The New Competitive Authoritarianism
Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way
Journal of Democracy, Volume 31, Number 1, January 2020, pp. 51-65 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided at 10 Feb 2020 13:50 GMT with no institutional affiliation
https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2020.0004
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/745953
Correction:​ This article has been corrected to use the current name of “North Macedonia” for the
country formerly known as Macedonia.
The New Competitive
Authoritarianism
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies
and professor of government at Harvard University. Lucan Way is
professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Together,
they are the authors of Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes
After the Cold War (2010).
Nearly two decades ago, our article on “The Rise of Competitive
Authoritarianism” appeared in these pages.1
It introduced a type of regime
in which the coexistence of meaningful democratic institutions
and serious incumbent abuse yields electoral competition that is real
but unfair. Today competitive authoritarianism remains alive and well.
Membership in the category was relatively fluid during the post–Cold
War period, as Christopher Carothers has observed.2
Some competitive
authoritarian regimes democratized (including Peru, Slovakia, and Taiwan),
while others hardened into full-blown authoritarianism (such as
Belarus, Cambodia, and Russia). Still others (including Albania, Benin,
and Ukraine) careened back and forth between democracy and competitive
authoritarianism.3
The 35 competitive authoritarian regimes we examined in our 2010
book Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold
War followed diverging paths between 1990 and 2019: Fifteen democ-
ratized;4
six democratized but later regressed into (usually competitive)
authoritarianism;5
four slid into full-scale authoritarianism;6
and ten remained
continuously competitive authoritarian.7
But as competitive authoritarianism has broken down in some countries,
it has emerged in others. Some regimes, as in Guinea, Kyrgyzstan,
and Uganda, liberalized from hegemonic to competitive authoritarian
rule. Others, as in Bolivia, Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, and
Venezuela, decayed from democracy into competitive authoritarianism
(Venezuela has since crossed the line to full authoritarianism).8
Overall,
the number of competitive authoritarian regimes has remained relatively
Journal of Democracy Volume 31, Number 1 January 2020
© 2020 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
52 Journal of Democracy
steady over the last quarter-century. Whereas we counted 35 competitive
authoritarian regimes in the 1990–95 period, we count 32 of them in
2019 (see the Table below). This figure is somewhat conservative, as we
excluded formerly competitive authoritarian regimes that recently experienced
turnover, in effect giving the new governments in countries such
as Armenia, the Gambia, Malaysia, and Ukraine the benefit of the doubt.
The Waning of Western Liberal Hegemony
The persistence of competitive authoritarianism is somewhat surprising.
Competitive authoritarianism was a post–Cold War phenomenon—
a product of an international environment that was uniquely hostile to
full-scale dictatorship. The collapse of Soviet communism gave rise to
a roughly fifteen-year period of Western liberal hegemony, marked by
unrivaled U.S. military, economic, and ideological power.9
During the
1990s, U.S. and European influence was so great that Western powers
became virtually synonymous with the “international community.” This
hegemony, together with unprecedented international efforts to promote
democracy, created strong incentives for ruling elites across the world to
adopt Western-style political institutions. For all but a handful of states
(usually those with nuclear weapons, oil, or vast domestic markets), the
cost of outright dictatorship became prohibitively high. External democratizing
pressure was most intense where Western linkage (ties to the
West) and leverage (dependence on the West) were highest, as in EastCentral
Europe and the Americas.10
The post–Cold War international environment favored the rise of
competitive authoritarianism. As multiparty elections spread across the
globe, countries with reasonably favorable domestic conditions (including
Mexico, Poland, South Africa, and Taiwan) generally democratized.
But multiparty rule also diffused to many states with highly unfavorable
conditions for democracy: impoverished countries with dysfunctional
states, tiny middle classes, and weak oppositions and civil societies
(such as Benin, Haiti, Madagascar, and Mali); postcommunist countries
with oversized states and undersized private sectors and civil societies
(Armenia, Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine); or countries characterized
by all of these conditions (Albania, Cambodia, North Macedonia, and
Romania). These were countries that, according to nearly all existing
social-science research, “should” have been authoritarian, but external
pressure compelled their elites to permit a degree of pluralism and electoral
competition. Thus, regimes that would very likely have been outright
dictatorships in another historical context became hybrids during
the post–Cold War era.
