Pakistan once required candidates to hold a bachelor’s degree. In 2002 that rule disqualified 96 percent of voters from running, according to political scientist Julius Yam, who uses it as a textbook case of how a hybrid regime tilts an election without cancelling it.
Hybrid regimes sit between democracy and dictatorship. Yam describes one as a system that “presents itself as a functioning democracy, but the incumbent has disproportionate control over the rules of the game.” Elections are held, but they are semi-competitive. In his words, “authoritarian success is the rule (the probable outcome), opposition success the exception (the possible outcome).”
How the tilt works
The methods vary. Candidates may face education requirements or loyalty tests that screen out the opposition. Yam also cites Hong Kong’s “patriot” restrictions. Meanwhile the formal machinery keeps running: constitutions protect rights on paper, courts keep their formal independence, and all of it operates inside limits that keep real challengers from winning.
Steven Levitsky of Harvard and Lucan Way of the University of Toronto, who wrote the standard study of the type, call the version they track competitive authoritarianism. Their definition is “the coexistence of meaningful democratic institutions and serious incumbent abuse,” producing “electoral competition that is real but unfair.” Their Cambridge University Press book covers 35 cases across Africa, Asia, Latin America and post-communist Eurasia between 1990 and 2008.
Why the West mattered
Levitsky and Way found that ties to the West shaped outcomes. Where a country had dense social, economic and technocratic links to Western institutions, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, incumbents who came under outside pressure to drop repression often saw their countries democratize. Where those links were thin, survival depended on the state itself. Some incumbents had “developed and cohesive coercive party structures” and used them to crush challengers. Without such tools, regimes stayed unstable, though they rarely democratized completely.
In their 2020 Journal of Democracy article, the two authors argued that “Western liberal hegemony of the 1990s, which led many full autocracies to become competitive authoritarian, has waned.” The type has not gone away. They give two reasons. “Many autocrats lack the coercive and organizational capacity to consolidate hegemonic rule,” and “the alternatives to multiparty elections lack legitimacy across the globe.” They also warned that “new competitive authoritarian regimes have emerged in countries with strong democratic institutions.”
What the elections are for
Lee Morgenbesser, writing in Political Studies in 2014, argued that scholars stretch the concept of an election when they apply it to these regimes. He proposed that elections in hybrid regimes serve at least three roles: “legitimation, patronage and elite management.” Yam adds a practical benefit: the democratic facade brings international legitimacy and trade relationships, and helps the regime avoid sanctions.
Sources
- The New Competitive Authoritarianism (Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Journal of Democracy, Volume 31, Issue 1)
- Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge University Press)
- Elections in Hybrid Regimes: Conceptual Stretching Revived (Lee Morgenbesser, Political Studies)
