Elections Without Democracy: The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism

TLDR

Since the end of the Cold War, many countries have adopted hybrid regimes that mix democratic institutions with authoritarian governance, challenging the notion that they are merely incomplete democracies. The authors propose abandoning the transition‑to‑democracy framework and instead categorizing these systems as distinct regime types. Their analysis shows that, especially in Africa and the former Soviet Union, most hybrid regimes have persisted or become more authoritarian, contradicting earlier optimistic expectations.

Abstract

The post-Cold War world has been marked by the proliferation of hybrid political regimes. In different ways, and to varying degrees, polities across much of Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe), postcommunist Eurasia (Albania, Croatia, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine), Asia (Malaysia, Taiwan), and Latin America (Haiti, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru) combined democratic rules with authoritarian governance during the 1990s. Scholars often treated these regimes as incomplete or transitional forms of democracy. Yet in many cases these expectations (or hopes) proved overly optimistic. Particularly in Africa and the former Soviet Union, many regimes have either remained hybrid or moved in an authoritarian direction. It may therefore be time to stop thinking of these cases in terms of transitions to democracy and to begin thinking about the specific types of regimes they actually are.