These conditions did not last. The international environment changed
dramatically in the early twenty-first century. For one thing, the rise of
China and Russia shifted the global balance of power, putting an end to
53Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way
Western liberal hegemony. Russia
aggressively contested liberal
international norms, making its
presence felt not only in neighboring
Georgia and Ukraine, but
also in Syria, Venezuela, and even
Western democracies. China used
its growing economic power to
sponsor alternative international
institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure
Bank and the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization. It
also launched the ambitious Belt
and Road Initiative, a trilliondollar
aid and investment project
that sought to “bind countries economically
to Beijing” and create
a “China-friendly political com-
munity.”11
At the same time, the power of
Western liberalism waned. The
U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, the EU’s mounting internal
troubles, and the 2008 financial
collapse eroded Western states’
power, prestige, and self-confidence.
The crisis was reinforced by the ascent of illiberal forces within
the West itself, most notably in the United States. In this new context,
the will and capacity of Western powers to promote democracy declined.
The EU, which had been so influential in Southern Europe in the
1970s and East-Central Europe in the 1990s, did little to combat resurgent
authoritarianism in the early twenty-first century. Likewise, U.S.
presidential support for democracy abroad waned under Barack Obama
and virtually ceased under Donald Trump. In cases ranging from Honduras
to Hungary to the Philippines, the Trump administration abandoned
longstanding U.S. policy orientations and embraced autocrats.
By the early twenty-first century, then, Western linkage and leverage
had lost much of their force. Leverage was undercut by the emergence
of alternative sources of military, economic, and diplomatic support.
Assistance from China, Russia, and in some cases Iran or Venezuela
reduced authoritarian governments’ dependence on the West. Whereas
China and Russia had acted as regional “black knights” during the
1990s, they became global ones in the 2000s.12
The impact of linkage
was diluted by the West’s diminished interest in democracy promotion.
When local politicians, technocrats, and business leaders do not expect
Table—Competitive
Authoritarian Regimes, 2019
Benin
Botswana
Burkina Faso
C^ote D’Ivoire
Gabon
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Kenya
Madagascar
Malawi
Mali
Kyrgyzstan
Hungary
Montenegro
Bangladesh
Philippines
Bolivia
Haiti
Mozambique
Niger
Nigeria
Senegal
Sierra Leone
Tanzania
Togo
Uganda
Zambia
Zimbabwe
North Macedonia
Serbia
Turkey
Honduras
Sub-Saharan Africa
East-Central Europe
Former Soviet Union
Asia/Middle East
Latin America
54 Journal of Democracy
their government’s undemocratic behavior to put their ties to the West at
risk, they have less of an incentive to oppose such behavior.
The waning power of linkage and leverage can be seen in Central
America and East-Central Europe. In these regions, extensive ties to
the West dramatically heightened the cost of authoritarianism during
the 1990s, making even mild forms of competitive authoritarianism difficult
to sustain. Indeed, nearly every competitive authoritarian regime
that existed in East-Central Europe and the Americas between 1990 and
1995 had democratized by 2004. Today, however, authoritarianism has
reemerged in both regions. Of the 32 cases of competitive authoritarianism
that existed in 2019, six were in high-linkage countries in the Americas
and East-Central Europe.13
Two additional high-linkage countries,
Nicaragua and Venezuela, are now fully authoritarian.
The erosion of EU influence has been made manifest in the case of
Hungary. The country had been a stable democracy since 1990, and in
the early twenty-first century few observers believed it to be at risk.
Beginning in 2010, however, the Fidesz government, headed by Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán, used its parliamentary supermajority to tilt the
political playing field. The Orbán government packed the Constitutional
Court, limited opposition media access both by politicizing state-run
media and by coopting much of the private media, and gerrymandered
electoral districts to lock in the ruling party’s control of parliament. In
stark contrast to the 1990s, when strong European pressure helped to derail
incipient authoritarian projects in Albania, Romania, and Slovakia,
a divided EU took little punitive action against the Orbán government
between 2010 and 2018.
The cases of Honduras and Nicaragua highlight the deterioration of
U.S. democracy promotion in the Americas. Honduran democracy was
derailed in 2009 when the military overthrew populist president Manuel
Zelaya. The Obama administration condemned the coup and suspended
nonhumanitarian aid, but the Honduran elite, backed by many U.S.
Republicans, went along with the coup, rendering the administration’s
response ineffective. Although civilian rule was quickly restored and
fair elections were held in 2010, the regime descended into competitive
authoritarianism under President Juan Orlando Hernández (2014–present).
