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Voting for Autocracy
Abstract
This book provides a theory of the logic of survival of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), one of the most resilient autocratic regimes in the twentieth century. An autocratic regime hid behind the facade of elections that were held with clockwise precision. Although their outcome was totally predictable, elections were not hollow rituals. The PRI made millions of ordinary citizens vest their interests in the survival of the autocratic regime. Voters could not simply ‘throw the rascals out of office’ because their choices were constrained by a series of strategic dilemmas that compelled them to support the autocrats. The book also explores the factors that led to the demise of the PRI. The theory sheds light on the logic of ‘electoral autocracies’, among the most common type of autocracy, and is the only systematic treatment in the literature today dealing with this form of autocracy. © Beatriz Magaloni 2006 and Cambridge University Press, 2009. All rights reserved.
... Centered primarily on support for the ruling party, the existing literature overwhelmingly points to individual characteristics to explain why certain types of people choose to participate in autocratic elections. Specifically, a number of studies have shown that people vote for ruling parties for economic reasons, in anticipation of a personal or community-based reward (Blaydes 2011;Lust-Okar 2006;Magaloni 2006;Miguel, Jamal, and Tessler 2015). On the other hand, while there is little systematic research on opposition partisanship itself, the literature on support for democracy implies such partisanship may be largely ideological, stemming, perhaps, from higher levels of education (Croke et al. 2016). ...
... 3 Overwhelmingly, the literature shows that people vote for the ruling party in expectation of a direct or community-based economic reward. For example, Blaydes (2011) and Magaloni (2006) demonstrate that electoral autocracies-specifically Mexico under the PRI and Hosni Mubarak's Egypt-focus their social spending and infrastructure investments in ways that correlate with voting behavior. These regimes tended to invest more heavily in strongholds or swing districts, implying that ordinary citizens support the ruling party in expectations of these rewards. ...
... The networks of opposition partisans appear to be more ethnically homogenous than those of nonpartisans or ruling party partisans, and opposition partisans tend to have higher levels of socioeconomic status but are less likely to contact their municipal councilors, less likely to believe that voting for the ruling party will lead to local investments, and, unsurprisingly, more likely to have experienced political intimidation. These results lend evidence to the hypotheses proposed by Blaydes (2011) and Magaloni (2006) that ruling parties derive their support from promises of economic investment, though including these measures in the analysis does not affect the enormous magnitude of the effect of a network's opposition homogeneity on individual partisanship. ...
In electoral autocracies, why do some people actively support political parties while others choose to not get involved in politics? Further, what differentiates those who choose to support the ruling party from those who support the opposition? Existing research has proposed that people support ruling parties primarily to extract economic benefits from the state while people support opposition parties primarily for ideological reasons. However, we lack a unified theory of partisanship, leading to indeterminant predictions about the individual predictors of partisanship. This article instead considers the social nature of partisanship in authoritarian regimes. Qualitative data collected in Cameroon highlight different processes of political socialization in an autocratic context, and data from an original survey show not only that partisan homogeneity in social networks is highly predictive of individual-level partisanship but also, at least to some extent, that partisanship can be contagious through the process of socialization within these networks.
... From the perspective of the clients, clientelistic networks in autocratic settings are a more-or-less enforced precondition for individual well-being, access to social services, patronage employment, or other tangible benefits, that individuals might not be able to access otherwise. Despite the fact that "delivering the vote" isn't always regarded as morally righteous behavior (Kao, Lust, and Rakner, 2022), it is the primary route to material resources, opportunities, and personal safety for ordinary voters in authoritarian regimes (Magaloni, 2006;McLellan, 2022). Voters whose access to stateprovided resources is linked -or perceived to be linked -to the ethnicity of their elected officials are more likely to band together and support candidates or parties from the same ethnic group. ...
... Clientelism serves as a crucial instrument in a dictator's toolkit for repression. The literature on ruling parties illustrates that this dependency on the state can sustain authoritarian regimes, even in the absence of overt coercion and widespread fraud (Saikkonen, 2017;Magaloni, 2006). The ability of authoritarian regimes to exert greater control over resource distribution is a fundamental aspect of clientelism. ...
... This, coupled with the ease with which politicians can wield control in autocratic contexts, renders clientelism a highly effective tactic. Additionally, from the perspective of the clients, clientelism is seen as a necessary means for attaining individual well-being as it offers the most viable path to obtaining material gains, employment, personal security, and other vital tangible and intangible resources (Magaloni, 2006;McLellan, 2022). What drives these differences between autocratic and democratic regimes and shapes the incentives to pursue clientelist strategies, is the robustness of political competition (Hicken, 2011;Van De Walle, 2007). ...
In this article, we explore the reasons why some ethnic groups tend to vote along ethnic lines while others do not. We argue that existing explanations for ethnic voting can be grouped into three main approaches: policy-based, grievance-based, and clientelism. However, we contend that inconsistencies in previous empirical research come from a failure to account for the political context in which ethnic voting occurs. Specifically, we argue that ethnic voting in democracies operates on a different logic than in non-democratic regimes. Our argument posits that policy- and grievance-based factors are the primary determinants of ethnic voting in democracies, whereas clientelist networks play a crucial role in understanding ethnic voting in autocratic regimes. To test our hypotheses, we use a sample of 428 ethnic groups from 33 African countries between 2005 and 2018, as well as a novel survey-based measurement of voting preferences among ethnic group members. Our findings support our hypotheses: in democratic regimes, grievance-based and policy-based explanations have strong explanatory power, whereas clientelism is the primary driver of ethnic bloc voting in autocracies. We conclude that both regime type and the different underlying mechanisms of clientelism require greater consideration in the research on ethnic voting.
