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MOCK DEMOCRACIES: AUTHORITARIAN COVER-UPS Mario Bours Laborin Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 517 pages.
As ideological challenges to the West dissipated after the end of the Cold War, many authoritarian regimes found themselves political and economic orphans. In this context, a new breed of hybrid regime emerged - democratic in appearance but authoritarian in nature. The democratic aspects of these regimes were mostly a product of the desire to conform to Western norms in order to access aid as well as political good standing.
From 1990 to 1995, thirty-five authoritarian regimes were supplanted by façade democracies in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. These countries are the focus of Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War, by Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University, and Lucan A. Way, assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto. The authors provide a comprehensive study of the trajectories of the regimes that became "competitive" authoritarian states during the post-Cold War period, with a look at the drivers that shaped their evolution.
Levitsky and Way first introduce the concept of competitive authoritarianism as "civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist but . . . they are not democratic because the playing field is heavily skewed in favor of incumbents."1 Second, they offer an innovative theory, supported by empirical analysis, explaining why some countries democratized while others did not. They offer an almost formulaic analysis to situate regimes...