Most countries today fill their top political offices through regular mass elections, but many could not in good conscience be called democracies. Instead, they embody a Minotaur-like combination of democratic procedures and authoritarian practices. How do such regimes survive, and when do they break down? How do incumbents manage electoral challenges? When do they choose to manipulate elections? What factors strengthen political opposition? How do elections become more, or less, competitive? These questions are both intellectually challenging and potentially relevant for policy. Unfortunately, we do not know nearly as much about them as we might want to know.
The 13 compact chapters in this edited volume, authored by 15 scholars, pack a wide range of fascinating ideas and information. Perhaps the main strength of the book is its empirical richness. Systematic knowledge about the subject matter is growing but still relatively limited. Therefore, anyone with an interest in the topic is likely to find much that is fresh and useful in this compilation—an idea, a piece of information, or a hitherto-uncovered empirical regularity.
Many of the authors proceed inductively, discussing specific cases in detail and seeking to extract propositions of general interest. This approach is both helpful and adequate given the current paucity of theoretical and empirical work on the topic. Virtually all the authors have considerable area and thematic expertise. Geographically, the coverage is wide, encompassing most of the regions where one might find the kind of regime under study—sub-Saharan Africa, the postcommunist region, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
A single review can hardly do justice to 15 authors. Andreas Schedler's introduction provides an excellent overview of all the chapters. As a guiding concept for the volume, he explains, electoral authoritarian regimes—regimes such as those in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Egypt, Togo, and Singapore—are viewed not as instances of democracy but rather as instances of authoritarianism, albeit a kind of authoritarianism that “departs from the forms of authoritarian rule as we know it.” Nevertheless, he rightly emphasizes that their electoral procedures must be taken seriously alongside their authoritarian qualities (pp. 3–5).
Most of the chapters study the incentives of elites in the electoral arena, focusing largely on incumbent and opposition parties. In Chapter 5, Nicholas van de Walle studies the conditions that enable opposition parties to coalesce and dislodge a powerful incumbent. On the basis of data for sub-Saharan Africa in 1991–2002, he finds that electoral systems with two rounds enhance possibilities for opposition cohesiveness. The reason, he suggests, is that opposition candidates can use the first-round results to gauge their level of support and cut deals. An important insight of this chapter is the idea that perceptions about the chances of an opposition victory are a key determinant of opposition cohesiveness.
Staffan I. Lindberg also studies opposition parties, specifically their decision to boycott elections (chapter 9). He argues that boycotting does not enhance, but rather hinders, over-time improvements in the democratic quality of regimes. To support this claim, he uses data for sub-Saharan Africa in 1989–2003. As he admits, however, one cannot reject the possibility that boycotts are endogenous, rather than causal.
Chapters 4, 6, 7, and 10 focus on incumbents. Mark R. Thompson and Philipp Kuntz (Chapter 7) seek to explain why rulers who lose elections sometimes choose the risky path of wresting victory from the winner, either through cheating or by force. They specify a cost–benefit framework where incumbents balance the potential consequences of snatching victory—e.g., removal through mass protests—with the possible costs associated with losing office—e.g., the risk of criminal prosecution and the loss of opportunities for graft. In Chapter 10, Lucan Way brings into the discussion the issue of state capacity: When the ability of a state to manipulate elections is weakened, he argues, electoral competition becomes more vigorous. His cases, however, seem to peg the weakness on elite divisions and transitory economic troubles, not on infrastructural deficiencies.
Steven Fish (Chapter 11), using evidence from the postcommunist region, suggests that strong legislatures function as bulwarks for democratic openness, not only because they can check the executive but, perhaps more importantly, because they catalyze the development of strong political parties. Steven Levitsky and Way (Chapter 12) argue that international pressures can play an important role in deterring authoritarian abuses and promoting democracy. Jonathan Hartlyn and Jennifer McCoy contribute to the literature on election monitoring by showing how monitoring has elicited strategic adaptation on the part of incumbents when it comes to cheating in elections (Chapter 3).
What next? On the basis of patterns common to various chapters, I wish to highlight three directions for further work. First, as observed by van de Walle and other authors, expectations about likely outcomes can make or break opposition challenges to incumbents in electoral authoritarian settings. This underscores the need to take the next analytical step and ask how expectations are formed and, perhaps more importantly, how they can be strategically influenced by elites.
Second, the analysis in many of the chapters does much of its work by focusing on a limited number of strategically motivated actors—incumbent and opposition parties, party factions, the military (Chapter 8), and election monitors. It is precisely in such situations, where a small number of actors engage in purposeful behavior, that game theoretic tools are most helpful. Formalization could prove particularly useful for theory building and for uncovering additional testable implications of existing propositions, complementing case-based and statistical work.
Third, as Schedler, Joy Langston, and others suggest, there is a pressing need for more and better data and for more rigorous testing of many of the propositions advanced in these chapters. Gerardo L. Munck (Chapter 2) warns against using data that are not fully appropriate to the purpose at hand simply because it is easily available. Instead, we should invest in the creation of better data when this could improve our inferences. How might one systematically decide, for instance, whether an election was free and fair, or flawed? Due to potential biases and censoring associated with different information sources, this question is not trivial. Further work is needed in this and other areas of data collection.
Finally, one area that remains conspicuously unexplored in this volume is the role of citizens under electoral authoritarianism, as voters and protesters. In sum, this unique and rich volume shows that electoral authoritarian regimes are quite amenable to systematic study, and it makes a substantively important contribution to knowledge about elections as they happen in a large part of the developing world.