... This type of clientelism has been widely observed in the former Communist Bloc countries of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia (Mares and Young, 2019;Reuter, 2017;Higashijima, 2022) as well as in dominant party states that have appeared in Latin America, Asia, and Africa Magaloni, 2006;Washida, 2019;Weiss, 2020a). For instance, public employees, such as bureaucrats, teachers, and doctors in the post-Soviet states, are strongly captured by the practices of relational clientelism, which is orchestrated by dominant parties, such as United Russia and Kazakhstan's Nur-Otan. ...
... Interestingly, parties that ranked higher in the lists generally resonate with prominent cases referred to in the existing studies of clientelism. For example, online Appendix C.1 (relational clientelism) includes typical cases taken up by the studies of authoritarian dominant parties and relational clientelism (e.g., Higashijima, 2022;Magaloni, 2006;Reuter, 2017;Washida, 2019) 13 In stark contrast to relational clientelism (online Appendix C.1), multiple parties are listed from the same countries in the case of single-shot clientelism (online Appendix C.2). The number of cases winning or retaining office within the total number of contested elections is much lower than those of higher-ranked countries in relational clientelism (online Appendix C.1). ...
Recent research on clientelism has focused on the varieties of clientelism. They suggest that clientelistic exchanges differ in terms of the expected length of iterations, whereby politicians deliver benefits to voters in exchange for political support. Using newly collected V-Party data (1,844 political parties from 165 countries, 1970–2019), we identify two prominent types of clientelism that recent studies have suggested: relational clientelism and single-shot clientelism. By demonstrating that our measures of clientelism outperform existing cross-national indices, we suggest that it is important to unpack clientelistic linkages at the party level to grasp the fine-grained differences in clientelism across parties within states. We then apply our measures to the analysis of the relationship between economic development and clientelism, one of the major topics in the clientelism study. Our analysis finds that relational clientelism persists even in relatively developed countries, whereas the effect of economic development on single-shot clientelism has a curvilinear relationship. Our applications of the new measures of clientelism also show that the gap in clientelistic practices between ruling and opposition parties varies depending on the types of clientelism, tenure lengths of incumbents, and the degree of political centralization.
... Evidence of regime popularity, such as favorable opinion polls or election victories, can prevent voter and elite defections as well as bolster regime control (Hale and Colton 2017;Reuter and Szakonyi 2019;Tertytchnaya 2020). A growing literature has therefore explored the factors that make authoritarian leaders popular, focusing primarily on the role of ideology (Colton and Hale 2009), performance evaluations (Magaloni 2006;Treisman 2011), and information manipulation in the form of propaganda or censorship (Guriev and Treisman 2019;2020a). ...
... Most contemporary autocrats rely on their popularity to ensure social control (Guriev and Treisman 2019). Autocrats can draw popularity from some of the same sources as democratic leaders: citizens may support the leader's programmatic positions or character traits (Colton and Hale 2009;Hale and Colton 2017) or they may believe that the autocrat is performing well in office (Magaloni 2006;Treisman 2011). Contemporary authoritarian regimes also try to actively shape citizen perceptions of the regime. ...
Being popular makes it easier for dictators to govern. A growing body of scholarship therefore focuses on the factors that influence authoritarian popularity. However, it is possible that the perception of popularity itself affects incumbent approval in autocracies. We use framing experiments embedded in four surveys in Russia to examine this phenomenon. These experiments reveal that manipulating information—and thereby perceptions—about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity can significantly affect respondents’ support for him. Additional analyses, which rely on a novel combination of framing and list experiments, indicate that these changes in support are not due to preference falsification, but are in fact genuine. This study has implications for research on support for authoritarian leaders and defection cascades in nondemocratic regimes.
... In other words, while the hegemonic center in this "competitive clientelism" enjoys extensive central and local resources it skilfully distributes as a "clientelistic national machine" or as the "popular broker-state", contenders either required to rely on resources controlled by powerful mayors (like the CHP), or extremely restricted resources stemming from party members' and party elites' limited private wealth (the İYİ Parti and the HDP), grassroots volunteerism, and official aid. These conditions foster a fragile hegemonic party autocracy (Magaloni 2006;Greene 2007). Clients become more dependent on one party rather than comparing and choosing between different party elites who compete for the clients' loyalty. ...
... Turkey is evidently not a full-scale autocracy but at times throughout the last decade of AKP rule, the political system in Turkey -at certain moments and localities-could be less competitive than a "competitive authoritarian regime", as formulated by Levitsky, Way (2002). However, this authoritarian system has never been as stable as an ideal typical "hegemonic party regime", examples of which are demonstrated by scholars like Sartori (2005), Magaloni (2006) and Greene (2007). Thus, here we identify the political system created by the AKP as a "fragile hegemonic party autocracy" in which the authoritarian incumbent could lose critical local offices and had to rely on a minor nationalist party to sustain its hegemonic position. ...
