Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes Lecture Notes
Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes
References
Authoritarian Regimes and The Selectorate Theory
CGG Chapter 9
Levitsky and Way
Bueno de Mesquita Ch. 1, 2, 4
Autocratic Survival
Ghandi and Przeworski
Bellin
Bueno de Mesquita Ch. 7
Varieties of authoritarian institutions and their consequences
Bueno De Mesquita Ch. 1
Small-r republican political institutions lead to the appearance of honest, civic-minded government. Monarchies/autocracies lead to corruption and political security
Monarchy
An autocracy in which the executive holds power on the basis of family and kin networks
Relatively stable form of authoritarian regime
The overthrow of monarchic dictatorships has led to long and bloody civil wars in three countries (Geddes 2014)
Stability from maintaining loyalty of support coalition
Allowing members of royal family to colonize government posts for material benefit
Credible “monarchic culture.” Three factors:
Clear rules on who insiders and outsiders are
Rules and norms on how regime rents are shared
Institutions that allow members of the royal family to monitor the actions of the monarch and enforce the norms for distribution of rents (e.g., royal courts)
Military
Executive relies on armed forces to hold power; current or past member of the armed forces
Junta rule
High-ranking officers tend to have small juntas; low-ranking ⇒ larger juntas to build support necessary to consolidate power
Threat to stability from factions of military
Military coups for economic gain. Threat of left-wing redistributive policy
High exit option for military. Can coup again if dissatisfied with new government
Civilian
1. Dominant-party dictatorship
Ties civilians (livelihoods) to the regime. Desire to maintain access to office holds party united
Co-optaton strategies: electoral fraud, co-opt minority factions
2. Personalist dictatorship
Parties and militaries are not developed enough to challenge the leader
Weak or nonexistent press, strong secret police, and arbitrary use of state violence
Personality cults: strategy of domination and intimidation
Leads to increasing preference falsification as citizens outdo each other in credible signals of support
Leader’s faction gives just enough benefits to rival faction to prevent defectin
Greater depth and duration of economic downturn necessary to overthrow personalist dictatorship than dominant-party. Three reasons:
Concentration of office benefits ⇒ retain sufficient resources to keep support coalition satisfied
Highly repressive nature ⇒ probability of successfully overthrowing regime is low
Members of leader’s faction have much less valuable exit opportunities
Electoral authoritarianism = hegemonic electoral regimes (one party wins all the time) + competitive authoritarian regimes (opposition parties occasionally win)
Contrasted with politically closed authoritarian regimes
Help dictators in three ways:
Co-opt elites, party members, or larger societal groups through using elections as an arena for patronage distribution and as a means of recruiting and rewarding local political elites
Co-opt opposition groups, as well as divide and control them. Some, but not all, are allowed to participate in elections
Elections provide important information to dictator
Levitsky and Way
Competitive authoritarianism (diminished form of authoritarianism)
Uneven playing field for government vs opposition due to violations of four minimum criteria
Executives and legislatures are chosen through open, free, and fair elections
Virtually all adults possess the right to vote
Political rights and civil liberties are broadly protected — incumbents will threaten challengers and challenge free media
Elected authorities possess real authority to govern
Subtle and legal use of democratic institutions for manipulations
Four areas of contestation: electoral arena, legislative arena, judicial arena, media
Electoral arena: elections regularly held and competitive
Legislature: Weak but occasionally focal points of opposition activity, particularly likely in cases where incumbents lack strong majority parties
Can block legislation proposed by executive
Judicial: attempts to co-opt judiciary (impeachment, bribery, extortion)
Media: independent media outlets are not only legal, but very influential. Journalists are threatened but emerge as important figures. Executives try to suppress media
Competitive authoritarian incumbents have to weigh pros/cons of repression
Can co-exist if executives avoid egregious rights abuses
Democratic rules + autocratic methods = instability
Paths to competitive authoritarianism: decay of democracy, fall of an authoritarian regime, transition to a new one
Two fundamental problems of Authoritarian Rules (Svolik)
Authoritarian power-sharing—must keep support coalition satisfied
