(A review of Steven Levitsky
and Lucan A. Way’s Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes
after the Cold War, Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Most political regimes in the world today allow for some
form of electoral competition. As we saw in
this post, towards the end of the cold war most stereotypical
“dictatorships” (where competition by non-official parties was de jure forbidden and political control
over the public sphere was nearly complete) began to give way to regimes in
which control over the state depended in some way on winning real electoral
contests. International pressure from Western powers, the breakdown of the
Soviet Union, and popular protest all contributed to this outcome.
Yet elections, as anyone will tell you, do not equal
democracy. Most of these “electoral” regimes – places like Zimbabwe, Russia,
Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar,
Nicaragua, and many other countries - featured genuine political competition,
with fiercely contested elections (unlike the meaningless “elections” held in
many communist countries before the end of the cold war), organized oppositions
which often held substantive legislative or subnational offices and could
occasionally even win presidential or parliamentary elections (unlike in de jure one party states), and at least
some islands of media independence (unlike the situation in many genuine
dictatorships); but such competition was neither free nor fair by any
reasonable standard. Incumbents persecuted or harassed their political
opponents by legal or illegal means, intimidated or bought the media, packed
supposedly “independent” judicial institutions with their supporters, used
state resources without restraint for campaign purposes, and even occasionally
fraudulently stole elections through good old-fashioned ballot stuffing and
vote falsification in efforts to secure their position.
Consider a few examples. In Ukraine in the 1990s,
“businesses that financed the opposition were routinely targeted by tax
authorities” and in Ghana similarly “entrepreneurs who financed opposition
parties “were blacklisted, denied government contracts, and [had] their
businesses openly sabotaged”.” In Taiwan, the KMT used to outspend its
opponents 50-1 in elections, and in Russia the Yeltsin campaign spent “between
30 and 150 times the amount permitted the opposition in 1996.” In the Peru of
Fujimori, private television stations “signed “contracts” with the state
intelligence service in which they received up to $1.5 million a month in
exchange for limiting coverage of opposition parties.” (All quotes from Levitsky and Way,
pp. 10-11). Everybody knows about the selective prosecution of potentially
threatening “oligarchs” in Russia (like Mikhail Khodorkovsky)
for tax reasons, not always without some justification (after all, they
probably did not get rich by following
the rules), but the tactic is common, though with local variations according to
context (see, e.g., the Anwar
Ibrahim case in Malaysia). Libel and defamation suits, especially, are the
tool of choice for shutting down critical forms of media: according to Levitsky
and Way, in the nineties newspapers in Croatia were sued for libel more than
230 times; in Cameroon at around the same time the use of defamation suits
forced the closure of several newspapers. (We pass over in silence the use of
libel or defamation suits in Cambodia, Belarus, Russia, and many other places
as a way to intimidate opponents and silence critical voices). Sometimes media
restrictions even get a decent veneer of justification, as when the Chavez
government in Venezuela refused
to renew the “over the air” license of RCTV, an opposition-leaning TV
station, in 2007 for having supported the coup against his government in 2002. All
of these actions are of course made easier if the government takes care to pack
supposedly “impartial” or “independent” institutions (constitutional courts,
electoral commissions, and so on) with government supporters (see, e.g.,
Venezuela and Malaysia). Finally, there are the more obvious tactics to
suppress political competition, to be used when all else fails: beatings and
imprisonment of opposition members by security forces (ask Morgan Tsvangirai and
many other Zanu-PF opponents in Zimbabwe), old-fashioned ballot box stuffing,
and vote falsification (in Serbia under Milosevic, Ukraine under Kuchma, and
many other places).