This article reviews the existing body of scholarship and draws on original qualitative research that compares the party organizations of four major Turkish parties. By doing so, it highlights the causal relationships -mediated by political agency– between socioeconomic structures and party politics. Clientelism remained part and parcel of Turkish party politics and state-society relations since the transition to multi-party system in mid-20th century through AKP governments. However, important changes occurred in terms of who effectively supplied it, how, and to whom on the basis of broader socioeconomic transformations of Turkey. Political parties did not equally or homologously adjust and respond to social change. The AKP’s successful organizational responses to socioeconomic transformations had important implications for Turkey’s political regime. In pre-AKP clientelism, the state and powerful local notables within parties were key to the supply and distribution of clientelistic benefits. We argue that this contributed to the emergence of electoral democracy under tutelage of military-bureaucratic state actors who faced weak resistance from a fragmented civilian political class. In turn, during AKP governments, the locus of patronage shifted from state to party and from local notables to the AKP party machine: national machine politics. This helped the party to pacify military-bureaucratic tutelage and achieve dominance in party politics, but, the lack of a categorically pro-democratic party ideology and the paradoxes of national machine politics together led the party to transform Turkey to an electoral autocracy instead of developing democracy. Further, the AKP reshaped the Turkish state, which on the surface began to look like a party-state. By revising and providing nuance to this observation, we discuss the emergence of a popular broker-state mediating between national and local state institutions and local communities through its control over resources. We maintain that all these changes facilitated also the party’s internal decay. This generates important opportunities for opposition parties, who however continue to rely heavily on pre-AKP forms of clientelistic politics. Without refashioning their party organizations and party-voter linkages, they may not be able to defeat the AKP electorally, and even if they are, they may not be able to secure successful democratization. They also face difficulties of altering how they form clientelistic linkages with society without controlling state resources at national level.
... Co-optation is a mainstay of authoritarian survival strategy, aimed at buying off potential opposition with either rents or policy concessions (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003;Gandhi and Przeworski 2006;2007;Haber 2006). Most co-optation institutions identified in existing studies share a common feature: in exchange for political support, the regime makes a payout, often in the form of material benefits (e.g., Magaloni 2006) or political offices (e.g., Malesky and Schuler 2010). As a matter of fact, political selection is frequently used as a vehicle for co-optation (Ang 2016;Blaydes 2010;Lust-Okar 2005;Truex 2014), as political offices are a credible way of distributing rents (Robinson and Verdier 2013). ...
Why does an authoritarian regime adopt meritocracy in its political selection? I argue that meritocracy can be used to co-opt large numbers of ordinary citizens by providing them with an opportunity of socioeconomic advancement instead of income redistribution, as long as the selection process is viewed as inclusive and rule-based. Focusing on the civil service examination in contemporary China, I examine how this meritocratic selection has shaped the relationship between college graduates and the Chinese regime. Exploiting a spatial-cohort variation in applicant eligibility, I find that the exam boosts college graduates’ perceived upward mobility, which in turn weakens their demand for redistribution even in the face of growing inequality. These findings point to an alternative mode of authoritarian co-optation and highlight the role of upward mobility in regime stability.
... Fourth, while our results focus on gender reforms, they likely speak more broadly to other liberalizing reforms undertaken by authoritarian regimes such as competitive elections or human rights councils. While these reforms are potentially more risky to regimes (Donno and Kreft 2019), they similarly earn them praise and help them survive (Blaydes 2010;Gandhi and Przeworski 2007;Magaloni 2006). If our results are any guide, such reforms may produce similar trade-offs in public opinion, with regime opponents skeptical of such reforms even when they support them in substance, wary of the legitimacy they may grant to the regime. ...
Gender quotas are increasingly being adopted by autocrats in part to legitimize their rule. Yet, even in autocracies, these quotas increase women’s political representation. It thus stands to reason that public support for gender quotas in autocracies might be shaped by this trade-off between advancing women’s rights and granting the regime legitimacy. All else equal, regime opponents should be less supportive of gender quotas in autocracies, wary of legitimizing the regime. We uncover evidence of this proposition in an analysis of region-wide Arab Barometer surveys and a survey experiment in Algeria. We also find that evaluations of this trade-off are conditioned by other demographics, with women, gender egalitarians, and Islamists remaining more consistent in their support for/opposition to gender quotas regardless of regime gains. Overall, our findings suggest that gender quotas in autocracies are viewed through a political lens, creating a potential backlash toward women’s empowerment.
Do nomination rules shape how voters evaluate their representatives? Some scholars argue that, in places where trust in political parties is low, primary elections can be an electoral asset by improving how politicians are regarded by voters. Yet, this claim has received little empirical scrutiny. A survey experiment in Mexico, where parties have employed several nomination rules in recent years, allows us to assess this argument. We find that, by and large, providing information about the method by which a politician was nominated to office—relative to not providing such information—has virtually no impact on how voters evaluate the politician. At the same time, we uncover evidence of a relative advantage of primary elections over more centralized nomination rules. Specifically, learning that a politician was nominated in a primary election—relative to learning that they were appointed by party elites—improves voter perceptions of politician quality and increases their reported willingness to vote for the politician in the future. Our results have important implications for political parties in many developing countries and new democracies, where intraparty democracy is increasingly popular.
Abstracts
What drives refugee movements? Focusing on host countries' domestic political institutions, we argue that refugee entry is determined by the political regimes that shape the incentives of both host governments and displaced persons. Specifically, we theorize that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between political regimes and the volume of refugee entries. When the host country is autocratic, refugee volume becomes smaller due to displaced persons’ unwillingness to risk the high uncertainty of life under such regimes, and when the host country is democratic, refugee volume is similarly curbed due to democratic constraints on the host government. Consequently, a majority of refugees are clustered into anocratic regimes. Using a global dataset, a series of statistical analyses found strong evidence in support of our theoretical expectations regarding not only the hypothesized correlation between regime type and refugee movements but also the preferences of host governments and displaced persons that we theorize underlie this relationship.
