Methods of Election Manipulation and the Likelihood of Post-Election Protest

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 534-556
Author(s):  
Cole J. Harvey ◽  
Paula Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Legal Mobilization ◽  
Popular Protest ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
The Stability

AbstractThe risk of popular protest is one of the few deterrents against election manipulation in authoritarian regimes and unconsolidated democracies, but why are some fraudulent elections met with popular protest while others are not? We use data from elections in 108 countries, from 1980 to 2004, to show that the regime’s choice of election manipulation tactics affects the likelihood of post-election protest. Leaders signal their strength and resources by manipulating elections, but some manipulation tactics send stronger signals than others. We find that opposition groups are more likely to protest when relatively cheap administrative fraud is employed, but not when more costly forms of manipulation – extra-legal mobilization and voter intimidation – are used. This study demonstrates the importance of accounting for variation in electoral manipulation tactics, and the information communicated by those tactics, in explaining post-election protest and the stability of electoral authoritarian and newly democratic regimes.

scholarly journals Party System Institutionalization in Democracies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Mainwaring ◽  
Fernando Bizzarro ◽  
Aaron Watanabe ◽  
María Victoria De Negri
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
System Collapse ◽  
Party System Institutionalization ◽  
Party Institutionalization ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Democratic Elections

Party systems vary in many dimensions. Variation in the stability and predictability of the party system in democratic elections is captured by the concept of Party System Institutionalization (PSI). Where the party system is stable and predictable, it is institutionalized. Where it is in flux and major new contenders regularly appear, the party system lacks institutionalization. Fundamental differences among party systems revolve around the level of institutionalization. Institutionalized systems make governing easier, lower the probability of populists winning office, promote greater economic growth, and are associated with better public policy. Many scholars who work on Latin America, the post-Soviet region, Africa, and Asia have employed the concept “party system institutionalize” to analyze these regions. Because party systems do not develop in a linear way, in some cases this means the study of deinstitutionalization. When deinstitutionalization happens abruptly, it is called party system collapse or party collapse. The article focuses on PSI, erosion, and collapse in democratic regimes; a different literature analyzes party institutionalization under authoritarian regimes.

Looking forward and looking backward: Economic evaluations and regime support in China

Politics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 026339572198954
Author(s):  
Yida Zhai
Keyword(s):  
Economic Evaluation ◽  
National Economy ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Economic Evaluations ◽  
Age Cohorts ◽  
Psychological Mechanism ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Regime Support

It is widely acknowledged that the economic situation is of vital importance for the stability of an authoritarian regime, but it is rarely known how the public’s economic evaluation contributes to such outcomes. This study examines the effects of citizens’ retrospective and prospective evaluations of their household economic situation and the national economy on the level of regime support in China. The findings show that the national economy outweighs household economic conditions in its effects on the public’s support of the regime. However, the gap between evaluations of the national economy and individual economic situations debilitates regime support. The population in different age cohorts has distinct patterns of relationships between retrospective and prospective economic evaluations and regime support. This study elucidates the political-psychological mechanism of the public’s economic evaluation affecting regime support, and the ruling strategy in authoritarian regimes of manipulating this evaluation.

scholarly journals Forecasting Stability or Retreat in Emerging Democratic Regimes

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Snigdha Dewal ◽  
Jack A. Goldstone ◽  
Michael Volpe
Keyword(s):  
Negative Relationship ◽  
Credible Commitments ◽  
National Elections ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Democratic Development ◽  
Middle Income Countries ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
Democratic Stability ◽  
The Stability

Drawing on the literatures on elite transitions, factionalism and the new institutionalism, this paper hypothesizes that the stability of partially democratic and emerging democratic regimes is dependent on the willingness of elites to make credible commitments to cooperate and comply with democratic rules. That willingness (or lack thereof) can be signaled by the presence of cooperative or conflict-precipitating events and actions in the periods around elections. We identify and analyze a variety of intra-elite interactions and demonstrate that conflict-precipitating events significantly increase the odds of a democratic retreat in the months before or just after an election, while cooperative events can balance them and prevent retreat. Using event data collected from 40 low- and middle-income countries for two-year periods around national elections between 1991 and 2007 we show that the imbalance of conflict-precipitating over cooperative events is far greater in cases of retreat from democracy. Furthermore, international intervention and pressure had a negative relationship with democratic stability. A logistic regression model accurately identified democratic retreat in 79 percent of the cases examined. Factor analysis revealed several common patterns of intra-elite conflict that can lead to democratic retreat, or conversely, patterns of cooperative events that bolster democratic consolidation. Finally, the data strongly argues for a model of democratic development that depends on open-ended elite maneuvering and the emergence of elite agreements, rather than a model where strong prior institutional constraints determine elite actions.

Explaining Budgetary Trends in Military Regimes

1988 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 287-296
Author(s):  
Gil Shidlo
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Military Regimes ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
Conventional Literature ◽  
The Military ◽  
Economic Considerations ◽  
Western Democracies

The conventional literature on the military generally believes that military, non-competitive regimes have a tendency to spend more for national-security purposes and less on welfare provision. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate why do Argentina and Brazil, military non-competitive regimes, have tendencies similar to those of Western democracies where the state’s economic expansion extends beyond that required by strictly economic considerations? In contrast to the rational-comprehensive or ‘technocratic’ model which is often assumed to predominate in bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes an analysis of social and economic policies in Brazil and Argentina highlights the essentially political nature of the policy process in non-democratic regimes.

scholarly journals Power Play: A Game Illustrating Power Transition in Authoritarian Regimes

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-171
Author(s):  
Susan Turner Haynes
Keyword(s):  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
College Instructors ◽  
Power Transition ◽  
Military Dictatorship ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
Power Play

ABSTRACTOne of the most alarming trends of the past decade has been the rise in authoritarianism and the growing support of strongman politics among citizens of democratic regimes. College instructors have a unique opportunity to challenge such thinking at a time when many of their students are still forming their political beliefs. Using a game, instructors not only can show students the perils of authoritarianism, they also can potentially expand students’ appreciation of democracy. This article describes a game suitable for this purpose. Students take on the role of workers, soldiers, and rulers in a military dictatorship to learn about the “guns-and-butter tradeoff” and authoritarian uncertainty.

