Dynamics of Political Opposition Under Authoritarian Electoral Regimes

• In Event: Poster Session II: Comparative Politics

Abstract

A main characteristic of authoritarian electoral regimes is that electoral competition is asymmetric in favor of the authoritarian leader; therefore elections are not free and fair. Even knowing these unfavorable conditions of political competition, the opposition political parties mostly betting through elections rather than other resistance strategies (such as boycotts or armed resistance).
The variation that exists in the rate of acceptance and rejection of electoral results in this type of regimes reflects different attitudes and strategies of different types opposition parties.
This paper identifies and explains how factors will operate to determine more or less likely to accept or reject election results by the leaders of opposition parties under authoritarian electoral regimes.
I argue that in order to predict the attitude of the different opposition political parties regarding rejecting or accepting electoral results, it is fundamental to focus on the expectations of victory that the leaders of those parties have in each election. When I say victory expectations, I mean what each opposition party expects to win or lose in terms of elective positions (governorships, mayorships, parliamentary seats, etc.). This expectation of victory is built on the basis of an evaluation made of their own capacity organizational and mobilization of their electoral support. These calculations are also mediated by unfavorable conditions of competition: in particular the level of fraud and manipulation as well as the intensity of the repression exercised by the authoritarian regime.
The existing gap between the expectation of victory of the leaders of the opposition parties and the results announced by the authoritarian regime seems to be the most important explanatory variable for explain the variation in the acceptance or rejection rate of electoral results.
I use a mixed methodology to provide evidence regarding the weight of the expectations of victory of the leaders of opposition parties, the type of opposition party and other key variables that help explain the phenomenon studied.
Centrally, the implications of this work are in terms of the survival of the authoritarian regime based on the electoral strategies adopted by the opposition parties. Their actions impact, negatively or positively, on the duration of the authoritarian regime and therefore on the potential outcome of political democratization processes.

Author

• Lourdes Gabriela Jimenez Brito, CIDE - Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas