It was Latin America that provided the main impetus behind the WCC’s articulation of liberationist human rights. Through its Human Rights Resources Office for Latin America, the WCC helped to facilitate activism across the region and galvanized support in the West. In Chile, after the 1973 coup by Pinochet, and in other countries under military dictatorship, the WCC collaborated with the Catholic Church to both remedy immediate suffering and resist repression. It also facilitated regional ecumenism and the dissemination of liberation theology. Contrary to contemporary critics and later accounts that suggest there were only two ways to respond to the rise of military rule, namely pursuing armed “revolution” or “minimalist” liberal rights activism, the chapter shows that some Protestants and Catholics sought to establish a space between these alternatives. The WCC helped to keep the flame of liberationist human rights activism going, supporting both local forms of “conscientization” (a term coined by the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire, who spent the 1970s in exile as an associate of the WCC) and generating pressure via its member churches in the West.

This chapter describes the 2010–11 revolution that kick-started Tunisia’s democratic transition and the initial transitional year that followed. It illustrates the two major axes of polarization that would define Tunisian democracy: one between the old regime and the revolutionaries, and the other between the secularists and the Islamists. It then describes the initial attempts to bridge these divides through compromise and consensus. Interim Prime Minister Beji Caid Essebsi initiated major compromises on the revolution’s demands of anti-corruption, security sector reform, and political lustration, finding consensus between the old regime and the revolutionaries. Meanwhile, the winning Islamist and secular parties in the 2011 elections likewise chose consensus, agreeing to govern in a grand coalition. These choices to share power and find common ground facilitated Tunisia’s early transitional years, allowing the political elite to rein in polarization and uncertainty and avoid spoilers that may otherwise have thwarted the transition to Tunisia’s first-ever democratically elected government in December 2011.

This chapter probes whether the theory travels beyond Tunisia by conducting a cross-national analysis of grand coalition governments across all democratic transitions between 1942 and 2020. It shows that grand coalitions are statistically associated with democratic collapse, even when controlling for the underlying structural challenges that lead to them. The correlation between grand coalitions and democratic breakdown likewise remains even when pursuing techniques to address potential confounding, such as propensity score matching, inverse probability weighting, and an instrumental variable. The data also lend support for both mechanisms, showing that grand coalitions lead to a higher vote share for populists in the next elections and lead to increased mass polarization as well. While grand coalitions in the first few years of a transition have only mixed effects on democratic breakdown, continuing a coalition beyond that point makes breakdown far more likely. After establishing the rules of the game, new democracies must transition to the politics of competition, rather than continued consensus.

This chapter illustrates the dark sides of continuing to pursue power-sharing after establishing the rules of the game. It outlines why the major political parties in Tunisia decided to keep governing together through another grand coalition government between 2015 and 2019, and how these efforts both worsened polarization and sparked the rise of populism. It first shows that the decision of Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda to enter into a grand coalition ceded space for the emergence of hardline parties on either end of the spectrum, worsening polarization. Second, the extended power-sharing inadvertently sparked populism as well, by tainting all of the mainstream parties as part of the establishment and fueling the rise of populist outsider Kais Saied. Drawing on interviews and original election surveys conducted in 2019 and 2020, I show that the grand coalition led the party system to collapse, with frustrated voters shifting to populist and extremist forces instead. Had the political parties not entered into a grand coalition, they may have kept Tunisians invested in the two major, moderate parties and staved off the rise of these populists and extremists.

This introductory chapter outlines the core argument of the book: that power-sharing can be useful at the start of a democratic transition in order to generate consensus over the rules of the game, but extending power-sharing beyond that point can lead democracy to unravel. Power-sharing frustrates the voters of each party and risks the party system collapsing in favor of populists and extremists. By worsening polarization and populism, power-sharing thus makes democratic breakdown more likely. The chapter outlines the contributions of this theory to the existing literature on democratization, polarization, and populism, showing that democratic transitions require a balance between competition and consensus. The chapter illustrates the core argument in Tunisia and draws parallels to other cases in the Middle East, in Europe, and in Latin America. It ends by previewing each chapter of the book and defining the key terms.

This final chapter concludes by tracing out the book’s contributions to our understanding of democratization. It highlights that while inclusion, consensus, and power-sharing are useful in the transition to democracy, it is differentiation, competition, and polarization that help to consolidate democracy. It highlights how the more successful cases of democratization, like South Africa, pursued grand coalitions only at the very start of the transition, before shifting to normal competition once the constitution was established. The chapter also provides some initial theorization as to what a healthy degree of polarization might look like, introducing the notion of “polarization within bounds,” where parties seek consensus only when adjusting the rules of the game, but seek competition within those bounds. Finally, it offers some brief reflections on the state of democracy in the United States and Europe. It argues that the initial strategies of mainstream parties toward populist threats have been self-defeating and provides some recommendations building on the insights of this book for alternative strategies to deflate populist threats.