The Extended Scope of Accountability in Public Administration

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Mulgan
Keyword(s):  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Usual Sense ◽  
Government Accountability ◽  
Hierarchical Networks ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
The Government ◽  
Democratic Elections ◽  
Informal Accountability

The accountability of governments to their citizens is usually framed within a relationship of principal and agent in which the government, as agent, is obliged to answer to the citizens as agents. It is also commonly located within a structure of representative democracy where political leaders are elected by, and answerable to, the voters. However, these two theoretical frames do not adequately capture the relations of government to their citizens or the parameters of government accountability. Governments increasingly operate through non-hierarchical networks that are not subject to the vertical accountability assumed in principal-agent theory. Instead, networks offer alternative, informal accountability mechanisms based on horizontal relationships. These are evident, for example, in the responsiveness of professionals to their clients and the mutual accountability of network members to one another. These mechanisms have a sufficient share in the characteristics normally associated with accountability, including the obligations to inform, discuss, and accept consequences, for them to count as mechanisms of accountability in the usual sense. Redefinition of accountability, for instance to exclude the requirement of answering to another person or body, while understandable, is not essential. Accountability mechanisms also function without the support of effective democratic elections. For instance, formal institutions of horizontal accountability, such as courts and anti-corruption agencies, can operate in non-democratic regimes and are better seen as conditions of representative democracy rather than as consequences. Partially democratic or authoritarian regimes also exhibit various forms of social accountability in which civil society organizations call governments directly to account without recourse to state-based agencies of accountability. Large authoritarian regimes can encourage limited accountability processes as a means of bringing public pressure to bear on recalcitrant cadres. To be effective, however, all such measures require at least some legally robust support from government institutions.

scholarly journals Democracy, consumption, and growth in sub-Saharan Africa

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-48
Author(s):  
John A Doces
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Fixed Effects ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Government Consumption ◽  
Private Goods ◽  
Empirical Estimates ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
Sub Saharan

This article studies the effect of political regime type on economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Democracy promotes growth because it conditions government consumption so that consumption is used for public purposes rather than private needs and this in turn leads to faster growth. By conditioning consumption towards public goods and away from private goods, we should see that consumption in democratic regimes is associated with more public goods like roads and education while in authoritarian regimes consumption yields less of these goods. Likewise, consumption should be associated with falling fertility in democratic regimes and rising fertility in authoritarian regimes. Using several measures of growth, the empirical estimates from a large- n fixed-effects regression show that democracy conditions consumption so that the latter is associated with faster growth. Moreover, the empirical analysis indicates that government consumption in democratic regimes is associated with more education completion and lower fertility rates.

Why is Stabilization Sometimes Delayed?

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Oatley
Keyword(s):  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Regime Type ◽  
Compelling Evidence ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
High Inflation ◽  
Distributive Conflict ◽  
Societal Dynamics ◽  
Do So

Existing work on the politics of stabilization has failed to find compelling evidence of a regime-type effect. This article reformulates and reevaluates the regime-type hypothesis. It is argued that regime type does not have an independent impact on the timing of stabilization. Instead, regime type influences the extent to which societal opposition and distributive conflict will delay stabilization. Societal opposition and distributive conflict are likely to delay stabilization in democratic regimes, because governments must worry about maintaining power. Such societal dynamics are less likely to delay stabilization in authoritarian regimes. Using a sample of 92 high-inflation episodes, precisely these regime-specific dynamics surrounding the politics of stabilization were found. Governments in democratic regimes want to stabilize rapidly but often cannot overcome societal opposition and distributive conflict to do so. Authoritarian regimes are substantially less constrained by societal opposition and distributive conflict but have less incentive to stabilize rapidly.

scholarly journals The determinants of Party System Change in Sub-Saharan Africa

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-129
Author(s):  
Riccardo Pelizzo
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Party System ◽  
System Change ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
Primary Driver ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
The Stability

This article examines what socio-economic factors are conducive to changes in the patterns of inter-party competition in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The literature has in recent years paid considerable attention to measuring party system change, to identifying the consequences of party system instability for the proper functioning of democratic regimes, and to understanding what factors are responsible for the instability of party systems. In contrast to previous studies that view political change in general and party system change more specifically as the result of social transformation, development, modernization and change in the cleavage structure, this paper shows instead that poverty is the primary driver of party system change in the SSA region. In countries with high levels of poverty, political elites do enjoy little to no performance-based legitimacy. The lack of performance-based legitimacy is the reason why voters in such countries are willing to alter their voting habits and parties are unable to preserve their electoral fortunes over time—which is precisely why party systems do change. The literature showed that stable party systems are good for democracy. This paper shows that to enhance the stability of party system in SSA, poverty has to be reduced and possibly eradicated.

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