratic outliers would be as cases of democratization through authoritarian weakness (D2). By focusing on Western leverage as the prime shaper of outcomes in low-capacity regimes, Levitsky and Way unnecessarily produce “false negatives” like Benin, Peru, and Ukraine—cases where their framework convincingly illuminates the causal processes through which organizational weakness fostered authoritarian breakdown, but needlessly predicts “turnover without democratization” where only a prediction of turnover seems theoretically warranted. The democratic transitions literature in particular provides ample theoretical reason to expect democratization in cases where dictatorships crumble from within. (Should we really have been surprised when Peru restored democracy after Fujimori's autocratic experiment imploded?)
Placing more causal weight on incumbent weakness than Western leverage also seems warranted in cases of unstable authoritarianism where state weakness is especially severe: e.g., Albania, Haiti, and Madagascar. Where states are extremely weak, one can draw a straight arrow from low organizational power to unstable authoritarianism, without any mediation by Western leverage. Rather curiously, however, Levitsky and Way suggest that stable authoritarianism should arise not only from high organizational power (A2), but from a combination of low organizational power and low leverage (A3). Yet it is hard to see, theoretically, why simply being ignored by the West should have a similar stabilizing effect as the construction of powerful party-state institutions. The only case coded as combining low capacity and low leverage is Russia, where authoritarian stability seems more efficiently explained by change over time in Levitsky and Way's internal regime variables than by the West's consistently limp-wristed responses to Russian leaders' strong-armed tactics.
A third theoretical possibility is that Western leverage not only destabilizes authoritarianism, but fosters full-blown democratization (a new D3). This would be the most straightforward corrective to Levitsky and Way's framework—yet also the least convincing. It is intriguing that Western leverage—or “vulnerability to Western democratizing pressure”—does not actually lead to democratization in any of Levitsky and Way's cases. (And if Western leverage cannot explain democratization, maybe it cannot explain “turnover without democratization” terribly well either.) To the extent that Western leverage matters, it appears to do so more in the initial transitions to than in the subsequent trajectories of competitive authoritarianism. The greatest irony in Competitive Authoritarianism is the book's stress on Western linkage and leverage as both the initial producers and the ultimate underminers of the regime type itself.
A fourth way to gain added purchase on democratization might be by painting both regime strength and opposition strength in more coalitional than purely organizational terms. (This would be my personal preference—unsurprisingly, given my effort to explore how coalitional factors shape organizational capacity in my own work on authoritarianism and democratization.) Levitsky and Way intermittently refer to the importance of coalitions and the balance of power between regime and opposition in their empirical chapters, but these notions are not tightly woven into their causal framework. It is worth considering whether a more systematic coalitional approach might provide a useful common thread at all three stages of Levitsky and Way's argument: from the effects of Western linkage on both regime and opposition coalitions, to the coalitional underpinnings of strong parties and states, to the coalitional dynamics of elections, protests, and crackdowns during times of regime crisis.
None of these critiques are knockout blows; this new heavyweight champion has no glass jaw. Competitive Authoritarianism provides a fuller theoretical account of authoritarian durability than democratization, but that is where regime scholars have the most to learn. Its arguments are largely period specific, but the post–Cold War era could well prove not to be a demarcated period like the Cold War or interwar periods, but simply the foreseeable future. This gives us even more reason to believe that Competitive Authoritarianism will be a benchmark book not only on hybrid regimes, but authoritarianism writ large, for years to come.
