Competitive Authoritarian Regimes Research Articles

Managing courts in competitive authoritarian regimes

Abstract More than a decade of democratic backsliding has turned Hungary into a competitive authoritarian state. The government has initiated many judicial reforms to exert control over the judiciary, yet needed to maintain plausible deniability due to formal international and constitutional standards of judicial independence. Based on interviews with Hungarian judges and experts for the judicial system, we explore techniques of managing the courts. In particular we study mechanisms of co-optation and soft repression and explain why the resistance of judges was weak. We find that a complex web of informal patronal politics undermines judicial independence in practice. Moreover, the regime fosters competition between three clients who are entrusted to manage and control the judiciary: the heads of the Supreme Court (Kúria), the National Judicial Office, and the Constitutional Court. Their resources and power ebb and flow with their reliability and performance. We conclude that competitive authoritarian regimes can maintain formally independent judicial institutions by delegating and incentivizing control over the judiciary. They thereby escape measurement, maintain plausible deniability, and evade international pressure.

Formal yet ineffective opposition coordination under competitive authoritarianism: Nation Alliance in Turkey

Pre-electoral opposition coordination is the most effective strategy to counter contemporary forms of autocratisation. While scholars have recently begun to explore the factors that lead to the formation of pre-electoral alliances in competitive authoritarian regimes, the high variation in terms of their composition and effectiveness is generally neglected in the existing scholarship. There is a lack of research on why some inter-party coalitions have limited effectiveness in the electoral arena while others nominate optimal candidates through routinised and transparent procedures and run cohesive campaigns. Through a detailed analysis of the Nation Alliance (2018–2023) in Turkey, we argue that in the context of high regime vulnerability, power asymmetry between alliance partners and a high level of leadership control over candidate nomination in opposition parties hinder the potential effectiveness of formal pre-electoral alliances.

Party system fragmentation and fractionalization in Turkey under the AKP's competitive authoritarian rule

ABSTRACT How does the political party system fragment and fractionalize during the episodes of democratic backsliding and autocratization? Current scholarship demonstrates that parties have become more pronounced due to the competitive nature of elections and the low-level institutionalization of authoritarian regimes, without explicitly laying out the causal mechanisms. Through an analysis of Turkey since the mid-2010s and by using both the institutional and sociological schools, this article examines how the number of parties in competitive authoritarian regimes significantly increases. The alteration of electoral laws and growing authoritarianism inadvertently benefit opposition parties, as democratic decline fosters new political cleavages, resulting in splits in established parties. Additionally, with the incumbent’s media power and its influence over state institutions, new parties are encouraged to split from major opposition parties by bolstering intra-party splits.

Proliferation of religious associations and local incumbency advantage: evidence from municipal elections in Turkey

ABSTRACT For two decades, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey sustained its electoral performance at the local level. We offer and test a new mechanism that contributed to the party's success in municipal elections. We argue that patronage links with religious civil society served as an important instrument of building and sustaining local incumbency advantage. Employing a close-election regression discontinuity design, we address two questions: To what extent did religious associations proliferate in AKP-controlled municipalities? Was this civil society penetration instrumental for the party’s electoral success? Employing a close-election regression discontinuity design (RDD), we show that in districts with a small-margin AKP victory in the 2014 elections, the number of religious associations in 2016 were significantly higher than in districts where AKP lost narrowly. We also find that the AKP incumbency in 2014 in closely contested districts increased the party’s vote share in the next local elections. Our results empirically demonstrate a new channel of local incumbency advantage. Moreover, we highlight the role of civil society as an agent of clientelistic exchange in competitive authoritarian regimes.

Competitive Authoritarian Regimes, Securitisation Techniques and the Role of Audiences: The Case of Pakistan

The article investigates the importance of the audience (general public) in the securitisation process. It then applies the concept in the context of competitive authoritarianism using Pakistan as a case study. The article argues that similar to securitisation processes, the audience plays a significant role in the (de-) democratisation process. The article contributes to both theoretical and empirical literature on securitisation and democratisation by extending the role of the audience to the democratisation process during competitive authoritarian regimes.