No independent third-party actor to enforce “power-sharing” agreement
No credible commitment not to renege on power-sharing agreements
Asymmetric information about dictator’s actions ⇒ reluctance of support coalition to rebel ⇒ dictator incentive to coalesce power
Solution: decision-making bodies within legislatures or political parties to provide a forum for exchanging info and deliberating about policy + transferring power to support coalition
Transferring power through key cabinet positions
Strong dictators have no need to institutionalize; weak ones do
Authoritarian control—conflict between authoritarian elite and masses
Repression = double edged sword. Must empower military to control masses
Ongoing large-scale, organizaed, armed opposition ⇒ military
Direct military intervention only occurs when the probabilty of mass unrest is moderately high ⇒ military brinksmanship
High mass unrest, dictator does whatever the military asks for
Co-opt masses
Liberalization and institutionalization ⇒ solves credible commitment problems
Public benefits ⇒ credible commitment problem. May remove when regime is stable
Regime party membership
Selectorate Theory (Bueno de Mesquita)
A country’s material well-being has less to do with whether it’s democratic or authoritarian and more to do with W/S
Assumption: leaders are office-seeking
Residents, selectorate, winning coalition
Public/private good distribution + tax rate (that provides for public/private goods)
Tax rates drop as W increases and S decreases
Democracies see more economically productive activity
Larger coalition = higher per capita incomes
Loyalty norm
When W is small and W/S is large (monarchies and military juntas), government performance is likely to be middling
Disagreements between winning coalition and leader may lead to changes to W/S. The winning coalition wants to reduce the loyalty norm, the leader wants the opposite
Theories of autocratic survival (Bellin; Gandhi and Przeworksi)
Bueno de Mesquita: every leader can lengthen their political career by responding to the specific incentives produced by selectorate theory
Bellin
Why is the MENA region so resistant to democracy?
Common explanations
Weak civil society/civic culture
State-run economies
High poverty, illiteracy, and inequality
Lack of democratic neighbors
Religious/cultural resistance
Main argument — builds off Skocpol
MENA states have both the will and the capacity to suppress democratic transition (coercive apparatus)
Fiscal health, maintenance of international support networks, robustness of coercive apparatus, will to hold on to power shaped by degree to which it faces a high level of popular mobilization
Higher institutionalization means less robust coercive apparatus
Objections to popular mobilization: circular argumentation because popular mobilization is shaped by coercive capacity and will of the state; popular mobilization reintroduced rejected social prerequisite variables
Patrimonialism, rentierism, foreign support, weak popular mobilization
Gandhi and Przeworski
When authoritarian rulers need to get cooperation from outsiders or deter rebellion, they rely on nominally democratic institutions for survival
Most autocrats usually have councils, juntas, or political bureaus. But that’s not always enough.
Legalized opposition = domesticated opposition; through partisan legislatures ⇒ more cost-efficient than use of force
Legislatures can reveal demands without appearing as resistance, hammer out compromises ⇒ works out spoils patronage system
By sharing spoils, autocrats can prevent threats to their power
Must institutionalize the right amount, no over/under-institutionalization
Democratic Transitions
Bottom-Up
References
Kuran
Theories
Collective Action theory (Olson)
Tipping/Threshold models (Kuran)
Social Media and Collective Action
Kuran
Fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989
Preference falsification
Can be the source of a regime’s stability or a regime’s downfall
This is why revolutions seem to come as a surprise, while they also seem inevitable
Revoluntionary bandwagon
As an opposition movement grows, the external cost of joining lessens
Tipping Models ⇒ revolutionary cascade (vs. bandwagon)
Private preference vs. revealed public preference
Preference falsification
Even if collective action could be effectively organized, individuals might still choose not to protest because they don’t know how much others’ preferences are falsified
Collective Action Theory
Democracy through protest = public good
Collective action is less likely to succeed if K is significantly smaller than the number of people who’ll benefit from its success
If N is large, you think you are a speck of dust. Monitoring free-riders is also more difficult if N is large
Top-Down
References
CGG Chapter 8
Huntington. Democracy’s third wave.
