Elections for the Leader, People, and Challengers

This week, we were assigned a number of readings concerning elections in authoritarian systems. The primary linkage between the authors (Fearon, Gandhi & Lust-Okar, Magaloni, and Cox) was a belief that scholars should recognize some of the fundamental differences between elections in these systems and those in traditional democracies, and furthermore, that there are implications of elections for authoritarian governance that extend beyond its causal relationship with democratization. I particularly enjoyed these readings because they introduced several novel and interesting aspects of an important component of the autocrat’s ‘governing toolkit.’

The material covered this week was expansive – every author posits a unique conceptual framework for elections in authoritarian governments. To help break down the material, I looked at the arguments being made in three perspectives: elections as they relate to the public, as they relate to the autocrat, and as they relate to potential regime challengers. Given the limited space for this memo, I’ll briefly comment on some of the arguments I found to be more interesting (or that I hadn’t heard of before) in relation to these three perspectives, as well as raise a few points of criticism on these ideas.

Concerning the implications of elections for the public, I found Fearon’s conceptualization to be particularly compelling because it correlated nicely with our previous readings on signaling in mass protest movements. Fearon describes elections as an institutional solution to the ‘coordination problem’: “The main argument here is that electoral democracy is a natural and indeed ingenious way of solving this coordination problem. In a functioning democracy, the public…implicitly threaten to rebel if elections are not held according to a commonly understood electoral calendar…The electoral results themselves then aggregate and publicize private information about the ruler’s actions and performance” (Fearon, 28). He explains that without this public exchange of information (when citizens are only able to observe their own allocations), it is easier for the ruler to withhold goods, and to solve this, citizens can demand elections. Lastly, Fearon builds off of an important idea developed by Weingast, the ‘social consensus’ (reciprocity amongst citizens of protection against transgressions by the ruler). Elections enable the public to utilize this principle.

From the autocrat’s perspective, the uses of elections are numerous. Gandhi and Lust-Okar neatly summarize the many instances in which a leader may choose to employ this tool: “elections may be the most expedient way to spread the spoils of office broadly among members of the elite…the dictator can ensure that the most ‘popular’ elites are associated with the regime and that they do not become complacent in serving the regime’s goals…[and] finally, elections aid incumbents in maintaining their ties with elites by deterring defection among members of the ruling coalition” (Gandhi & Lust-Okar, 405). What I found more interesting was the ramifications of elections on leadership tenure posited by Cox. While the aforementioned benefits are indispensable to the autocrat, they come at a price. He writes, “leaders of one- and multi-party regimes should be violently expelled from office at the same low baseline rate, while leaders of non-electoral regimes should suffer this fate significantly more often” (Cox, 28). Essentially, autocrats must gamble on using elections, and the risks run higher if you are a leader of a non-electoral regime. I found this particular insight between the cost and benefits of elections to authoritarian leaders to be an interesting lesson of this week’s reading.

Finally, there is much to be said about the challenger in authoritarian elections. Cox writes about two effects which greatly affect the choices of the challenger. The first is the ‘honeymoon’ effect: “violent ousters should be less common in the aftermath of an election, for the incumbent and the challenger are less likely to disagree about their respective chances in a violent struggle after the election than before and, hence, more likely to settle up without fighting” (Cox, 22). I would not quite place the same emphasis on this effect as Cox does. If the challenger is militaristic, what information would an election have on each side’s chances in a violent struggle? Elections can measure support of the populace, but this may only pose as a nuisance to armed combatants. I do not see the correlation between the ballot box and chances in violent struggle. The second effect described by Cox is the ‘electoral distance’ effect: “a smaller expected time until the next election should mean a smaller incentive for a coup or revolution” (Cox, 23). This is quite rational, and I believe this to be a powerful analytical concept.

These are only a few of the many interesting points raised in this week’s readings. One final criticism that I would make against this body of literature as a whole is the strong reliance on the idea of allocation as a driver of authoritarian politics. This is undoubtedly rooted in observation, as most autocratic leaders retain their positions through patronage and allocations. However, building theories and models off of this singular mechanism (these authors have argued that elections allow the public to signal approval or disapproval to given material distributions) may squeeze out other important variables in authoritarian governance. I would’ve liked to have more on the role of ideology – is it not reasonable to assume that the public may support a regime in an election in the face of unfavorable material allocations because of ideological reasons? On the whole, however, I found these articles to be very compelling.

Strongmen, Juntas, and “Military Rule”

One theme common to this week’s readings which particularly struck me was the apparent difficulty of defining what I had originally thought were two very clear-cut concepts: military regimes and coups d’état. Mention of the latter had always brought to mind the image of a row of tanks meandering down a wide, empty boulevard to fire at the executive office building of your choice with the intent of bringing about the former, epitomized by a man in dark sunglasses accoutered in far too many medals standing before a crowd behind some insignia-clad podium.

But while I had no trouble fitting my personal stereotype of a coup d’état into Powell and Thyne’s most precise definition of a coup (an “illegal and overt [attempt] by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive” (252)), I began to wonder if my mental portrait of a military regime – that autocrat in the dark glasses – might be misplaced. While Geddes, Frantz and Wright (GFW) are making a move in the right direction when they note that “[the] behavior of strongmen diverges from that of more constrained military rulers in other areas” (147), I believe they are not going far enough. In my thinking, the distinction between regimes run by strongmen and regimes administered by the “military as an institution” should be drawn more clearly.

For one, as GFW note, even if they came to power as a result of a military-initiated regime change, the most successful military strongmen rely on civilian mechanisms such as political parties to entrench their control, to the extent that “regimes established by military leaders who later created a party survive on average three times longer than those in which military rulers lack a civilian party” (151). Despite coming from the ranks of the armed forces themselves, such autocrats also tend to shirk reliance on their comrades-in-arms for purposes of maintaining order and security, instead “[using] internal security services to spy on and to counterbalance the regular military” (156). While this makes political sense on the part of individual dictators, especially considering Svolik’s observation that “the very resources that enable the regime’s repressive agents to suppress its opposition also empower them to act against the regime itself” (124), it is problematic for GWF’s examination of “military rule as a distinct subset of autocracies” (149), in that dictators, even if they originate from the armed forces, appear from these readings to rely on increasingly nonmilitary means to remain in power. Even if military strongmen are “more likely than civilian dictators to abuse their citizens and more likely to embroil them in civil war” (149), it cannot be overlooked that they (or, at least, the individuals with the greatest longevity among them) rely on institutions very similar to their civilian counterparts in order to maintain political control. Institutional rule by the military in the form of a junta (without the accompaniment of political parties and national police forces), in my purview, is then too institutionally different from rule by an individual military dictator who, over time, comes to resemble a perhaps more “brutal” variation of his civilian counterpart to classify both under the broad umbrella of “military rule”.

I think it is more useful, then, to construe of “military rule” as a process during which a variety of regime types can emerge. While the new authorities attempt to navigate the “problem of authoritarian control” and the “problem of authoritarian power-sharing” identified by Svolik, conditions within individual countries and actions undertaken by individual military officials can give rise to either autocracy (of the “contested” or, eventually, “established” varieties, in Svolik’s parlance) or a junta-based, “collegial” (per GWF) form of institutional military governance. However, despite their common origin in such a military intervention, more personalist dictatorships by military strongmen and rule by military juntas are too distinct from one another to consider as two faces of the same coin.