COVID-19 pandemic and competitive authoritarian regimes: Human rights and democracy in the Philippines and Nicaragua

How do competitive authoritarian regimes in the Global South respond to the COVID-19 pandemic? How do these policy responses facilitate human rights deterioration in societies that are already facing democratic regression during the pre-pandemic period? Examining evidence from the Philippines and Nicaragua during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article demonstrates that competitive authoritarian regimes have reinforced the deterioration of democratic processes and disregard for their human rights commitments amidst the global pandemic. First, such regimes weaponize the legal system to consolidate the powers of the chief executive and their allies. Second, such regimes systematically disregard transparency and accountability when executing state leaders’ public actions and responsibilities. Third, such regimes increasingly empower military personnel and intensify state violence at the expense of science-based approaches to crisis policies, thereby embracing militarism as an overarching orientation.

Local power play: the post-election repression and local governance

ABSTRACT We explore the aftermath of electoral defeats for incumbents in competitive authoritarian regimes, positing that they escalate repression in response. While prevailing research on competitive authoritarian regimes typically analyses incumbent repression at the national level, we focus on its effects on local political actors. Our argument centres on subnational variation in repression, influenced by the incumbent’s strength within the local city council. Specifically, incumbents tend to employ legislative blockage to hinder opposition mayors from efficiently delivering public goods when their party holds a majority of seats in the city council. We present original data on legislative proposals in city councils and employ a mixed-method approach to investigate this phenomenon. The 2019 local elections in İstanbul offer a unique opportunity to probe the dynamics of repression against the opposition at the local level. Our findings underscore that repression neutralizes emerging political leaders, thereby undermining municipal administration in the process.

Protest, Violence, and Illiberal Populism In Turkey, 2013–2019: A Network Perspective

AbstractThis article argues protest and violence between 2013 and 2019 both strengthened Turkey's competitive authoritarian regime in the short term and significantly weakened it over time. Crises in liberal democracy create opportunities for illiberal populists to build tightly bounded, vertical networks of supporters, but public disruptions can reconfigure such informal structures and allow new opposition networks to emerge. Using process tracing, the study shows how President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's attempts at building a dominant, religious‐nationalist community failed in the face of the 2013 protests in Istanbul and the violence around the 2015 national elections. These, in turn, altered the ruling party's vertical network. In Istanbul, the opposition took advantage of these changes to create a more pluralistic network and win the 2019 mayoral vote. After a narrow loss in the 2023 presidential contest, the opposition parties ran separately in the 2024 local elections and triumphed, pointing toward a post‐Erdoğan party system. Attention to both government and opposition networks and how they change helps illustrate the dynamics of illiberal populist regimes.

Where Are the Sore Losers? Competitive Authoritarianism, Incumbent Defeat, and Electoral Trust in Zambia's 2021 Election.

How do electoral turnovers shape citizen perceptions of election quality in competitive authoritarian regimes? We argue that electoral outcomes are crucial for determining perceptions of electoral quality. While detailed evaluation of electoral trust is complex in competitive autocracies with institutional uncertainty and polarized electoral environments, turnovers send strong and unequivocal signals about election quality. Previous literature has noted a strong partisan divide in electoral trust in competitive authoritarian regimes, but turnovers can boost trust among both incumbent and opposition supporters. We test this argument in the case of Zambia's 2021 election, a case where a ruling party lost despite electoral manipulation and strong control over the Election Management Body (EMB). Empirically, we leverage the first-ever panel survey carried out during Zambian elections. Comparing trust in elections before and after the election, we find that perceived election quality increased after the 2021 electoral turnover among both losers and winners. We find that trust in elections increased the most among winning opposition supporters. Moreover, despite the outgoing president's attempt to portray the election as fraudulent, losing ruling-party supporters also increased their trust in elections after the turnover. The study has important implications for the literature on democratic consolidation and institutional trust.

Judicial transformation in a competitive authoritarian regime: Evidence from the Turkish case

AbstractWhat accounts for the variation in the judiciary's ability to serve as a democratic guardrail under populist rule? This article contends that populist governments use judicial activism against their political agenda to portray courts as institutions that curtail popular sovereignty and subsequently adopt a democratizing discourse to conceal their assault on the judiciary. Based on the Turkish case under the rule of the AKP (Justice and Development Party), it explores how the judiciary's democratic deficits provided a legitimation strategy for the ruling party's gradual capture of the courts. During its initial term, the right‐wing populist AKP government faced staunch opposition from high courts aligned with the secular establishment. In response, it strategically used the Turkish Constitutional Court's counter‐majoritarian decisions to legitimize its actions, paving the way for court‐packing and other forms of judicial manipulation through a series of constitutional amendments. These changes set a dangerous precedent for future clashes with the judiciary, hastening the erosion of Turkish democracy and the subsequent shift toward a competitive authoritarian regime.

