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International Political Science Review
http://ips.sagepub.com/content/23/1/103
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512102023001006
2002 23: 103International Political Science Review
Andreas Schedler
The Nested Game of Democratization by Elections
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The Nested Game of Democratization by Elections
ANDREAS SCHEDLER
ABSTRACT. In developing an analytical framework for the comparative
study of processes of democratization by elections, this article first lays
out the techniques of electoral manipulation authoritarian rulers employ
to control electoral outcomes. It argues next that manipulated elections
tend to trigger two-level games in which electoral competition is “nested”
inside electoral reform, and outlines the causal interaction and strategic
interdependence of the two levels. It describes the basic strategic choices
and strategic dilemmas actors face in iterative cycles of conflict. It
analyzes the uncertainties of results, relations of power, and strategic
responses that characterize the game. Finally, it explains how actors may
cope with its ambivalent and uncertain nature—they may devise “mixed”
strategies or privilege one level of the game over the other.
Keywords: Democratization • Elections • Electoral reform • Legitimacy
Nested games
As political regimes move from authoritarianism to democracy, “founding
elections” are supposed to mark the institutional break with the authoritarian past.
In the first transitions within the “third wave” of democratization (Huntington,
1991) in southern Europe and South America, the convocation of elections
signaled the inauguration of a new democratic era. Military rulers had banned
political parties and suspended electoral politics, and when they allowed the
electoral arena to open again they withdrew to the barracks rather than standing
for election themselves.
Later transitions have often taken a different turn. Rather than quit the
political scene, authoritarian rulers opted for entering the electoral arena
themselves. But, turned into candidates, authoritarian incumbents contaminate
electoral contests. Since they stand for election not to lose power but to legitimate
their continuity in office, they commonly try to distort and control the electoral
process in order to minimize the risk of defeat. By “borrowing cunningly some
features of democracy in order to substantively avoid it” (Case, 1996: 438) the new
electoral autocrats practice “democracy as deception” (Joseph, 1998b: 56, 59).1
International Political Science Review (2002), Vol 23, No. 1, 103–122
0192-5121 (2002/01) 23:1, 103–122; 024218 © 2002 International Political Science Association
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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The elections they call for are therefore not foundational but transitional. They
inaugurate no new democratic regime but a new phase in the struggle for
democracy.
This article develops an analytical framework to guide our normative
evaluations of transitional elections. More importantly, it proposes a heuristic
model to advance our empirical understanding of the political logic of flawed
elections. In a first step, it discusses the manifold instruments ruling parties may
deploy to contain the democratic uncertainty of political elections. The “menu of
electoral manipulation” it sketches, with loose empirical illustrations from new
democracies, covers the whole sphere of electoral governance. It includes old
themes: fraud, repression, and unfairness. But it also includes issues that to date
have received little attention: the manipulation of actors, cleavages, and rules of
competition.
Moving on from the comparative anatomy of manipulation to the comparative
politics of manipulation, the article argues that the deployment of manipulative
strategies rarely leads to a stable regime “equilibrium.” Opposition parties usually
do not accept flawed elections as the endpoint of democratization. Rather, they
take them to be a mere way-station on the long road toward genuine electoral
democracy. Manipulated elections accordingly tend to trigger cycles of conflict
that revolve around issues of electoral governance. Rather than becoming
institutionalized they set countries on paths of democratization by elections. In
such transitions from authoritarian rule, electoral competition and the struggle
for electoral reform unfold simultaneously and interact in “nested” two-level
games.
The article outlines the causal and strategic interaction between the two game
levels, discusses the structural ambivalence, the strategic choices, and the
conflicting imperatives actors face, and delineates strategies actors may devise to
manage the ambivalence and uncertainty associated with the multi-layered “nested
game” (Tsebelis, 1990) of democratization.
The Menu of Manipulation
According to the standard script of transitions from military rule, authoritarian
incumbents tend to do two things when confronted with pressures for regime
change (short of simply repressing dissent). Initially, they may agree to liberalize.
They do this under the illusion of keeping things under control, but normally
things get out of control. Later, they may agree to hold elections under the
condition of obtaining certain institutional safeguards. The “vital interests” they
wish to protect commonly include property rights, military autonomy, and
impunity from judicial prosecution. In later transitions, authoritarian rulers have
been innovating. They have broadened their repertoire of “survival strategies”
(Brumberg, 2000). Instead of liberalizing they have been democratizing to
legitimate their continued monopoly of power. Instead of negotiating extraelectoral
guarantees, they have been devising electoral safeguards to protect their
vital interests. Once “exceptional” (Lamounier, 1989: 43), the Brazilian recipe of
“distorting rather than disbanding the basic institutions of political democracy”
(O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986: 22) has found adept imitators all over the world.
But how do rulers manage to “retain power while cultivating some semblance of
electoral legitimacy” (Skidmore, 1989: 30)? Generally speaking, they have a broad
array of safeguards at their disposal. By fine-tuning various complementary
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strategies of electoral control, instead of trusting a single mechanism of electoral
manipulation, they may minimize exposure to democratic uncertainty while
limiting damages to legitimacy.2
Electoral Fraud
According to conventional understanding, electoral fraud involves the
introduction of bias into the administration of elections. It distorts the voting
process in its narrow sense, in any of its multiple steps from the registration of
voters to the tally of the vote. Physically, vote rigging may involve such dissimilar
activities as deleting names from the voter list, expelling voters from polling
stations, and inflating the vote totals of certain parties and candidates. Whatever
its concrete manifestation, though, electoral fraud by definition violates the
fundamental principle of democratic equality. By unduly interfering with
administrative processes, it weights citizen preferences, denying voting rights to
some while amplifying the voice of others.
Clearly, over the past two decades, electoral fraud has been a widespread
technique for containing the uncertainty of transitional elections. Governing
parties from Haiti to Peru, from Yugoslavia to Azerbaijan, from Burkina Faso to
Zimbabwe, have implemented electoral fraud to control electoral outcomes. To
cite just one illustrative figure: on the basis of the regular election reports given by
the Journal of Democracy, Robert Pastor (1999: Appendix) identifies eighty-one
instances of protested elections worldwide during the 1990s. In many instances,
the dataset does not allow one to identify the generic reasons that motivated
protests. But in more than half of the cases (forty-three), allegations of electoral
fraud appear as an explicit motive for opposition parties objecting to the electoral
process. Yet ruling parties may allow the electoral process to be “administered
passably well” (Barkan and Ng’ethe, 1998: 33), as in Kenya in 1992, just to deploy a
whole panoply of alternative means of electoral containment. Sometimes, it
appears, old dogs do learn new tricks.
