Making Sense of Competitive Authoritarianism: Lessons from the Andes

Abstract

Scholarly attention has increasingly shifted from diminished subtypes of democracy to hybrid regimes, particularly competitive authoritarianism. Such regimes retain democracy's formal features while failing to meet its minimum standards. When properties of distinct concepts like democracy and authoritarianism are combined, however, confusion, inaccuracy, and mischaracterization of cases may occur. By disaggregating political systems into electoral institutions, surrounding rights and freedoms, constitutionalism, and the rule of law, this article complicates the binary distinction between a midrange definition of democracy and competitive authoritarianism. A number of Andean cases are found to fall on the spectrum of defective democracies between these categories. Defective democracies break down when rulers violate the conditions necessary for institutionalized alternation in power by means of public participation and loyal opposition in an electoral regime. Given leaders' reliance on electoral legitimacy, however, even defective democracies may prove surprisingly resilient.

El control contramayoritario como marco de análisis de la influencia del nuevo constitucionalismo latinoamericano sobre la democracia

“…El análisis crítico al NCL no se agota en esta versión radical. Hay análisis del NCL que, sin dejar la crítica, han sido más cautos en sus diagnósticos sobre el alcance de la destrucción de la institucionalidad (Cameron, 2014;Wolff, 2013) y su impacto sobre el devenir de la democracia en estos tres países 4 . En el presente artículo la atención se dirigirá a la versión radical de crítica al NCL.…”

“…. Para un análisis comparativo sobre la cuestión del régimen político imperante en los países del NCL específicamente dedicado a los enfoquesde Levitsky y Loxton (2013), por un lado, yCameron (2014), por el otro, véaseBarrios-Suvelza (2017).…”

Violence and Democracy in Colombia The Conviviality of Citizenship Defects in Colombia’s Nation-State

“…Intriguingly, testing for such indicators showed that the liberal and decentralizing constitution of 1853 (universal male suffrage, liberal rights, federalism; seePosada-Carbo 2000), already institutionalized what comparativists today term a democracy with adjective: an oligarchic democracy. This basic quality of polyarchy remains true until today, and it is for this consistency in, at least, holding relatively free elections that Colombia never qualified for an authoritarian subtype(Cameron 2018;Levitsky and Loxton 2013; Bejarano et al 2010;Bejarano and Pizarro 2005). It is an assessment that I share, but we need to venture beyond measures of political democracy 7.…”

Competitive Authoritarianism in Morales’s Bolivia: Skewing Arenas of Competition

“…The incumbent party steadily skewed all the relevant arenas of political competition, such that access to elected office became, in fairly short order, biased in its favor. Bolivia under the MAS has been labeled and examined as a postliberal democracy (Wolff 2013), a radical democracy (Postero 2010), an intercultural democracy (Mayorga 2011), an indigenous-liberationist democracy (Webber 2011), a delegative democracy (Cameron 2018), a delegative democracy with elements of incorporation (Anria 2016), a semidemocracy (Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán 2015, 116), and other forms of "democracy with adjectives. "…”

“…Certainly, a defensible critique of the concept's structure centers on its alleged low intension (i.e., the number of necessary attributes). The concept's operationalization has been argued to be too lax, such that an excessive number of regimes are thereby classified as nondemocratic (see Cameron 2018). However, inevitable tradeoffs follow from the purposeful increase of competitive authoritarianism's intension (via a change in concept structure); chiefly, the conceptual dilution of democracy qua regime type.…”