Hernández, who had packed the Supreme Court while serving as
president of the National Congress in 2012, flouted a longstanding constitutional
ban on presidential reelection by having the loyalist Court
rule it “inapplicable.” Hernández was reelected in 2018 in a vote marred
by irregularities. Despite massive protests and calls by the Organization
of American States for a recount, the Trump administration remained
silent, which lent legitimacy to Hernández’s increasingly authoritarian
government. Because Honduras’s standing with the United States was
not perceived to be at risk, business leaders, military officials, and other
55Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way
powerful elites felt little pressure to break with the government (as had
occurred, for example, after the 1993 presidential coup in Guatemala
and the 1994 stolen election in the Dominican Republic).
Western linkage and leverage also failed to deter authoritarian regression
in Nicaragua. The breakdown of Nicaragua’s fragile democracy
began soon after Daniel Ortega of the left-wing Sandinista movement
returned to the presidency in 2006. In 2008, progovernment authorities
stripped one opposition party (the Sandinista Renewal Movement) of
its legal status and forcibly replaced the leader of another party (the
Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance) with an Ortega loyalist. Mayoral elections
held that year were marred by irregularities. In 2009, a packed Supreme
Court overturned Nicaragua’s constitutional ban on reelection, and two
years later Ortega was reelected in a flawed vote whose results, according
to credible observers, were “impossible to verify.”14
The authoritarian
turn accelerated after 2011. A 2014 constitutional reform allowed for
unlimited presidential reelection, and in 2016 the main opposition force
was stripped of its seats in the legislature. In 2018, a wave of opposition
protest was brutally repressed, leaving hundreds of people dead. Today
the regime is a full-scale dictatorship.
Even though the current Ortega government is more authoritarian
than Sandinista rule was in the late 1980s, it has faced considerably less
external democratizing pressure. Among other factors, “black knight”
support from Venezuela in the form of subsidized oil and an estimated
$4.5 billion in aid helped to blunt international pressure. In addition, the
Ortega government’s cooperation with Washington on issues of trade,
drugs, and border security diluted support for U.S. punitive action.15
Indeed,
trade relations and U.S. assistance to Nicaragua remained steady
through 2017.
The persistence of authoritarianism in high-linkage countries such as
Honduras, Hungary, and Nicaragua shows how much Western democratizing
pressure has weakened relative to the 1990s. Even in small states
with extensive ties to the West, autocratic behavior no longer triggers
a costly punitive response from the international community. In other
words, the external cost of authoritarianism has diminished.
Why Competitive Politics Persists
Clearly, then, the world is less hostile to authoritarianism today than
it was in the initial post–Cold War period. One might expect this change
to encourage many regimes to shed their competitive elements and become
fully authoritarianism. If the external costs of repression are now
bearable for autocrats, why should they tolerate the uncertainties generated
by allowing open opposition and multiparty elections? A few
regimes have followed this logic. In Cambodia, for example, intense
international pressure forced the government of Hun Sen to legalize op-
56 Journal of Democracy
position and allow competitive multiparty elections during the 1990s.
Over the last decade, however, declining Western pressure and support
from China enabled Hun Sen to ban the main opposition party and jail
or exile major opposition leaders, thereby reconsolidating a full-scale
autocracy.
But such cases have been rare. Of the 35 competitive authoritarian
regimes we identified in the 1990–1995 period, only five—Belarus,
Cambodia, Cameroon, Nicaragua, and Russia—may be characterized as
hegemonic or closed autocracies in 2019. The rest remain competitive:
Fifteen have become democracies, while fifteen have remained competitive
authoritarian.
Competitive regimes thus remain surprisingly robust in the “post–
post–Cold War” era. Even countries with highly unfavorable conditions
for democracy—Benin, the Gambia, Haiti, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Malawi,
Mali, Mongolia, Sierra Leone—remain competitive authoritarian
or even democratic. Given the increasingly unfavorable international
environment, why has full-scale authoritarianism failed to make a come-
back?
The resilience of competitive electoral regimes has both international
and domestic roots. On the international front, the liberal West may be
down, but it is hardly out. Western democracies remain the world’s most
influential states. In 2017, the United States tripled China’s military
spending and exceeded that of the next seven largest military powers
combined.16
Nine of the world’s ten largest economies are established
democracies, and the dollar remains the world currency.17
At the same time, challenges to liberal democracy remain weak and
ineffective. During the Cold War, China and the Soviet Union engaged
in serious efforts to spread communism in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.
Contemporary China and Russia, by contrast, do relatively little to promote
alternative regime models abroad. Both states have sought primarily
to support geopolitical allies and weaken rivals, rather than to promote
authoritarianism per se. In China, although Xi Jinping has pushed
back aggressively against foreign actors—including businesses and universities—that
criticize the regime, it is not clear that his government
is intent on promoting autocracy abroad.18
Similarly, Russian support
for authoritarianism is largely opportunistic—and often ineffective. The
Putin government backed (pro-Russian) opposition forces in autocratic
Kyrgyzstan and Moldova. And in some cases, including Ukraine, Russian
intervention has been so ham-fisted that it has triggered an antiRussian
backlash that has strengthened democratic forces.