Political Repression
It seems obvious that for elections to qualify as democratic they have to take place
in an open environment of civil and political liberties. Democracy must allow for
more than the bare “freedom to shut up” that, according to Talbi (2000: 61),
reigns in the electoral autocracies of the Arab world. Yet, the “strange combination
of remarkably competitive elections and harsh repression” (Diamond and
Plattner, 2000: 107) that characterizes contemporary Iran is by no means exclusive
to the Islamic revolutionary state. For some time, Southeast Asia’s “semidemocracies”
have practiced “the containment of liberal participation more than
electoral contestation,” resulting in “a desultory mix of freedoms and controls”
(Case, 1996: 459, 453). Most Arab regimes have held elections “amid conditions of
pluralism and (relative) probity” (Sivan, 1997: 105) without guaranteeing the basic
liberties that are constitutive of democracy. In many sub-Saharan countries, too,
elections and repression have gone hand in hand. During much of Nigeria’s
tortuous transition from military rule, civil candidates entered the electoral game
“under the constant threat of arrest or physical attack,” with “brute force”
remaining “the main currency of political control” (Joseph, 1998a.: 5). In the early
1990s, in Cameroon and Togo, “bogus elections” were accompanied by “pervasive
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state violence” (ibid. 6). The 1996 presidential elections in Gambia took place
within an oppressive “climate of fear” (Wiseman, 1998: 66), while “continual state
harassment of the opposition” (Barkan and Ng’ethe, 1998: 33) marked the
Kenyan 1992 and 1997 national elections.3
There are many gray areas, though. Democracy requires minimal degrees of
freedom. But how much is just enough? Rather than organizing massive and
continual repression, political regimes may subject their adversaries to selective
and intermittent repression. Irregular episodes of harassment and intimidation
make fewer international headlines than systematic human rights violations, and
they may be equally effective in dissuading dissidence and imposing selfcensorship.
The 2000 presidential elections in Russia (McFaul, 2000: 30) and Peru
(Youngers, 2000: 41–50, 65–67) apparently fell into such borderline categories of
targeted “low-intensity” repression.
Manipulating the Actor Space
The capacity of authoritarian incumbents to go victoriously out of transitional
elections is often not due to their own “cleverness but the ineptitude of [their]
opponents” (McFaul, 2000: 23). Often, however, the failure of opposition parties is
manufactured failure. In cases of political redemocratization as in Argentina and
Uruguay, pre-authoritarian party systems have re-emerged in the course of regime
change. But most transitional regimes do not count with anything resembling a
consolidated party system. Authoritarian rulers have taken the opportunity of
these fluid situations to manipulate the number and nature of nascent opposition
actors. Their main strategies of manipulation read exclusion and fragmentation.
Exclusion. Authoritarian incumbents are always tempted to restrict the electoral
arena by keeping out unfriendly competitors. The means of exclusion range from
institutional violence to institutional design. The (attempted) physical elimination
of salient opponents, as in Togo in 1991 (Monga, 1997: 159) and in Armenia in
1994 (Bremmer and Welt, 1997: 86), is only the most extreme form of candidate
screening. Much “more common” is the “milder technique” (Monga, 1997: 159)
of banning parties and disqualifying candidates. Expelling parties and candidates
from the electoral game is sometimes a simple act of arbitrariness, as in Armenia
in 1995 (Bremmer and Welt, 1997: 86–87). But often ruling parties hand-tailor
legal instruments that permit them to exclude opponents from electoral
competition. The electoral laws of post-revolutionary Mexico kept regional and
religious parties as well as independent candidates out of the electoral arena
(Molinar, 1991: 27–28). In Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia incumbent
presidents used custom-made “nationality clauses” to prevent their most serious
competitors from running (Monga, 1997: 160). In Gambia, coup-monger Yahya
Jammeh pushed through a new constitution that blocked the country’s entire
political elite out of the electoral game. All significant pre-coup parties were
banned and any individual “who had ever been a member of any previous
government” was not permitted to run (Wiseman, 1998: 69). In much of the Arab
world, radical Islamic movements are either “legally banned (as in Egypt, Tunisia,
and Algeria) or are legal but restricted (as in Yemen and Jordan)” (Sivan, 2000:
77). In contemporary Iran, the Islamic revolutionary “legitimacy” of candidates is
subject to tight layered evaluation by state agencies and religious authorities
(Boroumand and Boroumand, 2000: 117–119).4
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Fragmentation. In authoritarian Brazil (1964–85), military rulers banned previous
parties but “their quasi-resurgence was tolerated under the all-embracing rubric of
an official two-party system” (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986: 22). In the course of
several electoral contests, however, the generals came to realize that “the
compulsory two-party structure ensured opposition unity” (Skidmore, 1989: 35).
In reaction, they abandoned their pretension of legislating the party system into a
bipolar format, and turned their creative energies to a project most electoral
autocrats pursue with determined enthusiasm: encouraging the fragmentation of
the opposition camp (ibid.: 22).5
To allow only unaffiliated individuals to contest
elections by either outlawing opposition parties, as in Taiwan until 1989, or
banning parties in general, as in contemporary Iran and Uganda, represents the
most radical device for disorganizing electoral dissidence. But authoritarian
incumbents have many other divisive means at hand, short of prohibiting the
organization of electoral alternatives. They may weaken opposition parties by
informal practice, as happened in Kenya with president Daniel arap Moi
“harassing or bribing the leaders of any new parties until splits occurred or key
members defected” (Barkan and Ng’ethe, 1998: 33). Rulers may also divide their
opponents by institutional design. For instance, radical proportional
representation in legislative elections has been instrumental since 1984 in splitting
the anti-Sandinista camp in Nicaragua (Santiuste, 2000). It has served a similar
function in Peru where, after 1990, it helped to produce and reproduce the
prevailing “partyless” party system (Levitsky, 1999: 88).
