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BETWEEN AUTHORITARIANISM AND DEMOCRACY Nicolas van de Walle Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. By Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 536 pp.
A new type of regime emerged at the end of the Cold War and in the wake of the "third wave" of democratization-one that holds regular multiparty elections while remaining fundamentally authoritarian. Political scientists have for the past decade been exploring this paradoxical combination and attempting to classify such regimes, of which there are many examples around the world. In April 2002, the Journal of Democracy published a cluster of articles titled "Elections Without Democracy" that included contributions by Larry Diamond, Andreas Schedler, and myself, as well as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, who wrote about "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." This impressive and much anticipated book expands on the ideas put forward in that essay.
The volume is comprehensive in its coverage both of the recent literature on democratization and of contemporary democratic practices in the non-Western world; and it is also an empirical tour de force featuring authoritative analyses of nearly three-dozen countries. The authors define competitive authoritarian regimes as political systems that remain essentially authoritarian despite allowing meaningful electoral competition. They occupy an ambiguous political space between full authoritarianism and democracy, with its respect for political and civil liberties. Levitsky and Way effectively distinguish their category from other similar classifications, such as Diamond's "hybrid regimes" and Schedler's "electoral autocracies." Competitive authoritarianism, the authors argue, is a more restrictive category. It is limited to authoritarian regimes that, despite their illiberalism, feature political competition meaningful enough for opposition forces to view elections as a possible path to power.
In their introduction, Levitsky and Way identify 35 competitive authoritarian regimes that existed in the early 1990s. The remainder of the volume traces the divergent trajectories of these countries over the last two decades: fifteen democratized, while nineteen remained competitive authoritarian. Only one-Russia-has regressed to full authoritarianism. In order to explain these divergent outcomes, the authors identify three key factors: 1) Where the West has high levels of leverage, democratization is more likely; 2) similarly, where ties or linkages with the West are denser, the probability of democratization rises; and 3) where the state apparatus...