The Covid-19 epidemic came at a sensitive time for Russia’s leadership, which was attempting a political reset and structural reforms, including the removal of President Putin’s presidential term limits. This article examines how issues related to the pandemic provided new opportunities for the systemic opposition, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, who emerged as the main beneficiaries after capitalising on opportunities created by the epidemic. The underappreciated role of systemic opposition parties in electoral authoritarian systems, which balance “voice” and “loyalty” to benefit both themselves and the regime, is examined in the context of the Covid-19 crisis.

In many authoritarian regimes, multiparty elections are held in which the opposition can potentially defeat the incumbent. How do ordinary citizens perceive the integrity of elections in such regime environments? We argue that government supporters adopt the incumbent’s narrative to consider elections fair and legitimate. By contrast, opposition supporters regard elections in such systems as biased and not meaningful. We provide evidence from large cross-country public opinion data and the unexpected 2018 Turkish snap election announcement to examine long- and short-term patterns of perceived electoral integrity. We find that the partisan gap in perceived electoral integrity is more substantial under electoral authoritarianism than under democratic rule. The partisan gap grows in autocratizing political systems, and these perceptions are mostly stable in the short term, even at times of radically increased salience of electoral competition. Our study yields implications for the dynamics between elites and citizens in autocracies in which elections remain a critical source of regime legitimacy.

Many opposition parties in electoral-authoritarian regimes identify as democracy movements. I ask: what ideologies do they publicly express? The first-glance answer is ‘democratic ones’, but there are many theories of liberal democracy, and they say little about living under or indeed confronting authoritarian regimes. I analyse the public messages of two such democracy movements: Chadema (Tanzania) and the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC, in Zimbabwe). I argue that they each articulate a homegrown vision of democracy in which they adapt democratic theory to make sense of their electoral-authoritarian circumstances. They do so by articulating that theory through the ‘populist logic’ conceptualized in the discourse-theoretic perspective. I call them anti-authoritarian (and democratic) populisms. Previous research has overlooked the distinctiveness of these ideologies because it has adopted concept configurations which invisibilize them. I argue that there are reasons to expect there to be a wider body of anti-authoritarian populisms articulated by democracy movements in electoral-authoritarian regimes in Africa, and indeed, worldwide.

Since the end of its absolute monarchy in 1932, Thailand has been variously described as a “hybrid regime,” “flawed democracy,” and “failed democracy.” Furthermore, its governance system has been identified as “electoral authoritarianism,” ‘hybrid authoritarianism,” “military domination,” and “Thai-style democracy.” Regardless of the analytic lens applied, the history of Thai politics has involved a continuing struggle for control of government between both authoritarian and democratic forces. Following the 2014 military coup d’état, the first election held in 2019 saw the 2014 military coup leader, General Prayuth Chan-o-cha, elected as prime minister. This article assesses the conduct and results of the 2019 election in terms of the general discourse on electoral authoritarianism and as an emerging framing of authoritarian regimes particularly applicable to Southeast Asia—the rise of “sophisticated authoritarianism.” This approach distills and integrates the discourse on electoral authoritarianism to produce a typology that is useful for considering the empirical characteristics of Southeast Asia. The 2019 election offers an opportunity to consider Thailand within this framing and to determine to what extent the military-dominated regime and its holistic manipulation of electoral institutions and processes can be assessed as “sophisticated authoritarianism.” This study demonstrates that Prayuth's election partially demonstrates “sophisticated authoritarianism”; nonetheless, his attempt to depoliticise Thailand and reduce it to a non-political state has met substantial resistance that will likely persist while he remains in power.

Why do autocrats hold multiparty elections? This article argues that transitions to electoral authoritarianism (EA) follow a strategic calculus in which autocrats balance international incentives to adopt elections against the costs and risks of controlling them. It tests this hypothesis with a multinomial logit model that simultaneously predicts transitions to EA and democracy, using a sample of non-electoral autocracies from 1946–2010. It finds that pro-democratic international leverage – captured by dependence on democracies through trade ties, military alliances, international governmental organizations and aid – predicts EA adoption. Socio-economic factors that make voters easier to control, such as low average income and high inequality, also predict EA transition. In contrast, since democratization entails a loss of power for autocrats, it is mainly predicted by regime weakness rather than international engagement or socio-economic factors. The results demonstrate that different forms of liberalization follow distinct logics, providing insight into autocratic regime dynamics and democracy promotion’s unintended effects.

This article investigates the dynamics that gender quota reforms create within and between government and opposition parties in electoral authoritarian dominant-party states. A dominant-party state regularly holds relatively competitive elections, but the political playing field is skewed in favour of the government party. We investigate the circumstances under which gender quotas’ goal of furthering political gender equality within political parties can be reconciled with parties’ electoral concerns. We address these issues by analysing the implementation of reserved seats by the three largest parties in the dominant-party state of Tanzania. The empirical analysis suggests that the uneven playing field leaves an imprint on the specific priorities parties make when implementing candidate selection reforms. Because of large resource gaps between parties, the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi – (CCM), is able to reconcile gender equality concerns with power-maximizing partisan strategies to a greater extent than the opposition parties.

We analyze and compare three separate efforts to code bias in Malaysia's media and find strong empirical evidence of an ongoing and profound progovernment bias in coverage. We also find, however, significant variation in bias between different types of news outlets. While Malay and Anglophone sources tended to be strongly progovernment, Chinese-language and online outlets were far more impartial. We demonstrate that both the general bias and the variation in it are largely the result of two factors: (1) government censorship and (2) ownership structures that link many major outlets to the ruling coalition. These findings provide a detailed view of the struggle for media independence in a less-than-democratic regime and supply insight into media bias across both authoritarian and democratic regimes in Asia, as well as outside it.

The last part of 20th century saw the collapse of a dramatic number of dictatorships. Rather than democracy, several of these transitions brought regimes where limited political competition coexists with persistently authoritarian practices. The diffusion of this form of authoritarianism in the developing world raises several questions about its broader consequences. Most importantly, does political change short of democratization matter for ordinary citizens? Recent research demonstrates that nominally democratic institutions, even in the absence of people empowerment, can result in better living conditions. The paper adds to this debate by formulating and testing new hypotheses. I compare electoral authoritarianism with democracy and full dictatorship, including specific subtypes of the latter, and focus on both policy outputs and outcomes.