Unlike in previous periods in history, moreover, no legitimate alternative
model has emerged to challenge liberal democracy in the early
twenty-first century. During the 1920s and 1930s, fascism and communism
enjoyed broad elite and mass support in countries across the
world. Well-organized parties and movements endorsed these ideolo-
57Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way
gies as superior alternatives to liberal democracy. During the 1960s and
1970s, Leninist single-party rule was embraced by prestigious Third
World leaders such as Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, Cuba’s Fidel Castro,
Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, Ghana’s
Kwame Nkrumah, and Tanzania’s
Julius Nyerere. In other countries,
particularly in South America and
parts of Asia, right-wing military
dictatorships were widely accepted
as a legitimate, if less than ideal,
means of staving off communism.
No such alternative model exists
today. Rather, multiparty elections
continue to be widely viewed as the
most legitimate means of ascending
to power. Public opinion across
much of the world remains essentially
in line with Churchill’s aphorism about democracy: Citizens do
not necessarily love democracy, but outside of a handful of countries
(including China and Singapore), they do not find the alternatives any
better.19
Societies may not be deeply committed to the principles of liberal
democracy, but people like competitive elections, and in particular
they value the ability to vote out bad governments. This is why citizens
across the world—most recently, in Algeria, Armenia, Bolivia, Burkina
Faso, Hong Kong, Nicaragua, Russia, Sudan, and Venezuela—continue
to take to the streets to demand or defend competitive elections.
Although Western liberalism faces diverse challenges, then, the institution
of multiparty elections remains remarkably strong.20
Populist and
ethnonationalist movements threaten liberal rights in many countries,
but these challenges remain grounded in electoral politics. Populism
weakens liberal institutions, often pushing democracies into competitive
authoritarianism,21
but it seldom does away with electoral competition.
Even military coups rarely give rise to dictatorship in the contemporary
era. As Nikolay Marinov and Hein Goemans have shown, most post–
Cold War coups have been followed by competitive elections.22
To a
striking degree, elections continue to be the only game in town.
There are also important domestic reasons for the persistence of competitive
politics in much of the world. Many contemporary autocrats
lack the institutional capacity to eliminate opposition and to maintain
the internal cohesion required for the consolidation of hegemonic rule.23
For one thing, they lack minimally effective states. State weakness—
which is pervasive in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the former Soviet
Union, Asia, and Latin America—undermines economic performance,
limits governments’ ability to deliver public services, and engenders
widespread corruption. As a result, governments that preside over weak
In many countries, the
persistence of competitive
politics is rooted in
pluralism by default:
Autocrats simply lack the
organizational resources
and coercive capacity they
would need in order to
consolidate hegemony.
58 Journal of Democracy
states often face widespread public discontent, which can easily lead to
opposition and protest. Just as democracies are prone to serious problems
of governance and governability when the state is weak, so too are
autocracies.
Crucially, moreover, autocrats in weak states often lack the coercive
capacity to suppress opposition challenges. If the army, police, and
other security units are ill-equipped, underfunded, and undisciplined,
they cannot be relied upon to put down even modest protests. The sheer
weakness of state bureaucracies and coercive agencies leaves autocrats
vulnerable to “people power” uprisings. In Kyrgyzstan, for example,
autocrat Kurmanbek Bakiyev fell in 2010 after a few thousand lightly
armed protestors overwhelmed police and took over government buildings
in the capital. As Scott Radnitz noted, “the Kyrgyz state was still
so weak that a protester could drive a truck through the front gates of
the White House, opening the way for mobs to flood into the build-
ing.”24
Likewise, in Madagascar, Didier Ratsiraka fell from power in
2002 when the army stood aside and refused to repress protesters in the
wake of a stolen election. Seven years later, his successor Marc Ravalomanana
fell in a similar manner, abandoning power after army units
mutinied amid antigovernment riots.
Weak ruling parties also can prevent incumbents from consolidating
power, leaving them vulnerable to internal schisms and succession crises.