Lust-Okar, Jamal
Geddes (not available)
Theories
Strong and weak opposition games
Complete vs. incomplete information games
Top-Down Transition
Frequently results from split between soft and hard-liners
Dictatorship comes under pressure ⇒ soft-liners come to prominence
Soft-liners may prefer to liberalize and broaden social base of dictatorship in an attempt to gain allies, strengthen their position in relation to hard-liners, and manage opposition groups
Co-opt opposition groups, divide and control them ⇒ broadened dictatorship
Democratic opposition can accept the liberalization or demand more
⇒ might end up back in narrow dictatorship
Huntington: Democracy’s Third Wave
Three waves of democratic transition
1820s
Reverse wave during interwar years
Post WWII 60s
Reverse wave again until 1975
Five major factors behind the third wave
Authoritarian legitimacy/performance issues
Global economic growth/middle class expansion in the 60s
Anti-authoritarianism in Vatican II
EC, US and USSR involvement
Democratic snowballing
Factors behind potential third reverse wave
Weakness of democratic values among key elite groups and general public
Performance failures in response to economic collapse/crisis
Breakdown in law and order resulting from terrorism or insurgency
Political polarization ⇒ political exclusion
Authoritarian snowballing
Reinvigoration of authoritarianism in a democratizing great power
Renewed forms of authoritarianism popping up
Authoritarian nationalism, religious fundamentalism, populism, etc
Cultural obstacles to democratization
Confucianism and Islam
Other obstacles to democratization
Political: absence of experience with democracy in most countries
Absence or weakness of real commitment to democratic values among poltiical leaders
“Economic development makes democracy possible; political leadership makes it real.”
Lust-Okar, Jamal: Rulers and Rules—Influence of Regime Type on Electoral Law Formation
—differences across authoritarian regimes affect the choice of new institutions during political liberalization—
One-party states prefer dominant political parties
Monarchies support electoral systems that balance political power among competing forces
Political liberalization but not democratization in ME
Electoral rules shape electoral outcomes and influence representation
Liberalization satisfies opponents, international watchdogs,
Incumbents still expect to be in power
Opponents lack organizational strength because they had to operate underground (undemocratic)
New parties emerge quickly
Incumbents foster party fragmentation to separate moderates from radicals
Opposition elites favor multimember districts and proportional representation
Also oppose laws that shift votes to the largest party. Thresholds, party lists (favors large, national parties)
Monarch: political division and competition = basis of stability
Absence of threshold laws and laws that shift votes to majorities
Small district magnitudes and first-past-the-post systems ⇒ blocs
Makes political management easier for king
King maintains balance in system
Presidents: promote majority party
Use party lists, high national thresholds, laws that shift seats to majoritarian party
Divide opposition and partially appease it by instituting multimember districts
Reduces ease of opposition forming electoral coalitions and reduces demands for proportional system
Democratic Institutions
Problems with Group Decision Making
Reference
CGG Chapter 10
Topics
Definitions - Rationality
Majority rule and Condorcet’s paradox
Power of agenda setter
MVT
Arrow’s Theorem
Rationality | an actor is rational if they possess a complete and transitive preference ordering over a set of outcomes
Condorcet’s paradox: rational actors who form a group that behaves irrationally
As the number of alternatives → infinity, P[group intrasitivity] → 1
Restricting group decision making to sets of rational individuals is no guarantee that the group will exhibit rational tendencies
One solution to Condorcet’s paradox: agenda-setter
Decide between two outcomes and which ones are getting voted on first. Then, those two will compete
Median Voter Theorem (MVT)
No alternative can be the one preferred by the median voter in pair-wise majority rule elections if the number of voters is odd, voter preferences are single-peaked over a single-policy dimension, and voters vote sincerely
AKA: political parties have an incentive to converge to the position of the median voter and adopt similar policy positions in two-party systems
Arrow’s Theorem
Demonstrates that it is impossible to design any decision-making procedure (not just majority rule) in which you rank alternatives that can guarantee producing a rational outcome while simultaneously meeting what he argued was a minimal standard of fairness
Fairness conditions:
Nondictatorship: no individual who fully determines the outcome of the group decision-making process in disregard of the prefs of the other group members
Universal Admissibility: any fair group decision-making rule must allow for any logically possible set of individual preference orderings (voters may vote as they please)
Unanimity or Pareto Optimality: if all individuals in a group prefer x to y, the group preference must reflect a preference for x to y as well
