Measuring Dissent in Electoral Authoritarian Societies

2011 ◽  
Vol 44 (11) ◽  
pp. 1557-1583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik S. Herron
Keyword(s):  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
Citizen Preferences ◽  
Authoritarian Elections ◽  
Limited Choice ◽  
Local Levels ◽  
Choice Set

Although authoritarian regimes assert control over electoral processes, election returns can yield valuable information about dissent. Using election data from two votes in Azerbaijan, this article assesses hypotheses about the sources of antiregime results. The analysis indicates that dissenting votes may be produced by a combination of elite interference at the national and local levels, and through the expression of citizen preferences under the conditions of a limited choice set. Although results must be interpreted with care, authoritarian elections may provide useful insights into hidden elite conflict and/or citizen grievances. The approach to assessing dissenting votes described in the article not only yields information about Azerbaijan’s internal politics but also could be applied to elections in other electoral authoritarian states.

Limited Choice Sets, Local Price Response, and Implied Measures of Price Competition

1996 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart J. Bronnenberg ◽  
Wilfried R. Vanhonacker
Keyword(s):  
Price Competition ◽  
Brand Choice ◽  
Price Response ◽  
Price Search ◽  
Choice Sets ◽  
Point Of Purchase ◽  
Choice Decision ◽  
Biased Estimates ◽  
Limited Choice ◽  
Choice Set

It is becoming increasingly evident that a consumer's brand choice decision in low-involvement categories does not involve full search, evaluation, and comparison of price information of all brands available at point of purchase (global price response). The authors propose a two-stage choice process in which the consumer first identifies a subset of brands within the universal set of brands called the choice set and then evaluates only those brands that are in the choice set relative to one another to select a single brand. The authors find that, consistent with reports of the extent of external price search of consumers, response to shelf price variations is limited to the brands in the choice set (local price response). Their results indicate that employing the assumption of global price response may lead to biased estimates of price elasticity and derived measures of clout and vulnerability. To enable a managerially meaningful and useful assessment of a brand's competitive clout and vulnerability, the authors provide a brand-level approach to integrate local price response into the derivation of these measures.

Elections and Political Regimes

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Gandhi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Political Liberalization ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Historical View ◽  
Electoral Authoritarianism ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Authoritarian Elections

Post-Cold War autocracies appear novel in their use of multiparty elections, attracting the attention of scholars and policymakers alike. A longer historical view, however, reveals that what is unique is not electoral authoritarianism after 1989, but rather the electoral inactivity of autocracies during the Cold War period. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, authoritarian regimes have held multiparty elections. The prevalence of these elections begs the question of whether they have any effects on political liberalization and democratization. But the study of authoritarian elections in processes of political change faces a number of theoretical and empirical challenges that can only partly be surmounted with existing approaches.

scholarly journals Partisanship Versus Democracy: Voting in Turkey’s Competitive Authoritarian Elections

2021 ◽  
pp. 147892992110304
Author(s):  
Tijen Demirel-Pegg ◽  
Aaron Dusso
Keyword(s):  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Authoritarian Elections ◽  
Democratic Norms

Do voters care about anti-democratic behavior by their leaders? While political pundits and academics often hope that they do, there has been little research that tests the effects that specific anti-democratic actions have on voters during elections. This is because there are few clear instances where violations of democratic norms are so visible to the average voter that one would expect it to have an effect, above and beyond traditional predictors of the vote. However, the recent elections in Turkey offer a unique opportunity to test the effect that nullifying an entire election (an unequivocal violation of democratic norms) has on voters. We do exactly that with a survey of voters following the election re-do. We find that even in such an extraordinary circumstance, voters rely on standard voting drivers like partisanship, rather than concern for the functioning of democracy itself. Ultimately, our findings have important implications for voting in competitive authoritarian regimes, as they fail to show that anti-democratic behavior is punished.

scholarly journals Preelection Mobilization and Electoral Outcome in Authoritarian Regimes

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Ali Kadivar
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Support ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Independent Effect ◽  
Final Version ◽  
Electoral Outcome ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
Election Results ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Authoritarian Elections

Final version of the paper is available here:http://mobilizationjournal.org/doi/abs/10.17813/1086-671X-22-3-293Does pre-election protest have an effect on the outcomes of authoritarian elections? Electoral authoritarian regimes use elections to consolidate their power and claim democratic legitimacy. Nonetheless, on some occasions authoritarian incumbents lose elections despite their advantages and a democratic breakthrough is achieved. I propose that pre-election protest contributes to such election results. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on the effectiveness of post-election upheavals, but the effects of pre-election protest are still theoretically and empirically understudied. This paper proposes a theory for why pre-election contention has an independent effect on incumbent defeat of authoritarian regimes and democratization. I present empirical support for the association between pre-election protest activities, incumbent defeat, and democratization using data from 190 elections across 65 countries with non-democratic regimes. The findings of this analysis have important implications for studies of social movements, authoritarian politics, and democratization.