For example, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko came to power
in 2014 with a party that was “no more than a myth,” with no website or
known address or telephone number.25
This limited Poroshenko’s ability
to maintain—much less consolidate—power. In late 2018, following
a Russian naval attack, Poroshenko declared martial law, which would
have postponed upcoming presidential elections. Due in part to opposition
from his own allies, however, he was forced to amend the declaration
to ensure the elections would go forward as scheduled. He was then
soundly defeated by political outsider Volodymyr Zelensky. Incipient
competitive authoritarianism in cases such as Benin under Thomas Boni
Yayi (2006–16), Ecuador under Rafael Correa (2007–17), Georgia under
Eduard Shevardnadze (1992–2003), and Senegal under Abdoulaye
Wade (2000–12) was similarly undermined by ruling-party weakness.
State and party weakness helps to account for the persistence of competitive
authoritarianism—as opposed to full-blown dictatorship—in
much of sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, two-thirds of the world’s competitive
authoritarian regimes (21 out of 32) are found in Africa, the region
with the world’s weakest states. In countries such as Benin, GuineaBissau,
Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Sierra Leone,
ineffective bureaucracies, underfunded security forces, and weak or
nonexistent ruling parties have limited governments’ efforts to consolidate
authoritarian control.
In many countries, then, the persistence of competitive politics is
59Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way
rooted in pluralism by default: Autocrats simply lack the organizational
resources and coercive capacity they would need in order to consolidate
hegemony. Weak states and parties undermine the stability of all types
of regimes. Democracies born under such conditions (as in Benin, Haiti,
and Mali) are likely to be fragile, but so are new autocracies. In other
words, state weakness has inhibited authoritarian consolidation in the
post–post–Cold War era.
The New Face of Competitive Authoritarianism
We have argued that most competitive authoritarian regimes emerge
under conditions that are highly unfavorable for democracy—low-income
countries with little or no democratic tradition, weak institutions
and rule of law, underdeveloped private sectors and civil societies, and
feeble oppositions. In such environments, it is relatively easy to tilt the
playing field. Weak state institutions are more readily packed and manipulated;
impoverished media outlets, businesses, and opposition parties
are more easily coopted. When abuse occurs, opposition protest is
often limited and sporadic. As a result, even relatively unskilled and unpopular
leaders are often able to subvert democracy (even if they cannot
consolidate dictatorship). In such cases, competitive authoritarianism
is largely a “top-down” affair, as leaders do not need to mobilize mass
support bases or build sizeable electoral majorities.
In recent years, however, competitive authoritarianism has emerged
in a handful of very different countries. In Hungary, the Philippines,
Turkey, and Venezuela, democratic traditions and institutions were
stronger than in cases of the kind described above. There existed reasonably
independent judiciaries and the rule of law was more or less established.
Economies were more developed, and there were robust private
sectors, vibrant civil societies, and strong opposition parties. Moreover,
these countries’ extensive ties to the West meant that their governments
faced greater external scrutiny than those in most of sub-Saharan Africa
and the former Soviet Union. In these new cases, then, tilting the playing
field was considerably harder. Incumbents confronted independent
judges, prestigious independent media outlets, and oppositions with the
resources to effectively mobilize supporters both on the streets and at
the ballot box.
Tilting the playing field in countries such as Hungary, the Philippines,
Turkey, and Venezuela thus requires greater skill, more sophisticated
strategies, and far more extensive popular mobilization than in,
say, Benin, Madagascar, or Moldova. Prospective autocrats must first
command sizeable electoral majorities, and then deploy plebiscitarian
or hypermajoritarian strategies to change the constitutional and electoral
rules of the game so as to weaken opponents and lock in the prospective
autocrats’ own hold on power.
60 Journal of Democracy
This is often achieved via polarizing populist or ethnonationalist
strategies. For example, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and the Justice and
Development Party in Turkey, campaigning amid serious economic crises,
used effective populist appeals that tapped into longstanding popular
resentment against the established political elite. In Hungary, Fidesz
achieved the landslide electoral victory that brought the party to power
in 2010 by skillfully mobilizing anti-elite sentiments in the wake of a
major corruption scandal. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte astutely
tapped into widespread public disaffection over soaring crime rates and
persistent corruption. Finally, in India, an established democracy that
may be on the brink of competitive authoritarianism, Narendra Modi
and the Bharatiya Janata Party used religious nationalism to mobilize a
large segment of the country’s Hindu majority. In each of these cases,
skillful populist or ethnonationalist appeals provided potential autocrats
with the broad public support and parliamentary majorities needed to
undertake constitutional and other changes aimed at tilting the playing
field. Given relatively high levels of domestic and international scrutiny,
moreover, these initiatives had to be more subtle and sophisticated
than those employed in other competitive authoritarian regimes.