Independence from Irrelevant Alternatives: when groups are choosing between alts in a subset, the group choice should be influenced only by the rankings of these alts and not by the rankings of any (irrelevant) alts that aren’t in the subset
Types of Democracies
Reference
CGG Chapter 11
Topics
Classifying democracies
Governments in parliamentary democracies
Policy-seeking vs. office-seeking world
Gamson’s law
Types of governments (minority, surplus majority, pre-electoral coalitions)
Governments in presidential democracies
The government
Government Formation Process
Types of Presidential Cabinets
Governments in semi-presidential democracies
Two types
The government
Government formation process
A unifying framework: Principal-Agent and Delegation Problems
Classifying Democracies
Responsible to elected legislature: legislative can call a vote of no confidence
Legislative responsibility: opposition can only call a constructive vote of no confidence (requires those who oppose the govt also indicate who should replace the govt if the incumbent loses)
Governments in Parliamentary Democracies
Policy-seeking vs. office-seeking world
Gamson’s law: a prime minister must give portfolios to other parties in proportion to the number of seats each party contributes to the government’s total number of legislative seats
Types of governments (minority, surplus majority, pre-electoral coalitions)
Minimal winning coalition: just enough parties (and no more) to control a legislative majority
Compact/connected coalition: form a government with parties that are located closer to you in the policy space than with parties that are more ideologically distant from you
Choose the connected least minimal winning coalition
Most likely IRL bc politicians don’t want to give policy concessions
Minority Governments: have “support parties” — implicit legislative majority
These parties retain the right to vote how they want on other policies and legislative bills (just not vote of no confidence or budget vote)
Don’t need to be accountable for all policies
Formal investiture vote makes minority govts less likely
Surplus Majority Government
Form in times of political, economic, and military crisis → crisis govts
Sometimes form for legislation (like to pass constitutional amendments)
Single party can’t bring down a government
Preelectoral coalitions better inform voters of the govt that could be in office
Governments in presidential democracies
The government
President = head of govt and head of state
Legislative responsibility does not exist in pres democracies
Government Formation Process
The President is always the formateur—president appoints whomever they want to the cabinet
President’s party must be included in each cabinet regardless of legislative size
“Reversion point” is diff. If there is no legislative majority, president’s party rules alone
Types of Presidential Cabinets
No constitutional imperative to form majority cabinets
Minority cabinet can rule with implicit legislative majority or without
Composition of Presidential Cabinets
Higher proportion of nonpartisan ministers
Allocates cabinet ministers in a less proportional way
Large formateur parties in presidential democracies, where votes of no confidence are absent, should receive a greater share of portfolios than their counterparts in parliamentary democracies
Governments in semi-presidential democracies
Two types
Premier-presidential systems—presidential head of state has no power to remove the government (no presidential responsibility)
President-parliamentary systems—legislative and presidential responsibility
President more responsible for foreign policy
PM more responsible for domestic
Cohabitation: Pres and PM from diff parties
PM must enjoy a legislative majority
The government
Cabinet has fewer partisan ministers and a lower proportionality in the allocation of portfolios than in parliamentary regimes (but more than in presidential regimes)
Government formation process
The government depends on the legislature to stay in power and the head of state is popularly elected for a fixed term
A unifying framework: Principal-Agent and Delegation Problems
Delegation: occurs when one person or group, called the principal, relies on another person or group, called an agent, to act on the principal’s behalf
Citizens = principals
Outcomes of delegation: agency loss and whether delegation is successful
Agency loss: diff between actual consequence of delegation and what the consequence would have been if the agent had been perfect
Successful delegation: when delegation outcome improves the principal’s welfare relative to what would have happened if the principal had chosen not to delegate (status quo, reversion point)
Principal-Agent game
Agent determines principal’s “region of acceptability”
Problems arise from incomplete and asymmetric information
Two problems if agent has more info: adverse selection and moral hazard
Adverse selection—when principal can’t observe the agent’s “type”
Share right preferences, or whether agent possesses the required skills or motivation to carry out the task to be delegated
Moral hazard—when principal doesn’t have complete info abt the agent’s actions
