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THE ERA OF ELECTORAL AUTHORITARIANISM Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 517 pp.
Staffan Lindberg, ed. 2009. Democratization by Elections: A New Mode of Transition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 432 pp.
Beatriz Magaloni. 2006. Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 316 pp.
Andreas Schedler, ed. 2006 Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 267 pp.
Introduction
THE electoral tsunami of the third wave heralded an era of democratization and sparked a robust and widely engaging research agenda on its causes. The research program was broad, covering multiple theoretical approaches ranging from social-structural to neoinstitutional to agency-driven analysis.1 However, as the post-cold war era unfolded, it became clear that much of this research suffered from a teleological bias. While not necessarily guilty of the "fallacy of electoralism," a distinct political trajectory ending with democracy was often assumed.2 In general, a process that began with liberalization led to an expansion of civil society activity and limited elections, which in turn led to unstable "halfway" houses that most often teetered toward democracy. 3 The emphasis was often on discreet stages of democratization-breakthrough, transition, and then mercurial consolidation. Yet, as the number of electoral regimes that defied easy classification proliferated, so did the number of adjectives added to the word democracy.4
In 2002 Thomas Carothers proclaimed the end of the "transitions paradigm," in hopes that scholarly attention would shift toward a better understanding of hybrid regimes without the baggage of assuming they would eventually become democracies.5 Subsequently, a conceptual shift occurred in the field of comparative politics toward the study of hybrid regimes, semiauthoritarianism, and what is now termed "electoral authoritarianism."6 In electoral authoritarian regimes incumbents hold elections that do not live up to democratic standards of freedom and fairness and therefore facilitate repeated incumbent victory. Scholars are now beginning to understand these regimes in terms of authoritarian durability and to consider how elections might actually serve distinctively authoritarian functions or supplement other authoritarian institutions in perpetuating incumbency. Concurrently, the question of democratization was not abandoned; indeed, the role of elections as a catalyst for democratization has been invigorated. The question is...