Manipulating Rules of Representation
Beyond efforts to screen and split their competitors, authoritarian incumbents
often institute self-serving electoral rules that give them a decisive edge at the
moment of translating votes into seats. They design biased rules of representation
to prevent an eventual loss of votes from translating into a loss of power. For
instance, majoritarian electoral rules in post-revolutionary Mexico, postindependence
Zimbabwe, and Croatia under Tudjman have been effective devices
to minimize the parliamentary representation of opposition parties. In democratizing
Mexico, the ruling party put into place a “governability clause” that
guaranteed “artificial” legislative majorities to the major party. Other regimes have
relied on gross malapportionment to keep winning despite defeat. In the 1997
Kenyan parliamentary elections, gross malapportionment led to a bare 51 percent
governmental majority. The official party would have won less than 40 percent of
seats, “had parliamentary districts been drawn to be roughly equal in numbers of
registered voters” (Barkan and Ng’ethe, 1998: 44). On the eve of the 1997
legislative elections in Gambia, “the old constituency boundaries were redrawn in
ways that blatantly violated” the constitutional requirement of a “reasonably
practical” equitable apportionment (Wiseman, 1998: 69).
However, biased rules of representation may not be illegitimate. Opposition
parties may pay little attention to them or even support them. In Brazil, Spain, and
Argentina, for example, outgoing authoritarian governments devised rules of
legislative seat assignment that were clearly privileging less populated, rural, and
traditionally conservative regions. Nevertheless, today, the high level of
malapportionment in these countries does not stir up any controversy. Political
parties have come to perceive it as a legitimate fact of political life (Reynoso,
2000).
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Manipulating the Issue Space
Democratic political parties are supposed to aggregate given societal interests but
also to identify and define societal cleavages and translate them into political
demands. They are not supposed, however, to literally create those cleavages; even
less so, to manufacture them by violent means. But this is exactly what some
incumbents have done in order to shore up popular support. They have
constructed societal cleavages through the deployment of either external violence
(international war) or internal violence (terrorism or civil war). Russian president
Vladimir Putin is suspected of having traveled both of these violent avenues to
popularity. According to Michael McFaul, the “simple explanation” of Putin’s 2000
electoral victory—which, as the author notes despite his skepticism, has apparently
“much truth” to it—runs as follows (McFaul, 2000: 20):
Putin was chosen by Yeltsin and his band of oligarchs as a loyal successor . . . To
boost [his] popularity in order to get him elected, they had to provoke a war
with Chechnya. Some assert that this cabal was even responsible for blowing up
apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere last fall—crimes that were
attributed to Chechen terrorists—as a way to bolster support for the war and
Putin.
In Kenya, the creation of ethnic conflict followed a less “dialectical” script.
Death squads “acting on the orders of [governmental] hard-liners” took care of
implementing president Moi’s “self-fulfilling prophecy that multipartyism would
lead to ‘tribal conflict’” (Barkan and Ng’ethe, 1998: 33). Unfortunately, a
substantial number of authoritarian elites in democratizing countries have been
surviving and thriving by “persuading” citizens of the saliency of ethnic cleavages
that had not been politicized before (Snyder, 2000).
Unfair Competition
When authoritarian incumbents go out to face voters and receive an electoral seal
of approval for their continuity in power, they confront emerging opposition
parties invariably under radically unfair conditions. The two main recurrent
themes are money and media. Usually, ruling authoritarians transmuted into
campaigning candidates enjoy generous access to public resources as well as
public exposure. They have the whole state apparatus at their service, they control
the state media, and they subject private media to harassment and intimidation to
block out opposition candidates. In addition, they often control another crucial
resource: time. In Ghana in 1992 (Gyimah-Boadi, 1999: 106–107) and Gambia in
1996 (Wiseman, 1998: 66) military rulers lifted the ban on political parties just a
few months before election day, which deprived their opponents of the time
necessary to put together something resembling a party organization.6
But the problem of electoral unfairness goes beyond unfair conditions of
competition; it includes unfair practices of competition. Turned into electoral
campaigners, authoritarian incumbents tend to treat their adversaries with
contempt (Monga, 1997: 165). But often they go beyond gestures of dismissive
arrogance and orchestrate aggressive campaigns destined to destroy the public
reputation of opposition candidates. In addition to inundating state media with
“undiluted praise” for themselves, they swamp them with “unadulterated attacks”
on their contenders (Wiseman, 1998: 65). Such campaigns may go much further
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than even the nasty forms of negative campaigning we have seen in some
established democracies. It’s not just that they violate minimal standards of civility
and truthfulness, even more importantly, they proceed without brakes, without the
countervailing force of “alternative sources of information” (Dahl, 1971: 3). In the
Peruvian as well as in the Russian 2000 presidential campaigns, the systematic
destruction of public reputation formed an integral part of sitting presidents’
public relations offensives against their contenders (Youngers, 2000: 65–67;
McFaul, 2000: 29).
Two-level Games
When authoritarian rulers convoke multiparty elections they open up a window of
uncertainty, however small and fragile. The strategies of electoral manipulation
serve the purpose of containing the emergent uncertainty of electoral outcomes.
But even if incumbents try to steal elections, repress dissent, weaken opposition
parties, create artificial cleavages, and establish unfair rules as well as unfair
conditions of competition, citizens may still vote against them. Voters are never
wholly predictable. In transitional situations, their preferences are either
unknown or susceptible to changes of unknown magnitude and direction. As a
consequence, manipulated elections tend to fall into the gray area of institutional
ambivalence that lies between the poles of full authoritarian control and full
democratic uncertainty. They are more than acclamatory rituals, but less than
open competitive contests (see Figure 1).
The institutional ambivalence of flawed elections creates pressures for
institutional change in both directions. On the one hand, authoritarian rulers
wish to retain control over electoral outcomes. If semidemocratic elections get out
of hand and start producing “unacceptable” results, incumbents will strive to
rescind democratic concessions made in the past. On the other hand, democratic
opposition parties struggle to institutionalize democratic uncertainty. They will
refuse to bind themselves to electoral rules that fall below minimum thresholds of
democratic quality. Even if they agree to enter the electoral game they will still
entertain the hope of dismantling its authoritarian limitations in the future.
