In this book, Andreas Schedler sets out to unravel the political dynamics of “electoral authoritarian” regimes, that is, regimes where formal institutions of democracy are systematically manipulated by authoritarian rulers. The book synthesizes more than a decade of research. While this means that few of the arguments are completely new, Schedler’s major contribution is that he presents an integrated theory of political dynamics in electoral authoritarian regimes. At the same time, he engages with other positions within the debate on autocratic regime types, one of the most vibrant subfields of comparative politics in the new millennium. In many ways, the time is ripe for this attempt to take stock and to carve out a coherent position.
The point of departure for Schedler’s theorizing in the first part of the book is a simple one: All authoritarian rulers face uncertainty. To deal with this uncertainty, they create institutions (pp. 21–24), the most important of such institutions in the post–Cold War era being elections. Hence the mushrooming of electoral authoritarian regimes, where institutions of domination collide with what the author terms “institutions of representation.” This collision is head-on, as the very purpose of the latter institutions is to constrain the arbitrary power of the former. Out of this boiling kettle come the fundamental battle lines of electoral authoritarianism: a struggle over voters that climaxes during elections (the game level) and an ongoing struggle over the institutional rules (the meta-game level).
This two-level game is asymmetric as the odds are skewed in favor of the authoritarian incumbent. Nonetheless, Schedler’s key insight is that authoritarian rulers often get more than they bargain for. To be genuine stabilizers of authoritarianism, institutions cannot be mere window dressing; they must have some autonomy. They are meant to provide control and co-optation but they also create contention (pp. 73–74). This opens the way for two distinct (indeed opposite) outcomes: one of authoritarian stability and one of democratization. The former outcome is the more probable but the latter is still possible (p. 141).
What determines whether elections—in the words of the subtitle—sustain or subvert authoritarianism? According to The Politics of Uncertainty, the actors’ choices do. Schedler is unapologetic about his voluntarist perspective, which he anchors in the tradition of Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter. It is against this backdrop that the book specifies the strategies available to both authoritarian rulers and to the opposition. Reading these strategies should be helpful to any would-be autocrat. But Schedler also reveals the key to effective subversion: The opposition needs to play both levels of the game with equal resolve (p. 119).
The second part of the book is devoted to applying this theoretical scaffolding. The author first tests whether his theory can account for electoral outcomes, then patterns of regime manipulation and opposition protest, and finally he addresses regime change. To do so, he has compiled an original “Dataset on Authoritarian Elections,” which covers the period 1980–2002. The data set classifies regimes into competitive and hegemonic subspecies, it includes a series of different measures of manipulation (e.g., human rights violation and electoral fraud), and it attempts to gauge opposition protest (e.g., opposition boycott of elections). The findings are mixed in the sense that they go some way toward corroborating the importance of actors’ strategies with respect to all of the outcomes of interest, but often only in a weak sense.
The main virtue of the book remains theory development, something that is actually conceded by Schedler (p. 372). This is in itself quite refreshing for a discipline that is ever more bound on empirical applications but where theorizing is too often neglected. However, it also reflects that there are grave problems when it comes to testing this theory. The author simply does not have enough variation in his data set to include relevant control variables together with those he wishes to analyze and is, therefore, time and again, forced to report results of a bivariate nature. He also operates with very high p-levels (sometimes .15) and is often left to interpret results that do not even pass this bar. Add to this that he is very up-front about the fact that there is a huge gap between his concepts and his measures. That, of course, is intellectually honest. But simply by accepting all of Schedler’s own caveats—about endogeneity, spuriousity, and the distance between concepts and data—the conclusion must be that the theoretical claims are not genuinely tested.
For this reviewer, the second part of the book vindicates the notion that it is very difficult to assess the impact of actors’ choices in a large-n analysis. However, it also begs the question of whether Schedler’s theoretical framework can in fact be subjected to systematic empirical testing. It might have been better if he had spent some of the huge efforts devoted to an ultimately unsatisfactory empirical analysis on laying out the implications of his theoretical arguments in a way that would allow others—with better data—to appraise them.
More convincing tests would thus be one possible next step for this research agenda, but truly convincing tests would require a shift in temporal focus. As Schedler notes, the emphasis of the vibrant debate of which the Politics of Uncertainty is a product has largely been restricted to regime dynamics in the post-1989 period (p. 57). This is a very particular context, where a democratic or liberal zeitgeist made it almost a necessity for authoritarian rulers to pay lip service to democracy. In the very last section, Schedler advocates a “historical turn in authoritarian studies” (p.391), beginning with an attempt to trace instances of electoral authoritarianism back in time. Such an enterprise would serve as an important corrective to his theory and analysis in that it would allow us to further probe whether the identified dynamics—and ultimately even the theory presented—are artifacts of, or at least bound by, a particular context.
Recall in this connection that elections and authoritarianism are old bedfellows. For instance, authoritarian elections, mostly held in the wake of democratic breakdowns, were ubiquitous in East Central Europe in the periods between the two world wars. Even a cursory glance at political dynamics in the electoral authoritarian regimes of the day indicates that context matters. With Romania in the period 1928–29 as a possible exception, none of the East Central European regimes democratized; rather, repression increased in all of them in the 1930s. This disheartening pattern obviously owes much to the international order that came into existence in the early 1930s. But this equals saying that the interwar period gives us variation on contextual factors that are constants in Schedler’s analysis. His conclusions about the democratic potentials of authoritarian elections might in that sense be overdrawn—or, to put it differently, only valid for the most recent decades. In other periods, electoral institutions have probably been easier to manipulate for dictators than in today’s world, where flagrant manipulation attracts both international attention and, oftentimes, international censure. This, in turn, indicates that the room for actors’ choices might be more restricted than Schedler posits.
Although The Politics of Uncertainty is timely, it thus also shows that the literature on autocratic regime types now needs to move beyond the post-1989 snapshots that have characterized the majority of its contributions. More precisely, if the objective is to capture the political dynamics of regimes where competition and domination collide, shorn of a particular context, we need to start mining the quarry of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history.
