Motståndskraft i konkurrensutsatta autokratier: Maktskiften, partiinstitutionalisering och demokratisering

Abstract

The Resilience of Competitive Authoritarian Regimes – Turnovers, Party Institutionalization and Democratization
Since the end of the Cold War, a clear majority of all states hold elections. The literature on electoral authoritarianism has acknowledged that authoritarianism can survive the introduction of multiparty elections, triggering a vivid academic discussion on how to distinguish democracies from autocracies with elections. A common argument is that democracies, in contrast to electoral autocracies, produce transitions in power and that we can therefore utilize electoral turnovers as the central criterion for democracy. This article contests this ”turnover rule”, both conceptu- ally and empirically, and suggests that newly elected governments in competitive authoritarian regimes often have clear incentives to maintain authoritarian institutions in order to improve their prospects of reelection. Moreover, it is argued that democratization is particularly unlikely when levels of party-system institutionalization are low. High levels of party-system institutionalization reduce the level of electoral uncertainty for the newly elected regime, enable a stronger opposition (formed from the former dominant party) and create higher voter and civil society expectations on democratization. The argument is tested using data from all competitive authoritarian regimes in the period 1989-2010, and illustrated by two case studies: Kenya, where the turnover in 2002 did not lead to democratization and Ghana where a transition of power in 2002 had a more positive outcome.