Authoritarianism with Elections

• In Event: Elections and Parties under Authoritarian Rule

Abstract

The literature on authoritarian politics has identified five functions of elections under authoritarianism that help the autocrats overcome particular challenges in sustaining their regimes: signaling, information-gathering, power-sharing, co-optation and legitimization. And although they have discussed extensively these functions of authoritarian elections, scholars have largely addressed these aspects separately, often driven by specific assumptions they deem most salient to challenges faced by the incumbent autocrat.

In this paper, we develop a formal model to integrate the diverse functions of authoritarian elections into a single, unified theoretical framework and derive results that simultaneously address different aspects of elections that have often been discussed in isolation. In addition, conversing with the broad literature on authoritarian politics, we integrate authoritarian power-sharing and authoritarian control by simultaneously modeling the strategic interactions among the autocrat, regime elites and the citizens. As such, we provide a conceptual and theoretical framework of authoritarian elections that are sufficiently general to cover diverse scenarios discussed in the existing literature.

Authors

• Bahar Leventoglu, Duke University

• Edmund J. Malesky, Duke University

• Tusi Wen, Duke University