Accordingly, neither incumbents nor opponents will perceive manipulated
elections as an “equilibrium” solution that corresponds to their long-term
interests. Rather they will accept the rules of the electoral game as a temporary
compromise, a provisional truce contingent on current correlations of force and
open to revision in the uncertain future. To restate the argument in a more
precise way: contending parties will refuse to accept ambivalent electoral
institutions as binding if at least one of three assumptions holds. First, under the
assumption that incumbents are authoritarian actors, rather than democratic
reformers, their commitment to semidemocratic elections will be contingent on
SCHEDLER: Democratization by Elections 109
Authoritarian
control
Institutional
ambivalence Democratic
uncertainty
FIGURE 1. The Ambivalence of Manipulated Elections.
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their ability to hold the bastions of state power. Second, under the assumption that
opposition parties are democratic actors, rather than players indifferent or even
hostile to liberal democracy, their acceptance of semiauthoritarian elections will
be contingent on their ability to besiege the bastions of power. Third, if neither
incumbents nor opponents expect voter behavior to affect prevalent balances of
power in the foreseeable future, if citizens thus do not represent a significant
source of uncertainty, ruling parties may be able to institutionalize
semidemocratic rule regardless of opposition parties’ attitudes towards
democracy.7
The ambivalent and thus (usually) contested nature of flawed elections implies
that elections do not unfold as simple games but as two-level games. They unfold
as “nested games” (Tsebelis, 1990) where “the game in the principal arena is
nested inside a bigger game where the rules of the game themselves are variable”
(ibid.: 8). At the same time as incumbents and opponents measure their forces in
the electoral arena, they battle over the basic rules that shape the electoral arena.
Their struggle over institutional rules is not extraneous to but an integral part of
their struggle within prevalent institutional rules, as the game of electoral
competition is embedded within the meta-game of electoral reform.8
The dynamics triggered by the organization of ambivalent elections contrast
markedly with the political process opened up by the convocation of democratic
elections. The early third-wave transitions from military rule that took place in
southern Europe and South America were based on foundational pacts and
foundational elections. After a conflictual period of institutional choice, founding
elections were held within “reasonably fair rules” (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986:
58) either imposed or negotiated by the outgoing regime. Contending parties
thus set up new electoral rules first and then moved on to play the game.
Institutional design and electoral competition formed a temporal sequence of
separate activities.
Processes of democratization by elections are different. When the curtain of the
first electoral contest falls, the “drama of democratization” (Whitehead, 1999) is
far from over. If held under the shadow of manipulation, first elections are not the
final step of regime change but its mere point of departure. They do not have
foundational, only transitional character. Rather than inaugurating a new regime,
they represent focal points of a cyclical “test of forces and of legitimacy”
(Lamounier, 1989: 69). Rarely do they allow regime opponents to conquer
democracy at once. Rather, electoral routes to democracy tend to unfold as
“protracted transitions” (Eisenstadt, 2000) in which opposition forces engage in “a
continuous series of battles” (Barkan, 2000: 236) to peel off layers of authoritarian
control step by step.
Conceptualizing processes of democratization by elections as two-level games
involves the assumption that the game of electoral competition and the metagame
of electoral reform unfold in a simultaneous as well as interactive fashion.
The links between the two levels are both causal and strategic. On the causal side,
the outcomes of the meta-game level—the conditions of electoral competition and
electoral governance—delimit the probability distribution as well as the outer
limits of outcomes at the game level. Inversely, the results of electoral competition
constitute important power resources at the moment of renegotiating the basic
rules of the game. On the strategic side, actors know about the causal interplay
between the two levels and adapt their strategic behavior accordingly. They know
that they cannot achieve their goals at either level without taking into account the
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repercussions of their decisions at the other level. Also, if we want to comprehend
the strategic interaction between incumbents and opposition from an external
observer perspective, it is only by being attentive to both levels of the
democratizing game that we can decipher the rationale for actions that otherwise
may look idiosyncratic, irrational or, at the very least, “suboptimal” (Tsebelis,
1990).
Of course, democratization is not the only possible outcome the nested conflict
over votes and rules may lead to. Abortion and stagnation are alternative
possibilities. If incumbents control the military (or think they control the military)
they may try to shut down the electoral arena at any point. Also, for as long as a
majority of citizens, the ultimate arbiters of the game, acquiesce to the ruling party
and its practices of electoral manipulation, electoral authoritarianism may settle
down as a stable solution (Case, 1996). Still, even if democratic progress is not
inevitable, the inner logic of the game pulls it away from authoritarianism. As
liberalization proceeds, processes of limited democratization have an intrinsic
potential for getting out of hand. And, as in the case of extra-electoral guarantees,
electoral controls may erode, rather than lock in unfair advantages for ever. To the
extent that opposition parties succeed in accumulating strength in the electoral
arena, they improve their chances to extract institutional reforms from the ruling
party. And vice versa, to the extent that they succeed in improving the conditions
of electoral competition and electoral governance at the meta-game level, they
improve their chances of capturing votes and seats at the game level. Electoral
success furthers electoral reform, which again furthers electoral success. Rather
than establishing a “self-enforcing” equilibrium, ambivalent elections thus tend to
trigger a “self-subversive” spiral that over time undermines both the institutional
and the electoral bases of the authoritarian incumbent.9
Figure 2 illustrates the
self-reinforcing interaction between electoral competitiveness and electoral
reform that defines “the power of elections” (Di Palma, 1990: 85) in
democratizing contexts. It is the possibility of such a virtuous circle that leads Joel
Barkan to the optimistic observation that “even flawed elections” are “not without
significance.” A compelling analogy, he writes, is “the mouse nibbling at the
proverbial piece of cheese. After a period of time, the piece, in this case the
authoritarian state, is no more” (Barkan 2000: 235–236).10
The remainder of this
SCHEDLER: Democratization by Elections 111
Institutional change
Electoral competition
Weak
opposition
Strong
opposition
Authoritarian
control
Democratic
uncertainty
▲
FIGURE 2. The Self-reinforcing Dynamics of Democratization by Elections.
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article, though, will focus less on the causal interaction between the two levels of
the electoral game than on the strategic interaction of incumbents and opposition
across these levels.
Strategic Choices
What are actors’ fundamental choices in the nested game of ambivalent elections?
Figure 3 shows the cycle of conflictual interaction that revolves around electoral
processes. The starting-point is a government calling an election the opposition
denounces as flawed. In continuation, (1) the incumbent decides whether to
respond to the criticism voiced by its adversaries by either attending to or
neglecting their complaints; (2) the opposition evaluates the response it gets from
the government and decides whether to participate or boycott the election; (3)
the incumbent chooses whether to run a relatively clean election or to commit
fraud on election day; (4) if the ruling party is declared victorious, the opposition
decides whether to accept or protest the result; and (5) the cycle comes to full
circle with incumbents deciding to repress eventual opposition protests or
respond by opening up to reform.