Scholars have mostly investigated the fall of dictatorships during the Arab Uprisings through the lens of contentious politics, uncovering new information about the protest dynamics and how they spread both within countries and throughout the wider region. However, the longer structural vulnerabilities within regimes have received little attention; yet such factors internal to states and their regimes proved paramount to the social revolutions investigated by Theda Skocpol. Focusing on the case of Tunisia, the author shows how the economic downturn and a succession crisis contributed to the decay of the Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali regime starting in the 2000s. Importantly, they heightened internecine conflicts within the regime and, in particular, within the longtime ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally. It is through this backdrop that the events of the 2010–2011 Tunisian revolution must be understood: far from supporting the regime in times of crisis, members of Ben Ali’s ruling party engaged in contentious activities against him, thus crucially weakening the regime from within.
This chapter turns to questions about how the institutional context influences voter turnout and how these effects might vary across rich and poor voters. The chapter contends that two types of institutional characteristics can encourage the incentive for voting across social groups. First, attention is placed on institutions that make the voting procedure easier. Particularly, these are institutions designed in ways that actively encourage, not repress, participation (i.e., voter registration). Second, the chapter focuses on institutions that operate as structures or centres for mobilisation. These institutions can reduce the cost of voting and mobilise potential political participants (i.e., party systems, electoral systems). Thus, drawing on several rounds of the Afrobarometer and institutional features, notably voter registration, party systems and electoral systems, the chapter uses multilevel modelling and develops models to examine how these institutional factors affect voting and modify the association between socioeconomic status and voting in sub-Saharan Africa. Overall, the result suggests country-level institutional determinants, notably voter registration and party system, are found to affect turnout across the board rather than to explain the reverse pattern between socioeconomic status and voting.
How can we ensure quality elections when the key institutions responsible for the organisation of polls are openly partisan and anti-democratic? In their 2017 paper, Birch and van Ham suggest that partisan electoral management bodies (EMBs) do not matter for the quality of polls so long as effective alternative oversight institutions exist, are active and independent. These institutions can make up for the EMBs’ shortcomings and ensure that a relatively high-quality election is still achieved. I argue that the notion of active and independent alternative oversight institutions leaves us guessing under which conditions it works. Adopting James’s network-based approach to electoral management, I show on the example of the 2019 Thai election that electoral governance networks that are characterised by high levels of political polarisation, the presence of entrenched authoritarian elites and formally independent EMBs that are too powerful make substitution untenable.
This article explores how personalization was formed in Nicaragua under the leadership of Daniel Ortega, focusing on four factors: short-term, long-term, domestic, and international perspectives. Nicaraguan politics are often structured by the country's relationship with the USA and regional powers. However, domestic actors make decisions regarding political regime changes. Therefore, the process of personalization must be considered in both domestic and international politics. This study's analysis unequivocally demonstrates that domestic and international factors have always influenced political regime changes in Nicaragua. However, personalization is primarily formed by domestic factors, with external factors reinforcing domestic movement in Nicaragua. In addition, this study shows that it is challenging to explain the process of Ortega's personalization according to short-term factors such as populism. Instead, it is a long-term factor, specifically the traditional power-sharing method in a duopoly, that pushes Ortega's personalization forward. We conclude that Nicaragua's hybrid regime resulted in personalization.
What are the drivers of citizens’ support for electoral gender quotas in transitioning and authoritarian states? Despite extensive research examining public support for women in politics in democracies, we know little about how the public perceives them in less democratic settings. To address this shortcoming, we use original survey data from authoritarian Morocco and transitioning Tunisia – two Arab countries hailed for their progressive gender policies. We argue that in these countries where citizens lack political information, they instead rely on their assessment of the government’s performance to form attitudes toward gender quotas. Furthermore, electoral legitimacy plays an important role in shaping citizens’ support for quotas, which are closely linked to how elections and legislatures operate. The findings offer strong support for our theoretical expectations and uncover important gender differences.
Empirical evidence suggests that contemporary authoritarian regimes face several incentives to redistribute social policy concessions to their citizens. Yet autocracies differ extensively in their capacity to implement policy decisions. In this article, we identify three distinct but interrelated mechanisms through which state capacity determines a more equal provision of social benefits and services in healthcare and education sectors. Administrative capacity allows the regime to manage the implementation of social policy, extractive capacity ties in with more resources and information to be used for the provision of social benefits and services, and coercive capacity permits the state to effectively enforce policies. Using static and dynamic regression models for over 120 countries from 1960 to 2016, our findings show that state capacity enhances social equality in authoritarian contexts through these three interrelated mechanisms. Further analysis though suggests that the overall effect of state capacity dissipates in the long run.
Ruling party strength is often associated with positive outcomes in autocracies, but we know little about how the effects of party strength differ across party types or which feature of party organization contributes most to better outcomes. This article argues that party infrastructural strength – the ability of grassroots party organizations to penetrate society and mobilize the masses – improves governance outcomes but only for authoritarian parties that rose to power through social movements that overthrew the existing political system. Parties that relied on mass mobilization to gain power tend to continue utilizing party strength to provide public goods and gather support. I provide empirical support for my theory using data covering all autocratic ruling parties during the post-Second World War period. The findings have major implications for understanding the intellectual and political challenges posed by well-organized one-party regimes.