Rather than thinking of these regimes as somehow imperfect
or transitional democracies, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that we should
see them as authoritarian regimes in their own right. Levitsky and Way call
them “competitive authoritarian” regimes (a term they coined in a widely cited
2002 article), and tell the story of their emergence and the reasons why
some of them managed to more fully democratize but others did not in a recent
book (Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes
after the Cold War, 2010). The book is a pretty impressive research
achievement; the bibliography alone is 110 pages long, and it can serve as a
good introduction to the post cold war politics of the 35 different countries
they study.[1]
Now, I’d prefer to speak not so much of authoritarianism, democracy, and democratization (at this point at least) but of transformations in the prevalent varieties of political competition in the world. Modern “democracy,” on this view, is merely a system of normatively regulated oligopolistic political competition for state power, which does not sound particularly inspiring, except when we consider how hard it seems to be to achieve even that. In the post cold-war era full political monopolies have tended to decay into systems of unregulated political competition (“competitive authoritarian” or “party hegemonic” regimes) where rulers can often get away with the murder of their political opponents (literally and figuratively); only some of these systems of unregulated political competition turn into modern “democracies,” where rulers cannot so easily get away with murder of their political opponents. So the key question is: how do normatively unregulated systems of political competition turn into normatively regulated ones? How do we move from political systems where rulers “play dirty” by exploiting their control of the state (and oppositions do the same, if they win) to systems where they can’t get away with that, or at least not that easily? (The converse question is also important, though not the focus of Levitsky and Way’s book: why do systems of normatively regulated political competition sometimes break down, leading to regimes where rulers can get away with murder?). The problem is not so much about political turnover (ruling parties do occasionally yield power in competitive authoritarian regimes, even though this typically requires mass protest and other forms of extralegal action as well as winning elections) but about what can shift the kind of political competition that is enabled by a regime.
Levitsky and Way’s answer to that question is relentlessly
structural – protest and opposition action plays little role. It is also
reminiscent of an old argument in Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” (hence the title of
this post; more on that later). In brief, they argue that neither Western
pressure nor domestic opposition action by itself is capable of inducing
democratization (at best, such international and domestic pressure can produce “electoralization,”
not democratization: electoral turnover within normatively unregulated forms of
political competition); it is only when domestic and international pressures
for democracy are consistently amplified by social and economic links with Western
democracies that elites in these regimes will consistently invest in credible ways
of enforcing the norms of political competition (e.g., genuinely independent
electoral commissions and judicial systems, a press that is not constantly pressured
by the government du jour, etc.).
Let’s start with the obvious international pressures for democracy (or political competition, really). Since the end of the cold war most Western powers (at least the powers Levitsky and Way are interested in, the USA and the EU) have adopted an explicit “democratization” agenda, in which they have used various incentives to promote electoral regimes of varying credibility. The effectiveness of these pressures, however, varies with what Levitsky and Way call “leverage,” i.e., the influence Western governments are able to bring to bear on other regimes to make their politics more competitive. Western leverage is greatest for small, aid-dependent countries (like many African countries), and smaller for larger economies (like Mexico or Malaysia). It is larger when democratization is the primary issue on the foreign policy agenda of Western powers (as in many Latin American and Eastern European countries in the 1990s and early 2000s), and smaller when competing issues (like terrorism or other security concerns, especially since 2001) trump democratization (e.g., in the middle East, but also in places like Serbia and Croatia during the Balkan wars), or when other powers are able to provide support to authoritarian rulers (e.g., Russian support for Belarus in the early 1990s, and Chinese support for Burma or North Korea today). It is larger when governments can offer carrots as well as sticks, and smaller when only sticks are available (so the European Union had high democratizing leverage over those countries that were thought to be credible candidates for membership in the EU, but had less leverage over those countries which were unlikely to become members).