Of course, the decision scheme is highly simplified. Choices are often not
binary but allow for more complex and subtle moves. Also, as the two-headed
arrows in the figure indicate, the simple chronological sequence often gets messed
up in an interactive dynamic of moves and countermoves. In addition, a more
complete model of electoral routes to democracy would have to take into account
that within the nested game of national elections, multiple nested games of local
elections may be taking place.11
Still, the figure indicates the fundamental
decisions each side has to take in iterative cycles of conflict.
Of course, the story may take a different turn if the opposition wins, or thinks it
has won. The ruling party must then decide whether to acknowledge or reverse its
defeat. If it accepts an opposition victory at presidential elections (in presidential
systems) or at elections to the national parliament (in parliamentary systems), the
transition has come to an end and the two-level game of democratization by
112 International Political Science Review 23(1)
▲▲▲
▲ ▲▲▲
▲
▲▲▲▲
Incumbent choices:
Institutional change
Opposition choices:
Electoral competition
Boycott
vs.
Participation
Protest
vs.
Acquiescence
Reform
vs.
Closure
Integrity
vs.
Fraud
Reform
vs.
Closure
Election
FIGURE 3. The Cycle of Strategic Choices.
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elections is over. The game is over as well if incumbents respond to defeat by
closing the electoral arena—for example, by staging a military coup. But
incumbents may also perpetuate the two-level dynamic by introducing “corrective”
postelectoral safeguards. They may adjust official election results, as in the 2000
parliamentary elections in Iran (Boroumand and Boroumand, 2000: 117–120).
They may jail the elected president, as in Nigeria in 1993. They may strip
legislators of their mandates, be it through the “whitewash” courts (Eisenstadt, this
issue) or by executive decree, as in Brazil in the 1970s. Or they may rely on
intimidation and material seduction to “persuade” opposition actors to join their
ranks, as reported in Kenya in the 1990s and Peru in the year 2000.
Strategic Interdependence
Figure 3 situates actors’ sequential choices at different levels of the game. As it
indicates, the major choices for incumbents lie at the meta-game level of electoral
reform, while the major choices for opposition actors lie at the game level of
electoral competition. This asymmetry of choices arises from the asymmetry of
resources actors control. On the one hand, incumbents control electoral rules and
conditions. Given their control over the meta-game of constitution-making,
incumbents commonly enjoy at least veto powers over the basic rules and
conditions of electoral competition and electoral governance. Between elections
they have to decide whether they reform given institutions or not. During electoral
periods, they have to decide how to act within the given framework, whether to
respect or subvert it.
On the other hand, while incumbents control the terms of electoral
competition, opposition parties control the terms of electoral legitimacy. As soon
as ruling parties convoke elections with at least some measure of genuine plurality
and competition, they provoke a fundamental shift of power. Even if they continue
to control the structural conditions of the game, they surrender control over its
conditions of acceptability to opposition parties. While incumbents may be able to
establish rules by decree, they cannot establish legitimacy by decree. If they wish to
embellish their hold on power with at least “a semblance of electoral legitimacy”
(Skidmore, 1989: 30) they need the cooperation of their adversaries. They need
opposition parties to participate in the electoral game they open up. Neither oneparty
shows nor one-man shows do the job. To the dismay of ruling parties,
international election monitors tend to recognize the privileged role opposition
parties play in defining the terms of legitimacy. Even if it “infuriates ruling parties”
(Pastor, 1998: 160), they tend to define a “flawed” election as one “in which some
or all of the major political parties refuse to participate” or to accept the results
(ibid., 1999: 15). With the denial of legitimacy as their major bargaining chip,
opposition parties face two major entry–exit decisions at the level of electoral
competition. In the pre-electoral phase they have to decide whether to boycott or
participate under given conditions; in the post-electoral phase they have to decide
whether to accept or protest official results.
To the extent that opposition parties care about conditions of electoral
competition and electoral governance and to the extent that incumbents care
about electoral legitimacy, each side thus controls resources valuable to the other.
To obtain their objectives in this situation of strategic interdependence, they have
to induce their adversaries to make cooperative moves across game levels.
Incumbents try to get what they want at the game level (opposition participation)
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by deploying the resources they command at the meta-level. Their opponents try
to get what they want at the meta-level (democratizing reform) by using the
leverage they have at the game level. While incumbents try to keep opposition
parties in the game of elections by manipulating electoral conditions, opposition
parties try to keep incumbents in the game of electoral reform by playing, or
refusing to play, the electoral game.
Strategic Dilemmas
For both sides, achieving the cooperation of their adversaries is not a simple
matter of goal maximization under conditions of strategic interdependence. The
ambivalence and the nested character of the game confront actors with severe
normative and strategic dilemmas. On the one hand, incumbents face the tradeoff
between electoral control and electoral credibility. They want to bring
opposition parties into the game but they also wish to keep them under control.
After all, they are not interested in institutionalizing democracy but in legitimizing
their continuity in power. Manipulating elections thus turns into a difficult
balancing act. Rational governments will not wish to distort the electoral process
as much as possible but only “as much as necessary to assure a win” (Monga, 1997:
159, emphasis added). But gauging the “optimal level of opening” (Eisenstadt,
2000: 14) is hardly a trivial assignment. The search for democratic “legitimacy via
controlled elections” (Joseph, 1998a: 9) under the logic of minimal concessions
may well be self-defeating. What looks like a minimal institutional self-restraint
today may be too much to prevent defeat or too little to earn recognition
tomorrow. Floating in a sea of uncertainty, authoritarian rulers have to steer
through the Scylla of losing an excessively open contest and the Charybdis of
winning an exceedingly controlled electoral farce nobody believes in.
On the other hand, opposition parties face the dilemma that democratizing the
pre-democratic electoral game often goes hand in hand with legitimizing it.
Where elections are hollow triple-nine rituals12
from which “all competitiveness”
has been “squeezed” (Case, 1996: 460), regime opponents will seldom feel torn
apart by Faustian inner conflicts when considering whether to stay out of the
electoral show business. By contrast, if announced elections “seem likely to occur
under reasonably fair rules” (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986: 58), emergent
opposition parties usually do not hesitate to take up the challenge and enter the
electoral arena. But how should opposition parties deal with the ambiguities of
patently manipulated, but still potentially meaningful, elections? Authoritarians
wish to have electoral legitimacy conferred without making further concessions.