Permissive prejudice in localized authoritarian consolidation: evidence from Turkey's municipalities

ABSTRACT What strategies do competitive authoritarian regimes use to target local-level opposition gains? How and why can these strategies vary subnationally? We analyse how national-level identity politics shapes regimes’ repression calculus at the local level. We suggest permissive prejudice leads regimes to choose harsher strategies in localities governed by stigmatized minority groups than in majority-led localities. To study this phenomenon, we identify three strategies varying in degrees of severity and visibility, and present an original dataset of repressive events in Turkey’s municipalities from 2016–2022. We argue anti-Kurdish prejudice explains the ruling AKP’s use of a harsh strategy of leader replacement in 149 cases of Kurdish-led municipalities yet only one Turkish-led municipality. Supporting our claim, the AKP used behind-the-scenes hamstringing to obstruct opposition mayors in Turkish-led municipalities. Our findings highlight the permissive and restrictive roles that identity politics plays in shaping local-level repression and wider patterns of authoritarian consolidation.

Party system institutionalization and the durability of competitive authoritarian regimes

AbstractParty system institutionalization (PSI) is regarded as a critical underpinning of democracies, but its role in non‐democratic systems has been understudied. In this paper, we evaluate whether the concept has meaningful and perhaps unique implications for the durability of competitive authoritarian regimes. We argue that a modified version of electoral volatility – the most common measure of PSI in democracies – conveys useful information about PSI in competitive authoritarian contexts by signalling the ability of the ruling party to manage the opposition. To this end, we construct an original data set that disaggregates electoral volatility into ruling party seat change and opposition party seat volatility and further divides opposition party volatility into Type‐A and Type‐B volatility. We find robust results that democratization becomes more likely when decreases in the ruling party's seat share coincide with an increase in opposition party Type‐B volatility. This paper demonstrates that the concept of PSI has utility for understanding regime dynamics in competitive authoritarian contexts.

Sources of Authoritarian Resilience: New Perspectives on Power-Sharing and Popular Support

This article reviews four recent books providing new perspectives on the sources of authoritarian durability and addressing the issues of intra-elite power-sharing and control of the masses. One of the main lessons derived from this research is that contingent sequences of historical events and rules of conduct mutually accepted by elites can play a greater role in the stability of a ruling coalition than a sheer balance of power prioritized by the rational choice approach. Another important takeaway is that increasingly refraining from repression, authoritarian rulers seek to project the image of their competence and indispensability. Apart from misinformation and censorship, during economic and political crises, leaders of competitive authoritarian regimes may deliver anti-democratic rhetoric and policies catering to genuine demands of the masses.

A versengő választás és a versengés fogalmának kihívásai

The paper relates to the literature on contemporary non-democratic systems with multi-party elections. It aims to prove that electoral competitiveness is a key concept for understanding these systems, but this concept is currently underdeveloped. It first reviews the main approaches of competition and competitiveness, then, using the widely accepted type of competitive authoritarian hybrid regime, argues that the concept developed by its inventors does not provide sufficient support to detect competitiveness, because the factor of uncertainty used by the concept creators to justify its existence is not accompanied by any real indicators. The conclusion of the article is that competitiveness should therefore be derived not from the unidentifiable uncertainty factor, but from the concept of electoral integrity, which indicates the existence or the absence of genuine (competitive) elections, and from the concept and characteristics of electoral manipulations.

India’s Democracy: The Competitive Authoritarian Propensity? Rahul Mukherji and Seyed Hossein Zarhani

This paper explains and corroborates the mechanisms by which civic and political spaces opposed to Hindu nationalism have been attacked, especially after the arrival of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in 2014. Three mechanisms are discerned for replacing pluralistic values with Hindu majoritarian ones. Sometimes institutions are just allowed to drift by interpreting old rules in new ways. For example, no formal rules for media control have changed but the government???s control over media has increased substantially. At other times, incremental legal and policy changes are executed to make the change explicit, often building on a new moral purpose. To give another example, the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) was amended and weaponized against NGOs in a layered way in 2020. Finally, when political opposition is weak, institutions that have provided guarantees for protecting diversity have simply been displaced by new and radically different ones. This was the case with abrogating Article 370, which converted the special status of the subnational state of Jammu and Kashmir to the status of two federally administered union territories–Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. These mechanisms place India in a competitive authoritarian frame, where those in power deploy electoral majorities to systematically attack the political opposition, making it more di(cult for it to rise. Despite these propensities, opposition parties have won elections in some of India’s subnational states. The challenges facing the world’s most populous democracy are significant, even though competitive elements co-exist. These elements in a competitive authoritarian regime, however, are under severe stress. India’s democratic credentials can be revived only if the competitive elements of India’s democracy stand united against ethno-nationalist Hindu majoritarianism.