Levitsky and Way emphasize that Western pressure for
democratization is very often quite superficial; Western powers are easily
satisfied if the target government conducts more or less “clean” elections, and
sometimes not even that. And they are not always especially consistent; only
salient events, like elections, tend to engage them, whereas more ambiguous actions
like politically motivated prosecutions or the abuse of state resources for
election purposes can pass off uncriticized. (Incidentally, as this neat
new paper by Simpser and Donno argues [gated],
high quality election monitoring can have unintended bad consequences, pushing
competitive authoritarian rulers to use practices that are generally bad for normatively regulating
competition, like muzzling the media or packing the courts as a way of getting
approval for “clean” elections on election day; too much focus on the quality
of elections can thus worsen the quality of the surrounding institutions via
strategic adaptation on the part of incumbent rulers).
Leverage is really helpful for democratization only when it
is reinforced by what Levitsky and Way call linkage.
By this Levitsky and Way mean the whole range of social and economic ties
between Western democracies and competitive authoritarian regimes. These may
include trade and migration links, the circulation of elites through American and
European universities, various forms of communication across borders, and so
on. A high density of these ties helps
produce consistent pressure for
democratization (or rather, for enforcing norms of fair political competition) by
amplifying the effect that even minor
violations of the norms of political competition have on foreign and domestic publics,
creating transnational constituencies for democracy, and providing incentives
for elites in competitive authoritarian states to invest in the credibility of
the institutions for monitoring violations of these norms. It is only when
linkage is high that foreign pressure really becomes expensive for domestic elites in competitive authoritarian regimes,
and not only in purely financial terms; when every suit your government brings against
its political opponents produces an endless stream of NY Times articles,
cancellations of visits from dignitaries, visa troubles, and in general
international opprobrium from their peers and colleagues in Europe or the USA, adherence
to the norms of political competition starts looking like a good deal.
Linkage gets you not only an official EU protest over the
treatment of Yulia Tymoshenko, it gets you a headline like “Europe
Protests Ukraine’s Treatment of Yulia Tymoshenko” in the NY Times, the
promise of an investigation by the Ukrainian government, and Joachim Gauck
cancelling his travel plans to Kiev. I’m sure similar treatment of a Malawian
opposition politician would not have rated anything close to the same reaction.
(And Ukraine, in Levitsky and Way’s scheme, only rates medium, not high, levels
of linkage). Linkage creates lobbies that constantly bring violations of the
norms of political competition to the attention of Western foreign ministries
and legislatures, and it creates elite constituencies interested in preventing such violations in the first
place; it makes Western pressure consistent and predictable. This is why it was
so hard, for example, for Vladimir Meçiar to get away with relatively small
violations of the norms of political competition when he briefly ruled Slovakia
in the 1990s, and why it seems unlikely that Viktor Orban will be able to
consolidate a truly competitive authoritarian regime in Hungary today. By
contrast, when there are few regular ties between a competitive authoritarian
regime and Western democracies, foreign pressure is erratic and constituencies for
enforcing norms of political competition are weak, regardless of the level of
leverage. High leverage and low linkage produces at best electoral turnover (i.e.,
it pushes incumbents out when they lose an election) without genuine
transformations in the norms and institutions of political institutions (the
opposition is likely to be just as bad as the government in its treatment of
the press or its abuse of state resources), which is precisely what Levitsky
and Way think happened in many African countries in the 1990s and early 2000s.
A parallel argument works for domestic sources of pressure, though I think here Levitsky and Way
muddle the presentation of the issues a bit. They want to argue that domestic pressure is usually not that
significant for either democratization or even electoral turnover (in contrast
to some recent scholarship, which emphasizes the importance of protest and
opposition strength). So they emphasize that what really matters is the strength
of states and incumbent party organizations: when these are “strong,” protest
doesn’t get you very far. Milosevic survived enormous levels of mobilization as
long as his security forces held together, whereas in Madagascar or Haiti the
state could barely control the territory, let alone prevent relatively small
opposition forces from overthrowing the government (in Haiti, an “army” of
about 200 rebels). But, as Levitsky and Way sometimes seem to acknowledge, the interesting
question is not so much about turnover
but about the fairness of the norms of competition; and here all the work is
done by linkage, not state or party strength or opposition pressure. Only high
levels of linkage, in their view, induce either victorious oppositions or
incumbent governments to invest in credibly enforcing norms of political
competition; in its absence victorious oppositions do not behave much better
when in power than the governments they displace.