Democrats struggle to achieve the opposite: they wish to extract democratic
concessions without legitimizing the authoritarian manipulation of elections. But
often they cannot have one without the other. They “find themselves caught
between the need to run and garner votes and the feeling that they are taking part
in a charade” (Monga, 1997: 158). If they enter the game they legitimate it. If they
stay outside, they miss an opportunity for accumulating strength and opening up
spaces of liberty and plurality. Contesting manipulated elections may perpetuate
their ambivalent nature, but it may well be the only way of subverting them.
Uncertainties of Competition
The strategic dilemmas actors face are heightened by the profound uncertainties
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that accompany processes of democratization by elections. Uncertainty is an
inherent feature of institutional change. When institutions change, “all that is
solid melts into air” (Berman, 1982). All the parameters that endow games with
coherence and predictability turn into variables: rules, preferences, expectations,
resources, and payoffs.13
Situations of regime change are prey to the same
fundamental uncertainty.
According to Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter’s classical
formulation, transitions from authoritarian rule are times of “extraordinary
uncertainty” and “indeterminacy” (1986: 3, 5). Processes of democratization by
elections make for no exception. Their “protracted” nature may flatten out the
uncertainties of transition, since actors are able to learn about the dynamics of
regime change in iterated cycles of conflict, yet electoral routes to democracy are
specifically affected by a triple uncertainty that derives from their nested nature.
In the two-level game of democratization by elections, actors face the uncertainty
of rules as defined at the meta-game level; the uncertainty of payoffs and
correlations of power as defined at the game level; and the uncertainty of how the
two levels interact. While the uncertainty of future rules (and their consequences)
is inherent to processes of institutional change, the diagnostic as well as causal
uncertainty of power relations needs some explication.
Votes and seats represent the basic payoffs of the electoral game. But they also
constitute a fundamental measure of power between incumbents and opposition
parties. Power, the “royal variable” of political science, lies at the very heart of
contemporary transition studies. The literature has analyzed processes of regime
change primarily as a function of (changing) correlations of power. Most
classification schemes of democratic transitions relate to prevailing realities of
power. They stress either power relations between elite and mass actors
(transitions “from above” versus transitions “from below”) or between regime and
opposition (“reform” versus “rupture”).14
Of course, electoral strength is not the
only measure of correlations of force between rulers and opposition. Other
currencies of power, such as money and violence, may trump the weight of votes.
But electoral competitiveness represents an indicator of power that is specific and
specifically relevant to electoral routes to democracy. In addition, it serves as a
proxy for a couple of interrelated variables that actors are likely to factor into their
nested strategies. For instance, the intensity of electoral competition is closely
related to the perceived need for regime legitimation; to the costs of repressing
opposition actors; and to the organizational capacity of opposition parties,
including their ability to monitor voting and defend their victories. Unfortunately,
however, in the ongoing game of democratization by elections, both levels and
consequences of electoral competitiveness are hard to estimate.
Uncertainty about parties’ correlation of strength in the electoral arena is
particularly acute before first elections, when actors have few cues to predict the
decisions voters will take on election day. But, in fact, during the whole process of
democratization, “measuring” actors’ relative competitiveness is very much a
matter of informed guesses. After the transition, once the fog of uncertainty
dissipates under the sun of credible results, correlations of power are easy to
ascertain. But during the process, perceived, expected, revealed, and actual,
electoral competitiveness often diverges.
Much has been written on the miscalculation of authoritarian rulers who
convoke elections under the firm expectation of winning, but who end up losing.
Much less attention has been given to the electoral miscalculation of opposition
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parties. Regime opponents sometimes overestimate their own popularity and have
a hard time learning that citizens may confirm authoritarian rulers in office by
their own free will. At times, their well-founded institutional distrust amplifies
their margin of error. Suspicious of official election results as well as of public
opinion polls, they often have to gauge their own popularity on the basis of
episodic evidence of doubtful reliability. As Vesna Pusic´ comments, for example,
Croatian opposition leaders had to overcome “the megalomania that counted on
landslide victories without electoral strategies” (Pusic´, 1998: 120). Yet, whether
false or accurate, whether overoptimistic or overpessimistic, what counts for the
strategic interaction between government and opposition is not the “real” but the
perceived level of competition. But how do actors react to different levels of
(perceived) competitiveness?
It is intuitively plausible that correlations of forces determine actor strategies on
both levels of the game. Available research seems to support this intuition. For
example, Fabrice Lehoucq and Iván Molina (forthcoming) find in their pathbreaking
study on electoral fraud in pre-reform Costa Rica that “the large-scale
denunciation of fraud” signaled “the end of noncompetitive party politics.” With
the rise of inter-party competition, parties faced increasing “incentives to commit
and to denounce acts of fraud.” As the struggle for elective positions intensified,
“efforts to stuff the ballot box became more blatant”.15
Not only the mechanisms,
but the intensity, and the exposure of manipulation changed in response to rising
electoral competition.
Evidence from new democracies suggests, however, that levels of electoral
competition do not have linear consequences. Rather, electoral competitiveness
seems to be similarly indeterminate in its effects as those “social mechanisms” that
trigger any of several “mutually incompatible” causal chains (Elster, 1998: 46).16
Seemingly, any level of competitiveness may constitute a plausible reason for any
kind of strategic response. It may motivate reform as well as closure on behalf of
incumbents and protest as well as acquiescence on behalf of opposition parties.
From the perspective of authoritarian incumbents, competition is the mother
of electoral fraud. As emerging opposition parties threaten to disrupt monopolies
of power, ruling parties are tempted to contain the democratic uncertainty of
elections by manipulative maneuvers. But the opposite may be true as well.
Competition may be also the mother of electoral reform. As ruling parties come
under the pressure of rising opposition forces, they may accede to democratizing
concessions in order to defuse political protest and legitimate their continuing
hold on power. In the Mexican transition, the non-linear impact of increasing
inter-party competition has been quite evident. In the 1980s, the regime
responded to the incipient competitiveness of the conservative National Action
Party (PAN) by stepping on the brakes of electoral fraud. Later, during the 1990s,
the electoral strength of opposition parties was crucial in getting far-reaching
clean election reforms accepted. But it is not just that high levels of inter-party
competition may lead to either electoral manipulation or electoral integrity. The
same is true for low levels of competition. When opposition parties are weak,
incumbents may distort the electoral process with impunity, but they may also
open up the process without risking the loss of anything in the foreseeable future.
