Synthesizing Theories of Authoritarian Elections: A Game-Free Analysis
Edmund Malesky, Ündes Wen and Bahar Leventoğlu explore how authoritarian regimes use ostensibly democratic institutions to serve undemocratic purposes.
Research co-authored by Edmund Malesky, professor of political economy and director of the Duke Center for International Development; Tusi (Ündes) Wen, affiliate of the Duke Center for International Development; and Bahar Leventoğlu, associate professor of political science; explores how authoritarian regimes use ostensibly democratic institutions to serve undemocratic purposes.
“Existing research identifies five key functions of elections under authoritarianism, shaped by different assumptions about the nature of the dictator and the flow of information,” the authors explained in the Comparative Political Studies article “Synthesizing Theories of Authoritarian Elections: A Game-Free Analysis."
They propose a unified model that connects these five functions through a "game-free" framework, where all aspects of the regime are determined endogenously, assuming only that elections can reveal new information.
“Signaling, information acquisition, power-sharing, cooptation, and peaceful exit all emerge as special cases in our model,” the authors wrote. “The framework also integrates the two goals of authoritarian power-sharing with other elites and authoritarian control of citizens.
The authors illustrate the model with case studies from countries such as Brunei, Singapore, the USSR, Romania, Mexico and Benin.