I also think that to speak of “state” vs. “opposition”
strength is to reify the fluid character of these things. One can agree that oppositions
win power in competitive authoritarian regimes where states and incumbent party
organizations splinter (as in the so-called “color revolutions” in the early
2000s), i.e., transfer their loyalty to the opposition or remain neutral, but this
hardly means that opposition efforts don’t matter much: successful opposition
efforts are typically geared towards
inducing such transfers of loyalty. The more interesting point Levitsky and Way
make has to do with why some states
and parties are so resilient in the face of opposition challenges – think of ZANU-PF
in Zimbabwe, holding together in the face of generalized economic collapse and
a well-organized opposition movement. Why? Levitsky and Way point to the role
of non-material incentives: whereas parties and states that are held together
only through patronage (the ability to distribute jobs and benefits) tend to
break down in the face of opposition pressure or economic crisis, security
forces and parties that were forged in war or insurgency (in Armenia or Zimbabwe, for example), or are otherwise held
together by some salient identity in addition to patronage (communism, ethnicity,
etc.), tend to require far more pressure, indeed generational change, to break
down. (This also works for regimes that are not competitive authoritarian but simply monopolize
political competition: Cuba, China, Vietnam, etc.).
There is something “Kantian” about the story Levitsky and
Way tell in this book. In Perpetual Peace
Kant argues that a “federation” of Republican peoples can spread “if a powerful
and enlightened people” that makes itself into a Republic serves as “a fulcrum
to the federation with other states so that they may adhere to it and thus
secure freedom under the idea of the law of nations. By more and more such
associations, the federation may be gradually extended.” This process does not
involve a change in human nature; as Kant says
elsewhere, “from the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever
made.” All it requires is the growing
interdependence of peoples, which eventually come to acquire interests in
the preservation of republican norms and the maintenance of peace, and which
thus make these republican “cores” grow outwards, slowly. Similarly here: norms
of fair political competition only spread and become powerful through a process
that involves a growing level of interconnectedness across borders. The idea is
simultaneously optimistic – electoralization plus growing connections to the
core (“globalization”?) make the zone of normatively regulated political
competition grow ever outwards – and pessimistic – regimes that are “far” from this
core will have fragile and generally unregulated forms of political competition
regardless (this suggests pessimism about, for example, Mali). (Though they do
not make much of this, their story also suggests that policies that prevent the
growth of linkage – like the “embargo” on Cuba – are about the worst possible
policy to encourage democratization). Of course, this story also assumes that
political competition in the core does not decay, perhaps through processes
that rob it of its importance – think of the growth of the national security
state in the USA, or the ways in which the great recession has affected most
European democracies. But Levitsky and Way tell it pretty convincingly, with
masses of qualitative evidence; I learned a lot from this book.
[1] Albania, Armenia, Belarus, Benin,
Botswana, Cambodia, Cameroon, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Gabon, Georgia,
Ghana, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mexico,
Moldova, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia,
Slovakia, Taiwan, Tanzania, Ukraine, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. All of these
countries are classified as “Competitive Authoritarian” in 1990-1995; by 2008,
two of them had become “fully authoritarian” (Belarus and Russia), and 14 had
become “full democracies” by Levitsky and Way’s accounting. (One additional
country, Nicaragua, first democratized and then became a competitive
authoritarian regime again by 2008). Their cases do not include countries that
became competitive authoritarian after 1995, or which were “party hegemonic”
regimes in 1995 (too little competition; e.g., Singapore, in their view, though I suspect this case would be problematic for their theory) but
might have become more open since then. They also do not include countries in
which unelected offices are the most important ones, even if there is a
significant electoral component (e.g., Morocco, Iran) or under foreign
occupation.