While high competition may lead to either defensive fraud or defensive reform,
low competition may give rise to either preventive fraud or preventive reform.
Over the past decade, surviving bastions of one-party hegemony in Mexican
federal states produced both kinds of responses to weak opposition. Some
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governors used their secure positions to promote reform, others to harass
opposition parties, colonize electoral institutions, and exploit state resources for
partisan purposes.
From the perspective of democratic opposition parties, different levels of
electoral competitiveness involve no less “agonizing choices” (O’Donnell and
Schmitter, 1986: 3). If opposition parties are weak, they have little to lose by
boycotting an election. But they have little to lose by participating, either. Whether
they boycott or enter the game, they may end up with nothing in their hands at
either of its levels. By contrast, if opposition parties are strong they have much to
win by participating, but much to lose as well if robbed of their victory by electoral
fraud. If they boycott they may or may not achieve democratic reform at the metalevel;
if they participate they may or may not make progress at the game level.
The reason for the causal indeterminacy of electoral competitiveness is simple.
The level of competition works like a control knob that increases simultaneously
both the expected utility and the expected cost of electoral manipulation. For
incumbents, the potential benefits as well as the potential costs of manipulation
rise as competition rises, with the same being true for democratic reform. In a
similar way, for opposition parties both the potential benefits and the potential
costs of exiting the game rise as competition rises, with the same being true for
participating in the game.
Managing Ambivalence
Contending parties may try to reduce the ambivalence and uncertainty associated
with electoral routes to democracy either by devising “mixed” strategies or by
privileging one level of the game over the other. To begin with, both sides have
ample opportunities for combining strategies. In fact, opposition parties dispose
of an easy exit route out of their dilemma—that their participation in the electoral
game may either legitimize or democratize it. They may resolve their dilemma if
they accept to compete in the electoral arena, while retaining the right to protest
against electoral results. Through participation they improve their electoral
competitiveness; through protest they improve the conditions of electoral
competition. In Mexico, between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, it was
precisely opposition parties’ persistent combination of electoral participation and
postelectoral protest that kept the country’s protracted transition from electoral
authoritarianism on the move.
Authoritarian rulers, too, may combine apparently contradictory strategic
choices. From the “menu of manipulation” laid out above it is clear that the choice
between electoral manipulation and electoral integrity is not a binary choice.
Rulers do not have to choose either one or the other but may take an intermediate
route. They may try to fine-tune manipulation by picking just certain items from
the menu. They may try to reap the fruits of legitimacy by selective reform while
containing its risks by selective bias. They may make partial concessions to build
credibility while putting in place (or leaving in place) certain “auxiliary
precautions” that contain democratic uncertainty.
In Malaysia, for instance, the relative “propriety” of electoral administration
“masks” (Case, 1996: 448) severe restrictions on civil and political liberties. In prereform
Costa Rica, the introduction of the secret ballot cancelled traditional
mechanisms of control, which led parties to rely on more severe violations of democratic
norms (Lehoucq and Molina, forthcoming). In democratizing Mexico,
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measures to clean up the electoral apparatus were accompanied by the introduction
of electoral rules that discriminated in favor of the ruling PRI. Later, as local
PRI party bosses could no longer resort to electoral fraud, they shifted their strategy
of electoral control from vote rigging to vote buying (Schedler, 2000: 13–14).17
Combining strategies is one technique for reducing the complexity of the
game. Alternatively, contending parties may privilege one game level over the
other. Opposition parties may either bet on improving competitiveness by
electoral gains or on improving structural conditions by electoral reform. The
deep strategic differences that separated the right-wing National Action Party
(PAN) from the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) during much of
the Mexican transition may be interpreted in this way. While the PAN centered its
efforts on accumulating strength in the electoral game (which then would
eventually translate into the party’s improved capacity for changing formal rules as
well as informal practices), the PRD focused on achieving institutional advances
through electoral reform (which then would eventually translate into the party’s
improved ability to win elections).18
Note that privileging one game level over the
other is not the same as decoupling the levels. It is only by cutting off one level
from the other that—following a distinction proposed by Todd Eisenstadt (2000:
8)—opposition parties divide into “patronage-seekers,” who pursue electoral gains
with indifference towards electoral reform, and “anti-regime” actors, who pursue
electoral reform with disdain for electoral competition itself.
Incumbents, on their side, often try to contain emerging opposition parties by
disconnecting electoral competition from electoral reform. They routinely
discredit criticism of prevailing conditions of electoral competition and electoral
governance by alleging that opposition parties boycott or protest elections only
because they are unpopular as well as undemocratic. By attributing opposition
grievances to undemocratic attitudes rather than undemocratic conditions, they
try to strip the game of its nested nature, converting it into a simple one-level
game.
Since actors may differ in their tolerance as well as in their strategic
management of electoral ambivalence, each of the critical decision points in the
electoral cycle may introduce tensions that lead to splits and provoke the
emergence of “the classic four-player game of transition” (Linz and Stepan, 1996:
265). The successive dilemmas both groups of actors face may lead authoritarian
incumbents to split into hardliners and softliners, while democrats may split into
radicals and moderates. Both subgroups entertain different degrees of aversion
towards electoral ambivalence. Hardliners are highly averse to electoral
uncertainty, softliners less so; radicals are highly averse to electoral ambivalence,
moderates less so; the “purists” on both sides are reluctant to play the two-level
game of ambivalent elections, the moderates less so.19
Conclusion
When authoritarian rulers convoke flawed elections, they inaugurate “nested
games” in which the competition for votes and the struggle for electoral reform go
hand in hand. After laying out the techniques of electoral manipulation the new
electoral autocrats may deploy, the article analyzed the political logic of such twolevel
games of democratization by elections. It sketched the causal and strategic
interaction between electoral competition and electoral reform and outlined the
structural ambivalence, the dynamic uncertainty, the strategic choices, the strategic
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interdependence, and the strategic dilemmas the game involves. The article
introduced the idea of a “nested” two-level game as a heuristic tool for the comparative
study of electoral routes to democracy. In the “third wave” of global
democratization, numerous countries have been going through processes of
democratization by elections. All over the globe, from Brazil to Mexico, from
Poland to Armenia, from Senegal to Kenya, from Malaysia to Taiwan, political
actors have been playing the ambivalent game of competing for votes and seats
and simultaneously struggling to change the basic rules and conditions of
electoral competition. To date, country and area specialists have tended to treat
those dispersed experiences as exceptional. The concept of a two-level game
provides an analytical tool that may guide the systematic comparison between
these seemingly dissimilar cases. In fact, the model may even serve as a fruitful
guide to studying the reverse movement: the erosion of democracy through
vicious circles of electoral manipulation that give rise to the electoral dominance
of the ruling party and vice versa.