Existing work on the democratic accountability of foreign policy suggests that when an incumbent incurs foreign policy losses, including but not limited to standing down in a crisis, making costly compromises, or accepting defeat abroad, opposition politicians at home weigh criticizing the government with the national interest. But this work has largely been developed with a view to explaining oppositional behavior in consolidated democracies. I argue that while electorally competitive oppositions in weakly institutionalized regimes can and frequently do criticize elected incumbents for costly foreign policy reversals, they are less likely to do so if they believe this criticism may negatively affect democratic stability and potentially invite irregular leadership turnover, as this would prevent the opposition from coming into office. I find support for this hypothesis, which I term oppositional pragmatism, in a survey experiment on 430 political party workers affiliated with Pakistan's biggest political party and directionally consistent effects on a smaller but highly elite sample of 202 Pakistani legislators.
El presente artículo analiza las consecuencias de la violencia y la inseguridad sobre la democracia, circunscribiendo el análisis a la participación electoral en elecciones presidenciales en el caso de México. Se pretende descubrir si la violencia y la inseguridad condicionan el hecho de que los ciudadanos voten o se abstengan. Se plantean varias hipótesis afirmando que tanto indicadores objetivos como subjetivos de la seguridad afectan la intención de voto. Para su comprobación, se utiliza una metodología cuantitativa y el Barómetro de las Américas 2019. Tras someter a prueba empírica las hipótesis, se confirma que la ocurrencia de asesinatos en el barrio sí condiciona la decisión de votar o abstenerse en unas futuras elecciones presidenciales. Ello muestra que el voto por cuestiones de seguridad tendría carácter sociotrópico.
Political clientelism refers to a socio-political structure and set of relations formed by the reciprocal and personal exchange acts that the patrons of political positions can use for the clients in exchange for votes or political support. While this kind of political bond can encourage democratic development, it can also produce detrimental effects on democracy if the phenomenon becomes widespread. This study will examine the basic studies in the field of political clientelism and emphasize some basic features underlined by the concept. Some aspects of these key features reveal the tense relationship between political clientelism and democracy. As a particular and informal form of participation, political clientelism exist in a tense relationship with certain dimensions of democracy in terms of the open public debate and inclusion. This tense relationship between democracy and political clientelism constitutes one other fundamental dimension underlined by studies of clientelism. Another aim of the presented study is to touch upon the development process of clientelistic politics in Turkey and examine its connection with democracy. Studies of political clientelism in Turkey emphasize that there is a transition from traditional patronage to party-based broker clientelism. Political clientelism increasingly dominated by urban dynamics in the multi-party era (1946–2002) becomes the fundamental form of interaction between the party and the electorate. In the period of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been in power from 2002 to the present, political clientelism has become extraordinarily widespread, triggering political polarization and ultimately bringing along a great decline in terms of democratic competition and accountability.
Journalism and civil society are two fundamental actors in processes of democratic transition. Twenty years after the first alternation of federal power in Mexico, it is necessary to assess the interaction between these two actors. Although the literature assumes a virtuous relation between them, especially for demanding rights and establishing procedures of accountability, there is evidence that civil society does not necessarily support the function of journalism, as reflected by the growing mistrust of printed media and in the widespread indifference to anti-press violence. Here it is proposed that this lack of trust is motivated by the way in which civil society has been covered by the press. From an original database integrated by the content of the two main newspapers of each state in the country, this research identifies the most common patterns adopted by the local Mexican press for covering civil society. The implications of these patterns for the actual relationship between press and society are discussed.
Why would an emerging market economy without Western democratic institutions provide and promote social welfare to its citizens? This paper explores the driving forces behind the rapid yet unequal expansion of social welfare in China, a phenomenon notable since the late 1990s. Rather than adhering to the conventional state-centered approach that views welfare expansion as a strategy for one-party regimes to seek legitimacy, this study offers an alternate perspective that emphasizes the ‘demand’ side, particularly the role of business. Through a systematic analysis of all 336 Chinese municipalities from 2001 to 2012, the study demonstrates how big businesses act as ‘vanguard,’ pushing local governments to enhance social welfare provision. It suggests that big businesses, in the absence of institutionalized democratic institutions, serve as ‘functional equivalents,’ channeling societal demands to the government. This paper also finds that firms’ influence on social policy in non-democracies is more capability based instead of institutional based; large domestic and multinational corporations are more capable in lobbying the government.
Multiparty elections can reduce the likelihood of conflict and help dictators secure their rule, but when does a dictator create electoral institutions? Existing research finds that one of the major reasons regimes introduce multiparty elections is to gain information about opposition demands. This article builds on that argument to explain that a regime’s finances determine whether or not it is able to benefit from creating electoral institutions. Dictators use the revenue of the regime to invest in different means of deterring opposition rebellion. A regime’s first priority is to build repressive capacity, after which it invests in public spending to buy the support of its winning coalition. Regimes only benefit from multiparty elections when they have sufficient revenue to fund repressive capacity but lack the finances to also buy regime security through massive public spending. Low-revenue regimes cannot benefit from elections and high-revenue regimes do not need elections to help secure their rule. I test the implications of the argument for regime spending and the creation of multiparty electoral institutions using a global sample of dictatorships between 1972 and 2014. The results of the hypothesis tests indicate that as revenue increases regimes decrease their shares of spending on repressive capacity but increase shares of spending on the public. The results also indicate the probability that a regime introduces elections rises as revenue increases from a low level, but the probability declines as revenue increases from a high level. The study builds upon the literature for how regime resources and state capacity influence authoritarian strategies of political survival. The findings for spending patterns are consistent with recent research on late modern regimes, and the results for the emergence of electoral institutions are consistent with research that finds dictators must have sufficient resources to survive holding elections.
