Local Governments as Stepping-Stones to Defeat Authoritarian Leaders

• In Event: Subnational Dynamics of Regime Resilience in Democracies and Autocracies

Abstract

Scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to competitive authoritarian regimes and explored what autocratic leaders have done to subvert democratic procedures, skew the electoral competition field and hold onto power, whereas the questions about opposition strategies to defend and restore democracies have attracted limited interest. However, opposition parties can compete with the authoritarian incumbents and the variation in their strategies can explain the variation in the stability of competitive authoritarian regimes. This paper aims to fill this gap and asks when and how the opposition parties can unseat autocratic leaders through elections. Existing studies show that the prospects for a liberalizing electoral outcome increase if the opposition parties coalesce (Howard&Roessler 2006, Bunce&Wolchik 2011, Donno 2013). However, since the leaders in competitive authoritarian regimes control institutions and public resources and repress the media and civil society (Schedler 2009, Levitsky&Way 2010, Bermeo 2016, Waldner&Lust 2018), opposition cohesion and winning electoral strategies are not easy to form and maintain. In this paper, I argue that opposition parties can use subnational elections as stepping-stones to challenge and defeat the incumbents in national elections. To test this proposition, I constructed an original dataset of subnational election results in all competitive authoritarian regimes since 1990. Results support the main claim: if the opposition governs a major city or the number of cities governed by the opposition increases, the likelihood of opposition electoral victory and regime breakdown increases.

Author

• Guney Demir