“Türkiye,” not “Turkey”

Abstract This paper critically examines the recent presidential memorandum that replaced the Anglicized exonymic version “Turkey” with the endonym “Türkiye” as a conscious, performative and public relations campaign at both national and international levels. On the surface, this change addresses populist sociolinguistic hypersensitivities surrounding the connotations of the term “turkey” while simultaneously harnessing the commodification and marketization of the Turkey brand through selective references culled from collective memory (i.e., past) and branding aimed at economic gains (i.e., future). However, at the deeper level, this transformation serves as a discursive political instrument and a top-down nation branding effort powered by substantial resources from the state and its institutions with an ultimate motivation to consolidate President Erdoğan’s political power and authority, elevate his status to that of a national leader and institutionalize his populist/nationalist yerli ve millî rhetoric from a de facto to de jure within Yeni Türkiye as a competitive authoritarian regime.

Examining the Role of Political Party Predispositions and Polarized Media on Network Agenda Setting: The Case of Syrian Refugees in Türkiye

The aim of this study is to investigate the association between the media and the public network agendas concerning Syrian refugees in Türkiye, as an exemplar of a polarized media system within the context of a competitive authoritarian regime to gain insight into the cognitive effects of media in such a context internationally. Large-scale media and nationally representative mind-mapping survey data analysis show that the media’s network agenda is only significantly transferred to the pro-government individuals, while no significant effect was found on pro-opposition individuals from any media outlet regardless of their political stances. Implications are discussed.

Competing external demoi and differential enfranchisement: The case of the 2022 Hungarian election

This analysis of the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election highlights the phenomenon of competing external demoi, a situation that emerges when an incumbent government differentially enfranchises and mobilizes different external national communities for electoral purposes, thus triggering a competing mobilization of external voters by non-incumbent political actors. Hungarian parliamentary elections have increasingly become battlegrounds between the ethnic Hungarians living in countries neighboring Hungary, who have access to non-resident Hungarian citizenship and the right the vote in Hungarian elections by mail; and Hungarian emigrants in Western Europe who must vote in person at home or at embassies. These differences in voting access and the highly partisan mobilization of these two external demoi came to a head during the 2022 parliamentary election. This article seeks to explain the development of two different sets of external enfranchisement policies within a single case, a variation that is undertheorized in the literature, and uncovers the causes and consequences of the unique structure of external partisan polarization that emerged in the 2022 election. It argues that we must look at Hungary’s competitive authoritarian regime type in the context of “divided nationhood” and the relationship between incumbent hegemony and opposition mobilization in different types of external communities to explain this outcome.

Radicalisation in competitive authoritarian contexts: visualising refugees with DIY media

This article focuses on how visual media interacts with the government practices in competitive authoritarian regimes. We argue that while the visual representation of refugees can in general mainstream radicalisation, it gains additional traction in authoritarian context as it streams political discontent away from the governments to ‘ungrateful’ refugees. The paper is built on an analysis of do-it-yourself (DIY) videos in Turkey and Hungary in relation to two specific events involving refugees. The extant research mostly looks into online activism via DIY media. However, we approach them from an opposite perspective and show that not only social movements, but also states benefit from the audience-making potential of DIY media insomuch as these videos appear less as government propaganda and more as representative of public opinion.

How opposition parties unite in competitive authoritarian regimes: the role of an intermediary party

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the growing body of literature on opposition coordination within competitive authoritarian regimes (CARs). Defining oppositional unity as the ability of key opposition parties to select one joint candidate for elections, it introduces the concept of an intermediary party that facilitates such unity. An intermediary party is perceived less threatening by other opposition parties in their opportunistic and ideological conflicts and has the potential to offer a more agreeable joint candidate or a more conciliatory method of selecting the joint candidate within the opposition bloc. The article illustrates this argument by examining the Budapest and Istanbul mayoral elections held in 2019 in Hungary and Turkey. Drawing on data from 30 anonymized elite interviews and media statements of the opposition leaders in each country, the article demonstrates the significance of an intermediary party that facilitates oppositional unity in CARs, adding that the participation of intraparty actors with strong communication skills during the negotiations further reinforces this outcome.