Authoritarian election as an incentive scheme

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-493
Author(s):  
Hao Hong ◽  
Tsz-Ning Wong
Keyword(s):  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Public Good Provision ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Authoritarian Government ◽  
Electoral Control ◽  
Good Provision ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Authoritarian Elections

Authoritarian rule requires teamwork of political elites. However, elite class members may lack incentive for the contribution of their efforts. In this paper, we develop a model to study the decision of authoritarian rulers to introduce elections. Our model suggests that elections can motivate the ruling class to devote more effort to public good provision. As a result, elections alleviate the moral-hazard-in-teams problem within the authoritarian government. Excessive electoral control hinders the introduction of elections, but mild electoral control facilitates it. Our findings offer a new perspective on understanding authoritarian elections and explain many stylized facts in authoritarian regimes.

scholarly journals PREELECTION MOBILIZATION AND ELECTORAL OUTCOME IN AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES*

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-310
Author(s):  
Mohammad Ali Kadivar
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Independent Effect ◽  
Electoral Outcome ◽  
Election Results ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Authoritarian Elections ◽  
Nondemocratic Regimes

Does preelection protest have an effect on the outcomes of authoritarian elections? Electoral authoritarian regimes use elections to consolidate their power and claim democratic legitimacy. Nonetheless, on some occasions authoritarian incumbents lose elections despite their advantages, and a democratic breakthrough is achieved. I propose that preelection protests contribute to such election results. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on the effectiveness of postelection upheavals, and the effects of preelection protest are still theoretically and empirically understudied. This article proposes a theory for why preelection contention has an independent effect on incumbent defeat of authoritarian regimes and democratization. I present empirical support for the association between preelection protest activities, incumbent defeat, and democratization using data from 190 elections across 65 countries with nondemocratic regimes. The findings of this analysis have important implications for studies of social movements, authoritarian politics, and democratization.

scholarly journals Power of Persuasion: Regime Legitimation During Authoritarian Elections

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Patane
Keyword(s):  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Essential Component ◽  
Authoritarian Elections ◽  
Events Data ◽  
Opposition Parties

Legitimation, the ways governments seek to justify their rule, is becoming an essential component of our understanding of authoritarian regimes. This paper seeks to measure the changes in legitimation efforts around the time of elections in authoritarian regimes. It is well understood that authoritarian regimes can benefit from the process and image of elections, as long as they remain managed. But it is less clear how these governments justify the management of such elections, and whether they are accepted by the population. Relying on detailed events data measuring the frequency of certain legitimating government statements, this paper tests whether electoral authoritarian regimes increase their justifications for remaining in power or devote their efforts to undermining the legitimacy of opposition parties in order to reduce the uncertainty of electoral loss.

Temporality of Authoritarian Regimes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Libman
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Temporal Dynamics ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Authoritarian Elections ◽  
Science Disciplines

The chapter surveys the existing research in political science and other social science disciplines investigating the temporal dynamics of authoritarian regimes. The chapter’s primary focus is on the incremental changes occurring in autocracies between their emergence and collapse, which has received relatively little attention in the scholarly literature so far. The chapter looks, in particular, at the evolution of authoritarian regimes toward individual or collective rule; at the regime cycles, caused, for example, by authoritarian elections; and at succession crises associated with death or resignation of leaders. Furthermore, it addresses the question of whether authoritarian regimes are better able to implement long-term and future-oriented policies than democracies. The chapter identifies a number of gaps in the literature on authoritarian dynamics relevant to future research.

Authoritarian elections, state capacity, and performance legitimacy: Phases of regime consolidation and decline in Suharto’s Indonesia

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Mietzner
Keyword(s):  
World Economy ◽  
State Capacity ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
New Order ◽  
Strong State ◽  
The World ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Authoritarian Elections

Political scientists have recently debated the extent to which strong state capacity helps authoritarian regimes to win elections and extend their rule. This article proposes that it is not only important to disaggregate the various forms of state capacity mobilized for that purpose, but also to analyze the sequence with which autocracies deploy them. Using Suharto’s New Order regime in Indonesia as a case study, I argue that regimes mobilize different forms of state capacity in distinct phases of their development, and that the sequencing of this deployment can have implications for the regime’s endurance. Suharto, for example, gradually reduced the importance of coercion as he increasingly focused on the state’s ability to facilitate elite co-optation and economic patronage. This helped to extend the regime’s endurance as long as the economy flourished, but also made it vulnerable to the fluctuations in the world economy that caused its demise in 1998.

Electoral authoritarianism and economic control

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merete Bech Seeberg
Keyword(s):  
The Philippines ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
National Study ◽  
Institutional Characteristics ◽  
Economic Control ◽  
Electoral Authoritarianism ◽  
Regime Types ◽  
Authoritarian Elections ◽  
Cross National Study ◽  
Cross National

While electoral revolutions in the Philippines and the post-Communist world have ousted dictators, autocrats from Mexico to Zimbabwe have cemented their rule through regular multi-party elections. Why do elections sometimes undermine authoritarian regimes while at other times they help sustain them? I argue that a dictator’s control over the economy conditions the effect of authoritarian elections. Where rulers command the heights of the economy, elections are more easily manipulated to sustain their rule. But where such control is lacking, elections may spur regime change. In a cross-national study of autocracies from 1970 to 2006, I find that as incumbent control over the economy increases, elections are less likely to lead to regime breakdown. Where economic control is at its lowest, elections increase the risk of regime collapse. Thus, research on authoritarianism needs to supplement the study of authoritarian regime types and institutional characteristics with a focus on the rulers’ control over the state and the economy.

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