By now, most political systems around the world hold regular multiparty elections of different quality and type. However, we know relatively little about the effect of elections on corruption, especially in high-discretion, public procurement contracts implementing development aid. To address this gap in the literature, we employ unmatched comparisons and matching estimators to analyze a global government contracting dataset that provides an objective proxy for corruption: the incidence of single bidding in competitive markets. We find that all things being equal, corruption risks increase in the immediate pre-election period: single bidding is higher by 1.3-6.1% points. We demonstrate that the corruption-enhancing effect of elections is stronger under conditions of (i) high electoral competitiveness, (ii) medium-level party institutionalization, and (iii) "localized collective goods" clientelism.
How is China acquiring global influence? Rather than focusing exclusively on China's interests, this book considers a vital but overlooked feature – the interests of recipient countries. Richard W. Carney argues that countries in which political leaders rely more heavily on clientelism coupled with greater control over the corporate sector have a higher demand for Chinese infrastructure spending. Through a combination of statistical analyses and case studies, Carney shows that electoral autocracies (in contrast to closed autocracies, electoral democracies, and liberal democracies) display these features most prominently and are the most avid recipients. This in turn contributes to elevated levels of Chinese digital technologies imports which facilitates the spread of Chinese technical standards, enabling China to create the scale to assert its dominance over the emerging digital economy. Electoral autocracies are the most prevalent type of regime, and are therefore essential partners to China's global ambitions.
Previous literature argues that social pressure during democratic elections motivates citizens to vote. Studies in western democracies find that social pressure is especially ingrained among older generations who possess a deeper sense of civic duty. I test this argument in a new democracy, Tunisia, where citizens of all ages are experiencing democratic elections for the first time. I analyze the results from an original survey that includes an experiment measuring social pressures to vote across generations. The results show that contrary to findings in developed western democracies, Tunisians fail to socially sanction or reward an individual based on voting behavior despite believing that citizens should vote. This finding implies a democratic transition might encourage individuals to ascribe to the norm of voting, but citizens are unlikely to fully internalize this participatory norm in a way that activates and enforces this norm to pressure people to vote. These results speak to the wider generalizability of the impact of civic duty and norm enforcement on voter turnout in nascent democratic contexts.
This study places Russia’s political regime into a comparative perspective by developing a conceptual framework that classifies authoritarian regimes along two dimensions, those of regime-specific institutionalization and electoral institutionalization. The resulting conceptual map places Russia’s political regime of 2003–2023 into the category of regimes that, while including an electoral component, score relatively low on the dimension of regime-specific institutionalization. At the same time, the conceptual map allows for tracing the regime’s evolution along the two dimensions. The analysis reveals that over time, the regime has undergone a staged transformation from electoral authoritarianism with relatively strong, albeit mostly informal, constraints on the exercise of executive power to a full-fledged personalist dictatorship. This process was finalized after the 2020 constitutional amendments, and became manifest in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022.
The term ‘resilience’ is widely used in current analysis of world politics to refer to a situation where institutions surprisingly sustain themselves against otherwise dire prospects. Yet, discussions of institutional resilience tend to underappreciate its dynamic character. This article proposes a reconceptualization of institutional resilience that centers the productive power of crisis. It argues that institutional resilience is best understood as an interpretative process rooted in a co-constitutive dynamic of crisis and adaptation. Resilience is made possible through the (re)production of a crisis narrative in context. We illustrate this argument with two case studies looking into how this dynamic unfolds in the context of political regimes (Cameroon) and international organizations (ASEAN). Doing so, we make the case for the development of a broader research agenda that can contribute to a better understanding of how institutions that are portrayed as frail and unstable not only survive but transform over time.
Dictatorships that use plebiscites – that is, referendums initiated by the executive – have a longer expected lifespan. A successful plebiscite sends a signal that makes coordination for collective action more difficult and induces the falsification of preferences. It also enhances the status of the dictator within the regime and against potential rivals through the use of agenda power. As a result, plebiscites are followed by decreased mobilization and a reduced risk of palace coups. This, in turn, adds years to the dictator's tenure. We have found evidence to support these propositions by utilizing data from various databases of autocratic regimes that span from 1946 to 2008.
Physical access to public services frequently does not guarantee people’s needs will be met — what we term effective access. Such discrepancies result in part from social bargaining: the extent to which citizens can leverage connections with street-level service providers. Survey data from 34 African countries shows citizens with greater social bargaining capacity enjoy greater effective access, in contrast to citizens who pay bribes. Data from 70,000 households in Tanzania further demonstrates that parents with greater social bargaining capacity have more opportunities to interact with school officials — and that their children are more likely to achieve relevant learning outcomes.