Hungary’s Authoritarian Path
The clearest case of this new pattern of competitive authoritarianism
is Hungary. As recently as 2010, Hungary was widely regarded as
a consolidated democracy with strong institutions, a competitive party
system, a vibrant civil society, and free and diverse media. Between
1990 and 2010, Hungary experienced five turnovers in which center-left
and center-right parties succeeded one another through elections that
“were about the political color of the government, not the nature of the
regime.”26
In 2004, Hungary joined the European Union, a move that
yielded billions of euros in agricultural subsidies and that a majority of
Hungarians still support today.27
Orbán and Fidesz first had come to power in 1998 on a liberal centerright
platform. But beginning in the early 2000s, and especially after the
party’s 2002 electoral defeat, Orbán changed course, traded in liberalism
for religious conservatism and nationalism, and skillfully began to
polarize Hungarian politics. As with populist and ethnonationalist parties
elsewhere, Orbán’s anti-elite appeals tapped into hitherto dormant
resentments, particularly among rural voters. Increasingly, he also embraced
illiberalism, condoning a “calculated breaking of taboos” against
anti-Semitic and anti-Roma rhetoric that helped to attract far-right sup-
port.28
After returning to power with a parliamentary supermajority in 2010,
Fidesz began to subvert democratic institutions in ways that were devastatingly
effective but also sufficiently subtle to limit blowback from the
61Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way
EU. Crucially, the Orbán government locked in power without overtly
violating basic civil liberties by such means as arresting opponents or
closing independent media. In 2011, claiming that the courts and other
state oversight agencies had been captured by a “deep state” controlled
by communists, Fidesz used its parliamentary majority to pass a “fundamental
law” that removed key checks on the prime minister’s power.
Most notably, the Constitutional Court was expanded and packed with
Fidesz loyalists, after which it lost political relevance. The government
also packed the National Election Commission with loyal partisans. As
a result, virtually all subsequent elections-related complaints submitted
through official channels were rejected on formalistic grounds. By
2012, Fidesz loyalists were “entrenched in every corner of the state—
from the Constitutional Court, Budget Council, and National Judicial
Office to the State Audit Office, Public Prosecutor’s Office, and National
Bank.”29
The Orbán government also gained effective control over much of the
news media—not by shutting down newspapers or arresting journalists,
but by working behind the scenes to politicize state media outlets, drive
international media groups out of the Hungarian market, and help allied
businesspeople to gain control of private-sector media. In 2014, for
example, a progovernment media company borrowed funds from two
banks with government ties in order to buy Origo.hu, a leading news
website that had been highly critical of the government. As of late 2018,
Fidesz allies controlled more than five-hundred media outlets, making it
increasingly difficult for government critics to reach large audiences.30
The Fidesz government has also shaped the media environment both
through the selective distribution of state advertising and via state influence
on other advertisers. For example, after 2010 many companies
stopped advertising on the opposition broadcaster Klubradio, fearing
political consequences. Starved of advertising revenue, many independent
news outlets have been forced to close.31
The dearth of visible coercion
allowed the government to portray such closures as a consequence
of market forces affecting all media rather than of autocratic pressure
aimed only at opposition media.
Finally, Fidesz used a series of electoral reforms to lock in its advantage.
These included egregious partisan gerrymandering; the elimination
of parliamentary runoff elections, which undercut the chances of
weaker opposition parties; and a ban on campaign advertising on private
media outlets, which effectively limited television campaigning to (biased)
state-run media.32
These advantages allowed Fidesz to retain its
two-thirds parliamentary supermajority in 2014 without resorting to outright
fraud on election day, even though its vote share fell to 45 percent
from 53 percent in the previous election.
Notwithstanding its clear slide into competitive authoritarianism, the
Orbán government largely avoided EU censure by deftly using Fidesz’s
62 Journal of Democracy
membership in the European People’s Party (EPP)—the conservative
bloc that dominates the European Parliament—to deflect criticism. Until
his party’s suspension from the EPP in March 2019, Orbán was shielded
by EPP members—including Germany’s Christian Democratic Union—
because Fidesz “delivered votes that helped the EPP maintain its status
as the dominant party in EU politics.”33
Thus, the combination of
subtle abuses and strategic alliances in the European Parliament enabled
the Orbán government to avoid EU punitive action for nearly a decade.
Pressure on Budapest from European regional actors increased in 2019,
but given Hungary’s tilted playing field and weak and divided opposition,
Orbán’s hold on power appears secure.
Diffusion to the West?
Other European leaders have sought to replicate Orbán’s strategies.
