Electoral Authoritarianism in the Third Wave of Democratization: Concepts and Regime Trajectories

Abstract

Recently, academics re-plunged into the study of authoritarian politics, as existing literature on democratization could not sufficiently explain some new forms of authoritarian regimes in the post-Cold War era. After the Cold War, a great deal of authoritarian regimes started to adopt democratic institutions such as multiparty election, but, rather than experiencing transitions to democracy, these regimes were still authoritarianism in nature. Thus, for understanding these regimes precisely, scholars began to develop new concepts, such as hybrid regime, electoral authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism, dominant parties authoritarian regime, and so on.This paper aims at solving two major questions by reviewing four outstanding academic works. First, what is the relation among the new concepts themselves, and between new concepts and traditional concepts like democracy and authoritarianism? To avoid conceptual confusion, we must know the boundaries and relations among all of these concepts as clear as possible. This paper argues that the intensions, using Sartori’s term, of these new concepts partially overlap with one another while still having their own distinctions. In order to present this argument clearly, this paper will position aforementioned concepts in the political spectrum from authoritarianism to democracy.Second, why do some new forms of authoritarian regimes could persist while others collapse? Existing literature on this question has four explanations: international factors, the capacity of the ruling party`s organizational power, the degree of cohesion of ruling parties or states, and the role of opposition forces. By reviewing these accounts, this paper then attempts to provide a more comprehensive and general causal explanation.