Allows agent to act in ways that aren’t in the principal’s best interest
Info gathering mechanisms of principals: ex ante mechanisms and ex post mechanisms
Ex ante can mitigate adverse selection
Screening: sets up a competition among potential candidates for the agent position
Selection: like presidential or PM selection, or selection process (job apps)
Ex post mitigate moral hazard
“Police patrols” and “fire alarms”
Police patrol: principals directly and actively monitor the actions of their agents
Like junior ministers in parliamentary systems
Or legislative committees in Germany → monitors actions of coalition partners
Fire alarm: the principal doesn’t monitor their agents themselves but instead relies on info from others to learn abt what the agent is doing
Elections and Electoral Systems
References
CGG Chapter 12
Boix, “Rules of the Game”
Topics
Elections and electoral integrity
Electoral systems
Proportional vs. majoritarian: understand main differences across the two systems
Legislative electoral system choice
Elections and Electoral Integrity
Elections have practical and symbolic role
Democratic elections provide the primary mechanism by which the people’s consent is translated itno the authority to rule
Dictatorial elections: used to co-opt elites and larger societal groups, to gain favor w foreign aid donors, as a safety valve for public discontent, or to gather info abt the strength of the opposition
Electoral integrity: the extent to which the conduct of elections meets international standards and global norms concerning “good” elections as set out in various treaties, conventions, and guidelines
Determinants of Electoral Integrity
Domestic structural constraints: econ dev, lvl of natural resources, legacy of conflict, inhospitable geography → logistical, financial, technical difficulties of running an election
International community: more integrated countries usually have more electoral integrity
Institutional design: role of power-sharing institutions
Electoral management bodies
Electoral systems
Proportional: parties win seats in proportion to the number of votes won. Favors small parties
Majoritarian: parties that win a plurality of electoral votes win the seats
Legislative Electoral System Choice
Dictators more likely to use majoritarian electoral systems than democracies
Others use political parties (party lists)
Easier to manipulate majoritarian
Majoritarian are simple for uneducated masses
Proportional systems could keep small parties small and hinder opposition coordination
Majoritarian = dominant party dictatorships
Proportional systems = monarchic dictatorships
Political division and competition in popular politics, not unity, is the basis of stability
Boix — Rules of the Game
—as long as the electoral arena does not change and the current electoral regime benefits the ruling parties, the electoral system is not altered—
—when the new parties are strong, plurality/majority ⇒ proportional representation—
—when the new parties are weak, system of nonproportional representation is maintained, regardless of the structure of the old party system—
Three steps to new hypothesis
The consequences of electoral rules
Strategic voting declines as proportionality of the electoral system increases
The calculations of rules and the stability of the electoral arena
Maintain arena ⇐> rules benefit ruling party
The reform of the electoral system as a function of the viability of the old party system
Strength of new entering parties and the coordinating capacity of the ruling parties
Shift to PR if tied in votes and there is no one dominant party
More trade
→ PR
Insulate state from protectionist interests and enhance autonomy from rent-seeking groups
Dependent variable: effective electoral threshold
Explanatory variables to the variation of selection of electoral rules
Strength of socialism
Effective number of old parties
Threat (interaction term)
Higher threat, more likely to shift to PR
Geographical area is statistically significant. More ethnically and religiously fragmented → lower electoral threshold
Parties and Party Systems
References
CGG Chapter 13
Berman and Nugent
Topics
Definitons of political parties
Political parties: a group of officials or would-be officials who are linked with a sizable group of citizens into an organization; a chief object of this organization is to ensure that its officials attain power or are maintained in power
Their role for politicians
Recruitment and socialization: of the political elite
Their role for voters: order in policy making process (coordinating action)
Information shortcuts for voters
Why people vote (Game)
Parties encourage people to vote
Social selective incentives
Party systems (5 categories): nonpartisan, single-party, one-party dominant, two-party, multiparty
Types of parties
Party formation
Primodial view: social cleavages define parties
Instrumental view: constructive cleavages (latent cleavages). Electoral institutions turn latent cleavages into salient cleavages
Cleavages → theorizing about politicized cleavages
Social cleavages, populism vs. liberal democracy
Number of parties: more social cleavages → more parties
Strategic effects of electoral laws
Voters vote strategically