The closest example is in neighboring Poland. Jaros³aw Kaczyñski has
attempted, in his words, to create a “Budapest in Warsaw” since his
conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) gained power in 2015.34
Like
Fidesz, PiS sought to purge and pack the courts, undermine the independence
of the election commission, seize control of public broadcasting,
and purge the army and intelligence forces of personnel deemed insufficiently
loyal to the party. These efforts have not always succeeded. Due
to robust civic opposition, PiS’s failure to achieve solid electoral majorities,
and greater pushback from the EU, Polish democracy survived
through 2019. The threat of a slide into competitive authoritarianism
remains very real, however, particularly in light of PiS’s easy reelection
in October 2019.
Even more surprising than the assault on democratic institutions in
Hungary and Poland is the evidence that these strategies may be diffusing
to established Western democracies. Amid deepening polarization
around issues of national identity, illiberal or populist right-wing forces
in the West have established close ties with Orbán as well as with Russia
and have embraced some of their authoritarian practices. Prior to Austria’s
2017 election, for example, leaders of the Austrian Freedom Party
were videotaped seeking Russian assistance and expressing interest in
replicating Orbán’s manipulation of the media playing field. In the video,
Freedom Party leader (and future vice-chancellor) Heinz-Christian
Strache declared, “We want to build a media landscape like Orban did,”
and embraced the idea of a Russian takeover of Austria’s leading tabloid
newspaper, Krone.35
As a junior partner in the Austrian government between
2017 and 2019, the Freedom Party worked to politicize state-run
television and used the interior ministry to shut out critical media outlets
and reward friendly ones. Italy’s popular far-right leader Matteo Salvini
has likewise described Orbán as a political role model. Salvini’s friendly
ties with Russia, harsh nativist and antiminority discourse, and use of
63Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way
defamation suits against critics raise concerns that a future government
led by him could move in an illiberal and even autocratic direction.
Similar tendencies have even reached the United States, where the
Trump administration borrowed the “deep state” discourse that autocrats
in Hungary and Turkey used to justify purges and the packing of
the courts and other key state institutions. Although Trump’s efforts to
purge law-enforcement, intelligence, and other public agencies achieved
only modest success, the Republican Party has taken a range of other
steps to tilt the electoral playing field to its advantage, including the
adoption of more than a dozen state-level “voter ID” laws that make
it harder for lower-income and minority citizens to register and vote.36
Systematic efforts to tilt the playing field against political opponents
were widely believed to be a thing of the past in established Western democracies.
The notion that openly illiberal and even autocratic leaders
might ascend to power, or that governing parties would seek to replicate
Orbán’s authoritarian media strategies, was virtually unthinkable just
a decade ago. Western states possess strong democratic antibodies, including
robust political and legal institutions, highly developed private
sectors and civil societies, and well-organized oppositions. The extensive
financial and organizational resources available to oppositions in
established Western democracies make it much harder to tilt the playing
field in these states than it is in, say, Kenya, Turkey, Ukraine, or Venezuela.
Nevertheless, the emergence of more subtle and sophisticated
authoritarian strategies, along with the evolution of effective nationalist
and populist discourses capable of building majority support for such
practices, is a major cause for concern. Competitive authoritarianism is
not only thriving but inching westward. No democracy can be taken for
granted.
NOTES
The authors thank Manuel Meléndez for his outstanding research assistance.
1. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “Elections Without Democracy: The Rise of
Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002): 52–65. See also
Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), from which many of the points below
are drawn.
2. Christopher Carothers, “The Surprising Instability of Competitive Authoritarianism,”
Journal of Democracy 29 (October 2018): 129–35.
3. Dan Slater, “Democratic Careening,” World Politics 65 (October 2013): 729–63.
4. As of December 2019, we classify Albania, Armenia, Croatia, Dominican Republic,
Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Peru, Romania, Slovakia, Taiwan,
and Ukraine as democracies.
5. These are Benin, North Macedonia, Mali, Nicaragua, Senegal, and Serbia.
64 Journal of Democracy
6. These are Belarus, Cambodia, Cameroon, and Russia.
7. These are Botswana, Gabon, Haiti, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania,
Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
8. At the time of this writing in November 2019, Bolivian president Evo Morales has
stepped down in response to widespread protests following allegations of fraud in the 2019
presidential election. Pending further developments, we have retained our categorization
of Bolivia as a competitive authoritarian regime.
9. Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the
American Global Order (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).
10. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.
11. Cooley and Nexon, Exit from Hegemony. On the effects of the changing international
environment see also Larry Diamond, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian
Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (New York: Penguin Press, 2019).
12. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 41; Larry Diamond, Marc
Plattner, and Christopher Walker, eds. Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to
Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).
