Democracy promotion and the challenges of illiberal regional powers: introduction to the special issue

Resisting democracy assistance: Who seeks and receives technical election assistance?

“…34 Carothers 1997;McFaul 2004;Santa-Cruz 2005;Kelley 2008; and Hyde 2011a. 35 Carothers and Brechenmacher 2014;Risse and Babayan 2015;Burnell 2010;Gershman and Allen 2006. 36 Hyde and Marinov 2012;Kelley 2010.…”

Process or Candidate: The International Community and the Demand for Electoral Integrity

“…But, it would not deal satisfactorily with the emerging problem of competition with powers that are not committed to democracy (Ambrosio 2008;Risse and Babayan 2015;von Soest 2015). Scholars have coined the term "black knights" for powers entering a conflict between an incumbent government and an outside actor in order to support the incumbent.…”

“…Thus, we can help shed light on research on "black knights" (Risse and Babayan 2015), which leaves open the question of whether a liberal power may counteract the election manipulations of the (illiberal) black knight. An election war against an illiberal power makes it very costly for a liberal power to achieve its desired election outcomes.…”

“…Election interventions often entail cases where different powers are intervening on different sides: for the government or the opposition (Risse and Babayan 2015;Tolstrup 2009). We call these situations "election wars."…”

Authoritarian Learning in China's Civil Society Regulations: Towards a Multi-Level Framework

“…Thus a growing body of IR literature has focused specifically on "authoritarian diffusion," pointing to several mechanisms through which illiberal policies in one country can increase the likelihood of similar policies emerging in another. They include direct authoritarian collaboration (von Soest 2015), democratic norm erosion (Cooley 2015), the rise of illiberal regional powers (Risse and Babayan 2015) or "authoritarian great powers" (Gat 2007) -and, most importantly, authoritarian learning (Ambrosio 2010Hall and Ambrosio 2017;Heydemann and Leenders 2011;Koesel and Bunce 2013).…”