Duverger’s theory: the size of a country’s party system depends on the complex interplay of both social and institutional forces
Duverger’s law: single member district plurality systems encourage two-party systems
Duverger’s hypothesis: proportional representation electoral rules favor mulitparty systems
Multiple parties expected with heterogeneous society and proportional electoral system
Types of party competition
Policy: your position on policy
Issue: what issues you choose to focus on
Valence:
Clientelist
Nonprogrammatic politics: delivery of goods and services to citizens is discretionary and not based on formalized rules that have been made public
Brokers in local social networks
Credible commitment problem to buying votes
Solutions:
Convince voters that secret ballot isn’t so secret
Control what benefits are given (e.g. jobs that can be taken away)
Monitor aggregate-level election results
Programmatic politics become more efficient as countries develop
Poverty: more poor ppl
Urbanization: monitoring easier
Less econ dev → more likely to be dictatorship
Value change: poor ppl less ideological
State capacity
Technology: econ dev has more tech
Berman and Nugent
“State-building interventions under authoritarianism produce axes of contestation among citizens that may be activated and exploited by latter-day democratic competition”
Institutional Veto Players
References
CGG Chapter 14
Topics
Federalism
Definition
Federalism in structure vs. in practice (decentralization)
Holding-together vs. coming-together federalism
The 2 axes of federalism
Unitary vs. federal
Centralized vs decentralized: do state govts have power to do stuff
Bicameralism
Types
The 2 axes of bicameralism
Congruent vs. incongruent
Symmetric vs. asymmetric: do two bodies have equal power (house/senate)
Constitutionalism
Shift to New Institutionalism
Legislative Supremacy vs. Higher Law Constitution
Veto Player Theory
Federalism in Structure
Three criteria for federalism
Geopolitical division: country divided into mutually exclusive regional governments that are recognized in the constitution and that can’t be unilaterally abolished by the national government
Independence: requires that regional and national governments must have independent bases of authority (typically elected independently of one another)
Direct governance: authority shared between regional govts and national government such that each citizen is governed by at least two authorities
Congruent federalism: territorial units of a federal state share a similar demographic
In a congruent federal system, each territorial unit would be a precise mini reflection of the country as a whole
Incongruent federalism~ethnofederalism
Decentralization: Federalism in Practice
Higher tax revenue → higher centralization
Federalism in structure: federal vs unitary
Federalism in practice: decentralized vs centralized
Why Federalism?
Coming-together federalism:
Bottom-up bargaining process in which previously sovereign polities come together and voluntarily agree to pool resources in order to improve their collective security and achieve other economic goals
Holding-together federalism:
Top-down process in which central government chooses to decentralize its power to subnational governments
Bicameralism
Congruent bicameralism: when the two chambers have a similar political composition
incongruent bicameralism: different political composition
If the same methods are used to elect the members of each legislative chamber and both chambers represent the same set of citizens, the political composition of each chamber will be congruent.
Symmetric bicameralism: two legislative chambers have equal constitutional power (vs asymmetric)
New Constitutionalism
Codified vs. uncodified constitution
Entrenched? Must be modified through constitutional amendment
Shift towards constitutional courts after Europe’s experience with fascism
Legislative Supremacy Constitution
Legislatures can do nothing wrong as long as they derive their legitimacy from being elected by the people
Constitution features
No entrenched
No institution with power to review constitutional legality of statutes
Doesn’t contain bill of rights that might constrain legislative authority
Higher Law Constitution
State can do legal wrong and must be constrained
Bill of rights
Constitutional review
Veto Players
Important characteristics of any country’s institutional structure are determined by its configuration of veto players
Veto player: any player whose agreement is necessary to change the political status quo
Institutional veto players: those directly generated by a country’s constitution
Partisan veto players: those generated by how the political game is played
Veto player theory: the number of veto players as well as ideological distance between them has important consequences for policy stability
Many veto players with conflicting policy preferences → Greater policy stability, smaller shifts in policy, less variation in the size of policy shifts, weaker agenda-setting powers
Agenda setting can move outcomes in the winset closer their ideal point
Consequences of Democratic Institutions
References
CGG Chapter 15
Topics
Two visions of democracy
Two sets of institutions
Political representation