Notes
1. In allusion to post-revolutionary Mexico’s hegemonic party, Przeworski and collaborators
declare themselves “impressed that the dream of many political elites is to rule
perpetually and to rule with consent: Politicians are just PRIstas [sic] by nature” (2000: 26).
2. Note that the focus is on centralized interference in national elections. This leaves out a
whole range of practices and institutions that may distort electoral processes in a
decentralized manner. Still, local practices of manipulation often count on at least tacit
toleration by the central government.
3. Fareed Zakaria, in his widely discussed “rise of illiberal democracy” (1997), adverts that
a growing number of leaders who came to power through “open and fair” elections (p.
25) are “routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving citizens of
basic rights and freedoms” (p. 22). While deeply sympathetic with concerns about
spreading illiberal practices, I am skeptical about the democratic nature of “illiberal
democracies.” I think it is more accurate to classify such regimes as instances of
“electoral authoritarianism” (Schedler, 2000: 6).
4. One story is the illegitimate exclusion of opposition candidates; another is the
illegitimate inclusion of incumbents. For instance, most independent observers believed
that Alberto Fujimori’s bid for a third presidential term was unconstitutional (Levitsky,
1999: 80; Youngers, 2000: 9, 30).
5. “Once long-dominant ruling parties are forced to accept the inevitability of
multipartism, they often try to ensure their control over the transition [by] encouraging
the creation of ‘friendly’ opposition parties, and infiltrating others with a view to
keeping them as weak and unstable as possible” (Sithole, 1997: 136).
6. On the strategic manipulation of electoral timetables by interim governments, see Shain
and Linz (1995: 76–83).
7. What do different techniques and degrees of electoral manipulation imply for the
authoritarian or democratic status of a political regime? Where should we draw the
boundary line between electoral authoritarianism and electoral democracy? By relying
on actor perceptions and expectations I circumvent the complex issue of regime
classification. Implicitly, though, I side with those who conceive democracy as a
continuous phenomenon. For a discussion of graded versus dichotomous approaches to
democracy, see Collier and Adcock (1999).
8. According to Tsebelis, “nested” games are either games in multiple arenas or games of
institutional choice. Although the latter may be conceived as a subtype of the former, as
the author himself suggests at a point (1990: 8), he tends to treat games of institutional
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change as a specific type of game in which “the choice of rules [is] opposed to the
choice of strategies inside existing rules” (1990: 248).
9. I owe the term “self-subversion” to Albert O. Hirschman (1995).
10. Note that the same self-reinforcing two-level dynamic may drive the inverse process of
democratic erosion. Incumbents in a democratic regime may start subverting the
electoral process to cement their hold on power. They may set in motion a regressive
spiral of decreasing electoral integrity and increasing electoral dominance of the ruling
party (see Lehoucq, this issue).
11. Analyzing regime change in Senegal, Mozaffar and Vengroff (forthcoming) propose
such a “whole-system” approach that takes into account the interaction between
elections at various levels (national, regional, and local, as well as executive and
legislative). On the interaction between subnational electoral dynamics and national
politics in Mexico, see Mizrahi (1995: 186–191) and Prud’homme (1999).
12. On contemporary “triple-nine” elections in the Arab world, in which “deliberately
absurd and intentionally ridiculous” official results declare incumbent parties victorious
with 99.9 percent of the popular vote, see Talbi (2000: 60).
13. “[I]nstitutional change by definition involves political innovation, and it is difficult (if
not impossible) to know its rules, much less to have a complete theory about them. . . .
Whether the laws of institutional design are unknowable or simply unknown, the issue
of institutional design is too important to be left out [although] the current state of
knowledge on institutions justifies the absence of theoretic rigor” (Tsebelis, 1990: 11).
14. For a summary of several coinciding conceptual proposals, see Huntington (1991: 114).
15. Quotes are from pp. 333, 144, and 133 in the manuscript version of 12 April 2000.
16. Elster contrasts such “type A” mechanisms with “type B” mechanisms that generate
contradictory effects in a simultaneous, rather than alternative fashion. Such
mechanisms “affect an independent variable in opposite directions, leaving the net
effect indeterminate” (Elster, 1998: 46). Electoral competitiveness, though, is not a
mechanism but a variable. As we outline below, the “causal mechanism” that turns it
into a contradictory variable reads strategic calculation.
17. Taking up Jon Elster’s distinction of causal mechanisms introduced above (see note 16),
when incumbents mix strategies in response to growing opposition pressures, electoral
competition transforms from a “type A mechanism” that produces alternatively either
reform or closure into a “type B mechanism” that involves simultaneously both
democratizing and authoritarian moves.
18. Complementary explanations emphasize, for instance, the two parties’ different social
constituencies (Eisenstadt, 1999) and their different degrees of risk aversion (Loaeza,
2000).
19. For the original formulation of this 2–2 scheme of transition actors in the context of
“classical” transitions, see O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986: 15–17, 24, 63, 71).
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Biographical Note
ANDREAS SCHEDLER is professor of political science at the Facultad Latinoamericana
de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Mexico City. His current research focuses on
Mexican democratization and electoral governance in comparative perspective.
ADDRESS: FLACSO, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Camino al Ajusco
377, Col. Héroes de Padierna, CP 14200 Mexico City, Mexico [e-mail:
andreas@flacso.edu.mx].
Acknowledgements. The author wishes to thank the Austrian Academy of Sciences for
supporting work on this article through the Austrian Program for Advanced Research and
Technology (APART). He also thanks William Case, Michael Coppedge, and James
Meadowcroft for valuable comments on earlier drafts.
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