Elections in Authoritarian Regimes: The Post-Soviet Cases

Petra Stykow, Elections in Authoritarian Regimes: The Post-Soviet Cases, pp. 237-271. In order to understand functions and meaning of elections in non-democratic regimes, about 100 national elections that took place in eleven post-Soviet states between 19922012 are examined. The comparative analysis reveals systematic differences corresponding to the openness of the political regime, the type of the election, the timing of the election and the character of the party system. The variance of post-Soviet elections can be subsumed into three patterns, i.e. closed-authoritarian, electoral-authoritarian and electoral-democratic. I conclude by proposing to use the competitiveness of presidential elections as a relevant indicator for the distinction between democratic and authoritarian regimes. Authoritarian subtypes, however, should be constructed according to the degree of the competitiveness of parliamentary elections.