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13 J. Democracy 51 (2002)
The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism

handle is hein.journals/jnlodmcy13 and id is 238 raw text is: Elections Without Democracy THE RISE OF COMPETITIVE AUTHORITARIANISM Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way Steven Levitsky is assistant professor of government and social studies at Harvard University. His Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Lucan A. Way is assistant professor of political science at Temple University and an academy scholar at the Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. He is currently writing a book on the obstacles to authoritarian consolidation in the former Soviet Union. The post-Cold War world has been marked by the proliferation of hy- brid political regimes. In different ways, and to varying degrees, polities across much of Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbab- we), postcommunist Eurasia (Albania, Croatia, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine), Asia (Malaysia, Taiwan), and Latin America (Haiti, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru) combined democratic rules with authoritarian governance during the 1990s. Scholars often treated these regimes as incomplete or transi- tional forms of democracy. Yet in many cases these expectations (or hopes) proved overly optimistic. Particularly in Africa and the former Soviet Union, many regimes have either remained hybrid or moved in an authoritarian direction. It may therefore be time to stop thinking of these cases in terms of transitions to democracy and to begin thinking about the specific types of regimes they actually are. In recent years, many scholars have pointed to the importance of hybrid regimes. Indeed, recent academic writings have produced a vari- ety of labels for mixed cases, including not only hybrid regime but also semidemocracy, virtual democracy, electoral democracy, pseudodemocracy, illiberal democracy, semi-authoritarianism, soft authoritarianism, electoral authoritarianism, and Freedom House's Partly Free. Yet much of this literature suffers from two important weaknesses. First, many studies are characterized by a de- mocratizing bias. Analyses frequently treat mixed regimes as partial or diminished forms of democracy,2 or as undergoing prolonged transi- Journal of Democracy Volume 13, Number 2 April 2002