This chapter describes how the 2011–14 grand coalition government in Tunisia navigated growing polarization in 2012 and especially 2013. That year, two major political assassinations and dueling protests led to fears of a coup or a descent into civil war. But the political elite’s norms of power-sharing, compromise, and consensus helped to bring them back from the brink and strike a grand bargain that put the transition back on track. Through an inclusive national dialogue mediated by civil society, Tunisia’s Islamist and secularist forces found common ground over a new, progressive constitution that was approved by near unanimity. Meanwhile, the revolutionary and old regime forces likewise compromised to include the old regime in elections but allow a transitional justice mechanism to hold the worst abusers accountable. Power-sharing thus enabled Tunisia’s transition in 2014 to establish a new constitution and electoral law – the rules of the game that would govern its new democracy.

This chapter argues that contemporary electoral clientelism focused on vote buying is more vulnerable to failure than robust prior forms of political clientelism. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century oligarchic clientelism, as well as mid twentieth-century corporatist clientelism, entangled the provision of benefits with employment and social protection. They thus raised the costs of defection so high that opposed recipients had strong incentives to comply. In contrast, contemporary electoral clientelism offers much lower-value gifts and limits the costs of noncompliance to foregone future benefits. Under these conditions, recipients’ personal political dispositions weigh more heavily in their vote choices, leading vote-buying attempts to fail when the conditions that I characterize in the rest of the book activate those dispositions. The chapter also describes Mexico’s transition from corporatist clientelism during most of the twentieth century under Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) rule to the new practice of electoral clientelism since national-level democratization in 2000.

This final chapter on mechanisms argues that recipients of electoral gifts have a partisan view of ballot secrecy. When opposition recipients only see machine representatives in their voting place on Election Day, they fear that ballot secrecy could be compromised and are more likely to believe the machine’s threats to impose costly sanctions for voting their sincere preferences. Recipient compliance is thus more likely in machine-dominant constituencies. When recipients also see opposing-party representatives at the polls, they are prone to believe that ballot secrecy is preserved and that they can vote their true preferences without incurring costs. This argument provides a new rationale for the protective influence of poll watchers and adds nuance to the standard institutional claim that de jure ballot secrecy alone undermines vote buying. Tests use observational survey data, survey experiments, and fieldwork in Mexico.

This introductory chapter describes the stakes of successful vote buying for new democracies and the deep pessimism of current perspectives. Despite the standard assumption embedded in existing theories that politicians only buy votes when the practice is guaranteed to be effective, meta-analyses of empirical research show that it typically fails. I introduce my partisan competition theory of electoral clientelism, which can better explain why vote-buying attempts success or fail. I argue that competitive elections can shift the balance of power from political machines to citizens, implying more optimistic outlook on elections, the voting behavior of poor citizens, and political representation in new democracies. Before outlining the remainder of the book, I introduce Mexico as a typical case of a new democracy awash in vote buying with subnational variation in the degree of partisan competition over time. I also introduce Argentina, Colombia, and Turkey as critical case tests of the mechanisms implied by the partisan competition theory.

The concluding chapter discusses the optimistic implications of my findings for the quality of elections, the voting behavior of poor citizens, the conceptualization of clientelist democracies, and the viability of political representation and accountability in new democracies. Vote buying still represents a drain on public budgets and inefficient social investment, but because competition makes poor voters more resistant to electoral clientelism than currently assumed, the electoral connection that underwrites democratic governance can operate in competitive constituencies. I draw out the public policy implications of my findings for opposition political parties, election management bodies, and democracy promotion efforts to fight vote buying and help transform clients into citizens.

This chapter tests the book’s main argument and the three proposed mechanisms by analyzing the effectiveness of vote-buying schemes in Argentina, Colombia, and Turkey. To avoid repetition, I highlight one mechanism per country, using a critical-case approach. In Colombia’s 2022 elections, weak partisanship and an atomized party system imply that recipients might respond instrumentally to electoral gifts. Nevertheless, using a conjoint experiment, I show strong partisan response, thus highlighting the low bar for partisan affinity to disrupt machine politics. Competitive authoritarianism in Turkey should bias elections in the incumbent’s favor, but I show that local competition for the Kurdish vote and intensive campaigns in the 2015 elections caused the incumbent party to target many unbuyable voters and made the vote buying strategy to fail nationally. Finally, in Argentina the use of partisan ballots should increase recipient compliance. Employing observational data and a photo-based survey experiment from the 2021 elections, I instead show that recipients believe in ballot secrecy and vote their true preferences where prior local electoral competition was vibrant but comply by voting for the machine where it had been locally dominant. The findings from these three critical-case tests show the surprisingly weak conditions that can make vote buying ineffective and imply that my argument generalizes to other competitive systems rife with clientelism.