The past few years have seen severe political decay in a number of countries across the world, having attracted wide attention from the international community. While existing research has delved into the causes of political decay from both internal and external perspectives, there has been a notable lack of attention given to the disproportionate influence wielded by armed forces, political parties, and bureaucrats. Taking the case of Egypt as an example, we demonstrate how the interplay between the military, parties and bureaucrats created a stable nexus that contributes to prolonged political decay. Furthermore, we draw comparisons between the well-known case of civil–military relations in Thailand and that of Egypt, highlighting how the social cognition forged in the historical process may contribute to the political power imbalance that makes it difficult for some countries to escape political decline. This research provides novel insights into understanding political decay in certain countries, shedding light on the complex dynamics at play and offering potential avenues for addressing this pressing issue.
How does economic globalization affect regime support in non-democratic regimes? While we know a lot about how globalization affects politics in democracies, we know only little about its impact on political preferences in autocracies. I focus on FDI, which has increased considerably over the last decades and affects low- and high-skilled individuals differently. Material risks associated with FDI decrease regime support only among the poorly educated; economic gains from FDI bolster support for the incumbent regime for well-educated individuals. I present two analyses that corroborate these hypotheses. Study 1 uses Afrobarometer data and matches respondents with geo-located data on FDI. To mitigate selection problems, I only compare individuals that are exposed to FDI with individuals that are not yet exposed at the time the survey was administered. Study 2 utilizes cross-national survey data from 14 autocracies. My findings explain why some citizens favor the political status quo, even in autocracies.
This paper assesses the long-term consequences of voting for democracy. We study Chile’s 1988 plebiscite, which ended 15 years of dictatorship and reestablished democracy. Taking advantage of individual-level voting data, we implement an age-based regression discontinuity design comparing long-run registration and turnout rates across marginally eligible and ineligible individuals. We find plebiscite eligibility increased electoral turnout three decades later. The magnitude of the initial mobilization emerges as the mechanism. Plebiscite eligibility induced a sizable share of less-educated voters to register compared to other upstream elections. The event contributed to the emergence of one-party rule the 20 years following democratization. (JEL D72, D82, O17)
Studies of elections held by autocrats often assume that institutions are strengthened in order to increase the leverage of the dictator. Yet, it can also be the case that institutions are purposely weakened when autocrats allow for elections. This is what happened in the 2019 Thai elections. These elections were notable not for advancing “national reform” or democratisation, but for the deinstitutionalisation of the party system. Through three mechanisms – constitutional engineering, electoral manipulation, and legal rulings – Thailand's royalist elites were able to deinstitutionalise the opposition and undermine a fair, democratic process. This paper outlines these mechanisms of deinstitutionalisation that distorted the outcome of the 2019 elections.
Italy’s 1992 elections marked the end of political dominance by Christian Democracy (DC). The conventional account of the collapse of the DC’s vote to less than 30% focuses on the breakup of the Soviet Union, which is said to have freed Catholic voters to switch to new regionalist protest parties. The author documents that this argument is empirically inadequate. Evidence shows that electoral districts more exposed to international trade were where the DC lost larger vote shares and where the Northern League received more support. These findings corroborate that social groups linked to small firms in the north and center whose products were exported throughout Europe underwent electoral realignment in response to the economic opportunities offered by the 1991 Maastricht Treaty. The author argues that DC was not credible in providing national macroeconomic policies that would have allowed Italy to partake fully of the opportunities offered by European economic integration.
Using formal tools from game theory, the first phases of the process of transition to democracy in Poland in 1988–1989 are modeled as a succession of strategic interactions among political actors. Because the Polish process of change was temporarily ahead of others in Eastern Europe, certain false expectations on actors' future power in the middle term were entertained. These miscalculations allowed the communist party and the democratic opposition represented by Solidarity to negotiate and agree on a round-table. However, the results of the first competitive election, in which the democratic opposition won by a landslide, revealed the real bargaining power of each party, breached the political arrangement previously negotiated, and precipitated the fall of the communist regime. Some refined tools of game theory, such as the assumption of an initial state of the game, the conditions of imperfect information, and the order of moves, show their relevance to an explanation of the viability of strictly nonequilibrium outcomes in real political games such as those of the Polish transition from authoritarian rule.
On 29 December 1992, the first multi-party elections — both presidential and parliamentary — since 1966 were held in Kenya. Exactly five years later this happened again. Not only in Kenya, but also in the international community, these elections were followed with special interest, for several interrelated reasons: (1) such elections are considered a major aspect of the ‘democratization’ process which has been imposed by the western donors on many African states; (2) Kenya has always been a very Western-oriented, open, capitalist and politically fairly stable country amidst a group of countries being quite different in these respects; (3) although less than in the past, it still has strategic importance for the Western countries (for example, Mombasa was an important harbour during the Gulf War); and (4) Kenya is a major ‘outlet’ for substantial Western donor funds.
The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the bases of support for Mexico's Partido Revolucionário Institucional . A model is developed which identifies the major and minor variables affecting changes in PRI support in the six elections between 1952 and 1967. Throughout the paper the unit of analysis is the state; the dependent variables are voter turnout and the percentage of the total vote in each state received by the PRI .
The nexus between regime type and development has long preoccupied scholars of the political economy of development. Investigation of this relationship has generally taken place at the cross-national level of analysis. In a world now dominated by a development strategy that seeks to empower local governments and community groups, an understanding of the development consequences of the local political environment is essential. This article examines the municipal development legacy of Mexico's principal demand-based poverty alleviation program of the early 1990s, the National Solidarity Program (PRONASOL). Examination of PRONASOL project outcomes across distinct local electoral environments provides strong support for the proposition that characteristics of local electoral regimes play an important role in the success or failure of the decentralized development strategy.
