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Correction: This article has been corrected to use the current name of “North Macedonia” for the country formerly known as Macedonia.
Nearly two decades ago, our article on "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism" appeared in these pages.1 It introduced a type of regime in which the coexistence of meaningful democratic institutions and serious incumbent abuse yields electoral competition that is real but unfair. Today competitive authoritarianism remains alive and well. Membership in the category was relatively fluid during the post–Cold War period, as Christopher Carothers has observed.2 Some competitive authoritarian regimes democratized (including Peru, Slovakia, and Taiwan), while others hardened into full-blown authoritarianism (such as Belarus, Cambodia, and Russia). Still others (including Albania, Benin, and Ukraine) careened back and forth between democracy and competitive authoritarianism.3
The 35 competitive authoritarian regimes we examined in our 2010 book Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War followed diverging paths between 1990 and 2019: Fifteen democratized;4 six democratized but later regressed into (usually competitive) authoritarianism;5 four slid into full-scale authoritarianism;6 and ten remained continuously competitive authoritarian.7
But as competitive authoritarianism has broken down in some countries, it has emerged in others. Some regimes, as in Guinea, Kyrgyzstan, and Uganda, liberalized from hegemonic to competitive authoritarian rule. Others, as in Bolivia, Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, and Venezuela, decayed from democracy into competitive authoritarianism (Venezuela has since crossed the line to full authoritarianism).8 Overall, the number of competitive authoritarian regimes has remained relatively steady over the last quarter-century. Whereas we counted 35 competitive authoritarian regimes in the 1990–95 period, we count 32 of them in 2019 (see the Table below). This figure is somewhat conservative, as we excluded formerly competitive authoritarian regimes that recently experienced turnover, in effect giving the new governments in countries such as Armenia, the Gambia, Malaysia, and Ukraine the benefit of the doubt.
The Waning of Western Liberal Hegemony
The persistence of competitive authoritarianism is somewhat surprising. Competitive authoritarianism was a post–Cold War phenomenon—a product of an international environment that was uniquely hostile to full-scale dictatorship. The collapse of Soviet communism gave rise to a roughly fifteen-year period of Western liberal hegemony, marked by unrivaled U.S. military, economic, and ideological power.9 During the 1990s, U.S. and...