13. These are Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia.
Two other new competitive authoritarian cases, the Philippines and Turkey, are also characterized
by extensive ties to the West.
14. Kai M. Thaler, “Nicaragua: A Return to Caudillismo,” Journal of Democracy 28
(April 2017):159.
15. Thaler, “Nicaragua: A Return to Caudillismo,” 165, 163.
16. Cooley and Nexon, Exit from Hegemony, chapter 1.
17. See www.focus-economics.com/blog/the-largest-economies-in-the-world.
18. Indeed, political scientist Jessica Chen Weiss recently concluded that “there is scant
evidence that the Chinese Communist Party is deliberately trying to spread autocracy or
defeat democracy.” See Weiss, “An Ideological Contest in U.S.-China Relations? Assessing
China’s Defense of Autocracy,” forthcoming in Security and US-China Relations: Differences,
Dangers, and Dilemmas, eds. Avery Goldstein and Jacques deLisle. See https://
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3427181.
19. See Richard Wike, Laura Silver, and Alexandra Castillo, “Many Across the Globe
Are Dissatisfied With How Democracy Is Working,” Pew Research Center, 29 April 2019,
www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/04/29/many-across-the-globe-are-dissatisfied-with-howdemocracy-is-working,
and Richard Wike et al., “Globally, Broad Support for Representative
and Direct Democracy,” Pew Research Center, 16 October 2017, www.pewresearch.org/
global/2017/10/16/globally-broad-support-for-representative-and-direct-democracy.
20. Over the last decade, the number of countries in which V-Dem scores on the dimension
of “electoral competition” have improved exceeds the number of countries in
which these scores have declined. Indeed, V-Dem concluded in 2019 that the world was
“more democratic compared to any point during the last century.” See Anna Lührmann et
al., “State of the World 2018: Democracy Facing Global Challenges,” Democratization
26, no. 6 (2019): 895–915.
21. Steven Levitsky and James Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism
in the Andes,” Democratization 20, no. 1 (2013): 107–36.
65Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way
22. Nikolay Marinov and Hein Goemans, “Coups and Democracy,” British Journal of
Political Science 44 (October 2014): 799–825.
23. Lucan Way, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive
Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
24. Scott Radnitz, Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-Led Protests
in Central Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 207.
25. Serhii Leshchenko, “Poroshenko i porozhnecha” [Poroshenko and the vacuum],
Ukra¦nska Pravda, 16 May 2014, www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2014/05/16/7025568.
26. Jacques Rupnik, “Hungary’s Illiberal Turn: How Things Went Wrong,” Journal of
Democracy 23 (July 2012): 132.
27. Alexandra Béni, “Eurobarometer : Support for EU at Record High, 60% of Hungarians
Back Membership,” Daily News Hungary, 17 October 2018, https://dailynewshun-
gary.com/eurobarometer-support-for-eu-at-record-high-60-of-hungarians-back-member-
ship.
28. Paul Lendvai, Orbán: Europe’s New Strongman (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2017), 48.
29. Miklós Bánkuti, Gábor Halmai, Kim Lane Scheppele, “Hungary’s Illiberal Turn:
Disabling the Constitution,” Journal of Democracy 23 (July 2012): 145.
30. Patrick Kingsley and Benjamin Novak, “The Website That Shows How a Free
Press Can Die,” New York Times, 24 November 2018.
31. “Hungary’s Independent Media Struggle Against Economic Pressure, Intimidation,”
Committee to Protect Journalists, 7 July 2014, https://cpj.org/blog/2014/07/hunga-
rys-independent-media-struggle-against-econom.php#more.
32. See www.transparency.org/news/feature/hungarys_elections_free_but_not_fair;
also Bánkuti, Halmai, and Scheppele, 145.
33. R. Daniel Kelemen and Laurent Pech, “Ejecting the Autocrat: The EPP Must Ditch
Orbán to Salvage What Remains of Its Credibility,” Euronews, 8 March 2019, www.
euronews.com/2019/03/08/ejecting-the-autocrat-the-epp-must-ditch-orban-to-salvage-
what-remains-of-its-credibility.
34. “Poland’s New Government Finds a Model in Orban’s Hungary,” Financial Times,
16 January 2016, www.ft.com/content/0a3c7d44-b48e-11e5-8358-9a82b43f6b2f.
35. “Austrian Leader Calls for Snap Elections After Far-Right Vice-Chancellor Resigns,”
New York Times, 18 May 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/world/europe/aus-
tria-strache-resigns-video.html.
36. Benjamin Highton, “Voter Identification Laws and Turnout in the United States,”
Annual Review of Political Science 20 (2017): 151–53.