The end of the Cold War posed an unprecedented challenge to authoritarian regimes (see Whitehead 1996). The collapse of the Soviet Union, the ascendance of Western democracies, and the virtual disappearance of legitimate regime alternatives created powerful incentives for developing world elites to adopt formal democratic institutions. As a result, overtly authoritarian regimes disappeared from much of the globe, giving way, in most cases, to regimes based on multiparty elections. However, many of these emerging electoral regimes were not democracies. In countries as diverse as Belarus, Cambodia, Croatia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Serbia, Slovakia, Russia, Ukraine, Zambia, and Zimbabwe during the 1990s, competitive elections coexisted with substantial abuse of democratic procedures.17 We call these regimes competitive authoritarian: civilian regimes in which democratic institutions exist and permit meaningful competition for power, but in which the political playing field is so heavily tilted in favor of incumbents that the regime cannot be labeled democratic (Levitsky and Way 2002). Contrary to many expectations, these regimes were not simply “in transition” to democracy. Although some competitive authoritarian regimes democratized during the post-Cold War period (Croatia, Mexico, Peru, Slovakia, Taiwan), others remained stable and authoritarian (Cambodia, Cameroon, Malaysia, Russia, Zimbabwe). In other cases (Zambia in 1991, Ukraine in 1994, Georgia in 2003), autocratic governments fell but regimes nevertheless failed to democratize. These diverging regime paths were heavily influenced by countries' relationships to the West. To understand this variation, it is useful to treat the post-Cold War international environment as operating along two dimensions: Western leverage, or governments' vulnerability to external pressure, and linkage to the West, or the density of a country's ties to the United States, the European Union (EU), and Western-led multilateral institutions. Western leverage may be defined as governments' vulnerability to external democratizing pressure. International actors may exert leverage in a …