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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians

Chapter 1

Validating Autocracy through the Ballot

A major difference between modern authoritarian systems and traditional dictatorships lies in the role of elections for parliament and head of state.

Twentieth-century dictatorships often dispensed with elections entirely or conducted them under blatantly fraudulent conditions. In the Soviet bloc, elections were a pointless ritual in which citizens were pressured to go to a polling place and cast ballots for the Communist Party candidate, the only one permitted to compete. Military and postcolonial dictatorships often canceled elections on spurious "national emergency" grounds, or rigged the outcome through crude ballot-stuffing and open intimidation.

At a certain point in the 1980s, however, the strongmen, juntas, and revolutionary councils of the era realized that reasonably fair elections could no longer be avoided. Sometimes a ruling group understood that this would likely lead to an opposition victory. But usually, the incumbent leaders—and often foreign journalists and diplomats—presumed that voters in repressive settings preferred stability to uncertainty and would opt for the reassuring faces of authority.

These calculations proved wildly misplaced. Opposition parties swept to victory in country after country—in Uruguay, Argentina, Nicaragua, South Korea, the Philippines, Poland. The word "stunning" made a frequent appearance in news accounts, as in the stunning rejection of the ruling party in Poland, or the stunning setback suffered by Chile's Augusto Pinochet in a referendum on the continuation of his dictatorship. Or, perhaps most astonishing, the stunning defeat of Communist Party stalwarts in a number of Soviet cities in 1990 local elections.¹

Elections became a key force behind the wave of democratization that engulfed much of the world during that decade. Today, the obligation to hold some form of multiparty balloting is felt by nearly all governments.

The illusion of pluralism
Yet just as with other democratic institutions, modern authoritarians have mastered the techniques of control over the electoral process, maintaining political dominance behind a screen of false diversity.

They have adapted in many ways to the age of the inter-

[Sidebar Quote 1]
"We're not perfect. But we do have democracy."
—Hugo Chávez

[Sidebar Quote 2]
"Yes, we falsified the last election.... In fact, 93.5 percent [of ballots were] for President Lukashenka. People say this is not a European result, so we changed it to 86 percent."
—Alyaksandr Lukashenka

[Column 2]
net and the expectations of a better-informed public. In the most sophisticated authoritarian states, professional political operatives—in Russia they are called "political technologists"—work just as hard as their counterparts in the United States. Their goal, however, is not to defeat opposition candidates in a competitive setting, but rather to organize a system that creates the illusion of competition while squelching it in reality.

In most countries, elections are largely "free and fair," meaning the playing field is reasonably level, there is an honest tabulation of the ballots, vote buying and ballot stuffing do not change the outcome, and independent election observers are allowed to monitor the proceedings. For 2015, Freedom in the World placed the number of electoral democracies at 125, around 64 percent of the world's sovereign states.² By historical standards, this is an impressive figure. Still, there are 70 countries that do not qualify as electoral democracies. In all but a few of these settings, elections are indeed held, but they are either badly flawed or patently dishonest.

Yet even in systems where elections are tainted or fixed outright, authoritarian leaders often claim legitimacy from the ballot box. Of the countries assessed in this study, only China rejects elections as part of the leadership's strategy for political control. In Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, and elsewhere, the leadership invokes victory at the polls as a mandate for government, including the adoption of policies that are in fact deeply unpopular.

In some authoritarian states, elections are neither free nor fair, with heavy manipulation that directly ensures

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