The Domestic or International? Assessing the Factors in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes’ Trajectories and Outcomes: A Review of Levitsky and Way, Schedler and Brownlee

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet regime and the subsequent end of the Cold War signaled a shift in the international environment away from the previous one: a new era in which the West was the winner and—at least initially—that the liberal democracy seemed to be the only game in town. Consequently, many closed or hegemonic authoritarian governments felt the pressure to either leave the political arena or to reform their way of ruling and their institutions. In this effort, they introduced multiparty systems and elections in various degrees. Thus in the aftermath of the Cold War, the proliferation of democratization efforts reached a peak and at its maximum level, this phenomenon has come to be referred to by scholars as the 4th wave of democratization. Actually not very surprising, this was exactly the time period where—out of these democratization efforts—history witnessed the emergence of competitive authoritarian regimes that mixed, in various degrees, democratic institutions with an authoritarian rule. However, contrary to the expectations of many democratization scholars, who assumed this phenomena to be a transitional stage which would lead to full democracy, many of these regimes preserved their authoritarian stability as opposed to establishing stable democracies and, additionally, others emerged as unstable competitive authoritarian regimes open to contingent outcomes.