This article investigates voting behavior and policy outcomes when violence can occur after the election. The author finds that under complete information, voters will prefer the weak party—that is, the party that is the least capable of controlling violence. Under incomplete information, however, violence might occur, and voters could prefer the party the most capable of controlling violence. Finally, the author shows that despite this likely voting outcome, the weak party will choose to participate nonaggressively in the election, providing legitimacy to the new democratic process.
Mexicans behave according to normal economic voting rules: When economic conditions improve they support the president, and when the economy deteriorates they turn against him. Price increases have made people angry, substantially reducing presidential approval rates and eroding confidence in the success of the anti-inflation plan. Self-exonerating arguments do not seem to work in a polity in which the same party has held power since 1929. The article highlights the importance that timing has on the ability of governments to demand public support for economic reforms. Reforms have to be introduced early in the term. Otherwise, negative retrospective evaluations will weigh heavily in people's assessment of the government's ability to implement the economic program successfully. Further, if the government implementing the reforms is not a new one, it will be less able to blame problems on former governments.
This paper discusses the role of electoral institutional design in Mexico’s transition to democracy. Our argument is that electoral rules facilitated party dominance through two mechanisms: electoral rules disproportionately rewarded existing majorities and, at the same time, discouraged potential majorities from forming. More specifically, the rules rewarded parties that could win a majority of the vote in single-member districts; but at the same time, rewarded minority parties with seats from multi-member districts, mitigating Duvergerian incentives to coordinate behind a single challenger. In the short run, seats from multi-member districts benefited opposition parties by significantly reducing entry costs; in the long run, however, these seats helped sustain party dominance, by discouraging coordination among opposition parties and voters.
Political change in Mexico since the crisis of 1994 has been characterised by the breakdown of centralised hierarchies and the dispersion of power across geographical regions. We examine the changing relations between regional officials of the National Solidarity Programme (PRONASOL) and local PRI politicians in four Mexican states: Puebla, Nayarit, Tamaulipas, and Baja California. Although PRONASOL was dismantled after 1994, the influence of anti-poverty bureaucrats has varied across geographic regions, depending on whether they had been authorised to engage in grass-roots mobilisation and/or party politics under Salinas. We emphasise the importance of regional politics in transitions from dominant-party regimes, and the impact of conflicts within the political hierarchies of the old regime.
This paper focuses primarily on systems in which each voter has a single (non-transferable) vote. For such systems, it shows that, if the district magnitude and distribution of vote support among parties are held constant and some empirically attainable conditions are met, then the d'Hondt PR formula and the plurality rule formula will yield identical seat allocations. This result will seem less surprising once the definition of plurality rule is understood, but will remain instructive. The paper also shows that, district magnitude held constant, d'Hondt and plurality rule have identical thresholds of exclusion. These technical results are used to illustrate broader terminogical and conceptual confusions in the empirical literature. For example, I argue that current interpretations of Duverger's Law, emphasizing the electoral formula, are misleading.
The usual model of electoral reaction to economic conditions assumes the “retrospective” economic voter who bases expectations solely on recent economic performance or personal economic experience (voter as “peasant”). A second model assumes a “sophisticated” economic voter who incorporates new information about the future into personal economic expectations (voter as “banker”). Using the components, both retrospective and prospective, of the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) as intervening variables between economic conditions and approval, we find that the prospective component fully accounts for the presidential approval time series. With aggregate consumer expectations about long-term business conditions in the approval equation, neither the usual economic indicators not the other ICS components matter. Moreover, short-term changes in consumer expectations respond more to current forecasts than to the current economy. The qualitative result is a rational expectations outcome: the electorate anticipates the economic future and rewards or punishes the president for economic events before they happen.
Japan uses simple plurality elections with multi-member districts to elect its lower house. This system tends to produce competition among n + 1 candidates per district. This ‘law of simple plurality elections’ is a structural generalization akin to Duverger's Law. Evidence from Japan also indicates that the causal mechanism behind this ‘law’ is not strategic voting, although strategic voting occurs, but elite coalition building. It is further argued that the connection between structure and behaviour is learning and not rationality. Equilibria are reached slowly through trial and error processes. Once reached, the equilibrium is unstable because parties and candidates try to change it. Even without rational actors and stable equilibria, however, this structural generalization accurately describes the dynamics of electoral competition at the district level in Japan.
This article explores the relationship between civil-military relations and political change. Transitions to democracy in Latin America have led scholars to focus attention on the legacy of military rule and those efforts aimed at securing democratic control of the military. The article examines the foundations of civilian supremacy in Mexico, established within the context of a hegemonic party system. Changes brought about in the civil-military balance as a result of shifts in the division of labour between civilians and soldiers, as well as the impact of political liberalisation, are also analysed. Drawing on the experience of other transitions to democracy, the article discusses some of the issues raised by the dismantling of hegemonic rule for civil-military relations in Mexico.
The paper presents a critical review of two major approaches to the analysis of agrarian societies in light of evidence taken from the scholarly literature on Africa. The first approach posits the existence of “natural” societies; the second, of “peasant” societies. The existence of such “precapitalist” societies is often invoked to account for patterns of change in contemporary rural societies. The author argues that these approaches are overly culturally and economically determined, and that they undervalue the importance of the state. Many of the so-called precapitalist features of these societies are themselves found to be products of the societies' encounter with agents of capitalism. Moreover, many result from the efforts of states to secure domination and control over rural populations.