This is the first of three chapters on the mechanisms that translate the effects of electoral competitiveness into the success or failure of vote buying. Here, I provide a new argument for recipients’ responses to vote-buying offers. Existing theory rooted in instrumentalist microfoundations predicts that all demographically similar voters respond equally to electoral gifts of a given value, thus making all voters potentially buyable. Drawing on the motivated reasoning literature in political science and the gifting literature in behavioral economics, I argue that responses to electoral gifts are conditioned by preexisting partisanship. Even though all recipients appreciate the gift’s economic value, partisans assign it different symbolic value due to inferences about the machine’s rationale for targeting them. Initial supporters respond positively, inferring that the machine cares about their welfare, whereas initial opponents respond negatively, inferring that the machine seeks to manipulate their vote. Partisan responses limit the market for votes by putting many opposed recipients out of the machine’s reach. Tests compare the predictions of standard “equal response” theory to my partisan response model using fieldwork observations, survey data, and conjoint experiments in Mexico.

This chapter provides a bookend test of my main hypothesis that the intensity of local electoral competition conditions the effectiveness of vote-buying attempts. I use specialized election-season panel surveys of Mexican citizens to assess the impact of electoral gifts on vote choices from the onset of national-level democracy in 2000 until 2018. Results show that vote buying typically fails in competitive constituencies and only succeeds where the machine was already electorally dominant for nonclientelist reasons. The rest of the chapter provides robustness tests. I use multiple approaches to measure vote-buying attempts, including direct and indirect self-reports from recipients and the PRI’s intent to treat constituencies with electoral gifts. Tests for endogeneity include sensitivity analysis and instrumental variables models, as well as time series and fixed effects models at the municipal level.

This second chapter on mechanisms argues that competitive elections cause machines to target many unbuyable voters with electoral gifts. Vote buying is effective when recipients vote for the machine but would have voted for a rival party had they not received a gift. Existing research shows that machines select clients based on citizens’ observable pre-campaign dispositions. Yet the unknowable effects of the subsequent campaigns can shift recipients’ vote-relevant attitudes enough to make some initially buyable voters unbuyable by Election Day. Machines in competitive constituencies thus make many unavoidable targeting errors. Campaign effects are muted in constituencies that the machine already dominates electorally, leading to more efficient targeting and more effective vote buying. Tests use a variety of measurement techniques and election-season panel surveys from Mexico between 2000 and 2018.

This chapter challenges the prevailing narrative that the release of open-source models constitutes the “democratization” of generative AI (GenAI). Arguing that genuine democratization requires far more than mere access, the analysis posits that openness is a necessary but insufficient condition. Current initiatives often create a “techno-utopian mirage,” benefiting only those who already possess the requisite expertise, computational power, and economic resources. The concentration of GenAI use in wealthy, English-speaking nations reveals a digital and linguistic divide, while the industry’s reliance on a workforce of low-wage global laborers highlights exploitative practices antithetical to democratic ideals. Furthermore, companies often protect proprietary trade secrets like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) methods, which are central to model quality. Until these systemic issues are addressed, “democratization” will remain a marketing slogan rather than a meaningful reality.

International organizations (IOs) are instances of international governance, i.e., places where international (normative) power is exercised. As such, they are subject to requirements for democratization, among which is the need for democratic representation. The meaning of democratic representation varies. When applied to IOs in the context of globalization, democratic representation is understood as the set of mechanisms and techniques that make individuals present in their functioning, particularly in the making of international norms, including soft norms. Among these mechanisms and techniques, parliamentarization is supposed to involve national parliaments to a greater extent, either as such, through their members, or through the institutions that brings them together: the international parliamentary institutions. Notwithstanding their diversity, these institutions appear to be the preferred vehicle for the parliamentarization of IOs because they institutionalize international parliamentary representation. Yet, the extent to which this parliamentarization effectively serves democratic representation in IOs is open to discussion. First, representation within international parliamentary institutions reveals that the parliamentary representative can be a false friend of IOs as democratic representatives. Moreover, representation by international parliamentary institutions or their members is often a false pretence of democratic representation within IOs, despite clear democratic virtues for their functioning.

This chapter first presents an ideal type of a hybrid regime. This account sees a hybrid regime as a regime that presents itself as a functioning democracy, but in which the incumbent has disproportionate control over the rules of the game. The chapter then identifies points of tension between a hybrid regime’s constitution and the constitution of a good state. It shows that three constitutional features tend to be found in a hybrid regime: rivaling constitutional ideologies of democracy and guardianship; a trifurcated dual state legal order; and two levels of constitutional battle. Along the way, the chapter suggests how these features might impact a constitutional court in a hybrid regime.