At the turn of the twenty-first century, we faced a new and somewhat oxymoronic phenomenon: authoritarian elections. While the presence or absence of elections was once considered the dividing line between dictatorships and non-dictatorships, the past three decades have seen the combination of authoritarianism with elections. In the past, one of the first things authoritarian governments did upon coming to power was cancel elections and crack down on political activity, particularly among the opposition. Today, by contrast, most authoritarian regimes hold national-level parliamentary elections and even allow multiparty competition.
Todayâs authoritarian elections present opposition parties with a strategic dilemma (Schedler 2002a; Posusney 2005; Rakner and van de Walle 2009). Do opposition parties participate in elections despite concerns that the electoral process will be unfair? Or do they boycott the election in order to express their belief that the process lacks legitimacy, while forfeiting any possibility of parliamentary influence? In recent years, political parties and groups have regularly and consciously chosen the latter, even as many of these boycotting parties led the struggle for democratic reforms, such as the legalization of political parties and the right to participate in elections. The opposition strategy of boycotting an election raises an important question regarding political behavior under authoritarianism: why do political parties boycott elections? How can we understand when and why opposition groups adopt the strategies they do?
The choice to boycott is in many ways to be expected given that most election boycotts occur under authoritarian regimes. The prospect of unfair elections, combined with the high probability of defeat, can make participation a questionable strategy for any opposition party that challenges the regime. This reality raises a further question: if meaningless elections and fear of losing at the polls are the main factors driving decisions to boycott, why do opposition parties sometimes choose to participate in authoritarian elections at all?
In this book, I take up these questions and explore the electoral strategies of opposition parties in the electoral authoritarian regimes of the Arab world. While other scholars have investigated critical questions surrounding why authoritarian rulers hold elections and whether such elections lead to further political liberalization, there has been comparatively little work on opposition strategies adopted during authoritarian elections.1 This study takes opposition parties as its focus in order to illuminate the complex motivations that influence their decisions to participate or boycott, and whether to protest following contentious elections. I examine how perceptions of regime strength and stability influence electoral strategies and how these, in turn, affect the way elections unfold. In so doing, I provide a richer and more nuanced understanding of opposition strategy in authoritarian elections.
1.1 Electoral Authoritarianism in the Arab World
From 1974 to the early 1990s, during what Samuel Huntington (1991) has called the third wave of democratization, approximately 100 countries began to democratize. Authoritarian nations from Argentina to South Korea set up democratic institutions, restored or began holding elections, and in many cases liberalized restrictions on the media as well as on civil and political rights. The vast majority of the countries that began democratizing during the third wave are today neither democracies nor democratizing (Diamond 2002; Levitsky and Way 2002). In the end, slightly less than 20 percent of these countries successfully transitioned to democracies (Carothers 2002, p. 9). Some countriesâ democratization efforts stalled while others moved backward, undoing the reforms of the previous years. This reversion to authoritarian practices continues even today.2
The existence of regimes that began but never completed the process of political liberalization led scholars to generate a number of different regime classifications that aim to deepen our understanding of the dynamics of authoritarianism and democratization.3 Andreas Schedler (2002a, 2006) coined the term âelectoral authoritarianismâ to classify regimes that hold multiparty elections for the legislature and/or the executive and have open political space, universal suffrage, and multiparty elections. However, despite their ostensible embrace of democratic fundamentals, these regimes lack the checks and balances, bureaucratic integrity, and judicial impartiality we associate with fully democratic states. Under these regimes, ruling elites engage in undemocratic practices (such as election fraud) and regularly restrict citizensâ political freedoms and civil rights.
Electoral authoritarianism aptly characterizes the regimes across the Arab world that combine democratic institutions, specifically elections and national parliaments, with otherwise authoritarian governments.4 The regionâs most recent foray into democratic politics began at the tail end of the third wave of democratization. For many regimes, economic crises of the late 1970s and 1980s prompted them to begin political liberalization. Declines in oil prices and reductions in international assistance, when combined with stringent requirements imposed by structural adjustment programs, brought economic hardship on much of the populace. To alleviate growing popular discontent, incumbent regimes, both monarchies and presidents, initiated a controlled process of political liberalization. For these regimes, limited political openings and elections were viewed as a way to relegitimize the status quo rather than foster real political change (Baaklini et al. 1999; Brumberg 2002; Brown and Shahin 2010).
After an initial surge in political liberalization swept across the Arab world, few countries continued on a straight path to liberal democracy. Instead, most oscillated between periods of greater freedom and greater repression. Of the six Arab countriesâAlgeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Tunisiaâthat began democratizing during the third wave, none could be considered democracies by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Despite these stalled or failed transitions, electionsâor more correctly authoritarian electionsâhave become the norm and are now a central feature of Arab politics today. Nathan Brown (2012) has argued that elections persist because all involved have come to accept that electoral politics are here to stay: âBoth government and opposition in the Arab world show little sign of asking many questions about whether and why to hold elections, but instead think hard about how to use themâ (p. 16). With both authoritarian regimes and opposition groups embracing electoralâif not exactly democraticâpolitics, authoritarian elections constitute the âcentral arena of struggleâ between the regime and opposition groups (Schedler 2006, p. 1; Levitsky and Way 2002).
The spread of electoral authoritarian regimes across the Arab world opened up new options for political opposition that were not previously possible. One such strategy is the boycott. At their most basic level boycotts are, as Laidler argued (1913), âan organized effort to withdraw and induce others to withdraw from social or business relations with anotherâ (p. 27). In an electoral boycott, a political organization refuses to participate in a particular election and refrains from running candidates. These boycotts often, though not always, are accompanied by appeals to voters to stay home on election day (Beaulieu 2014, p. 36).
Approximately 14 percent of elections worldwide, including those in both democratic and authoritarian nations, have been boycotted by opposition groups (Beaulieu 2014; Hyde and Marinov 2012). Figure 1.1 shows the number of election boycotts observed each year between 1945 and 2010. The increase in boycotted elections beginning in the mid-1970s tracks with the third wave of democratization and the spread of elections across Africa, Asia, and the Middle Ea...