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ABSTRACT
Authoritarian states often command tremendous resources, but their ability to fundamentally change regimes abroad remains in question. Proponents of an “authoritarian resurgence” have speculated that China and Russia are rolling back democracy around the world, much like fascist powers in the interwar period. By contrast, the introductory article of this special issue theorizes that current authoritarian powers are not catalyzing autocracy far afield. Rather, they are prudentially defending the surrounding political order. The present article applies this framework to make sense of cross-national trends in democracy and authoritarianism. The bulk of evidence supports the notion that authoritarian powers have regionally shored up existing regimes, rather than globally subverting democracy. Evidence from around the world indicates the number of electoral democracies has been growing, democracy has remained tenuous in lower-income countries, and democratic breakdowns have owed more to unfavourable local conditions than predacious external actors.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Kurt Weyland, André Bank, participants in the IDCAR network, and two anonymous reviewers for constructively assessing earlier versions of this work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. A touchstone is Larry Diamond’s 2008 Foreign Affairs article, “The Democratic Rollback,” which anchors the burgeoning scholarship on authoritarian cooperation and has over 300 Google Scholar citations to date. See also Gat, “The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers”; Cooley, “The League of Authoritarian Gentlemen”; Vanderhill, Promoting Authoritarianism Abroad.
2. See the essays collected in Diamond, Plattner, and Walker, Authoritarianism Goes Global.
3. See Foa and Mounk, “The Democratic Disconnect,” and their other work.
4. Bader, Gravingholt, and Kastner, “Would Autocracies Promote Autocracy?”; Levitsky and Way, “The Myth of Democratic Recession”; Merkel, “Are Dictatorships Returning?”; Hackenesch, “Not as Bad as It Seems”; Risse and Babayan, “Democracy Promotion.”
5. Weyland, “Autocratic Diffusion and Cooperation,” See also Babayan, “The Return of the Empire?”
6. Weyland, “Autocratic Diffusion and Cooperation.”
7. See Diamond, “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes,” 30–1.
8. Linz and Stepan, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes.
9. Gat, “The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers”; Kagan, “The Weight of Geopolitics”; Vanderhill, Promoting Authoritarianism Abroad; Diamond, Plattner, and Walker, Authoritarianism Goes Global. For an alternative take on why democracy may be flagging in the 2000s, see Whitehead, “Losing ‘The Force?’”
10. Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development.
11. Freedom House, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2016 (accessed 31 January 2016). See also, Diamond, “Facing up to the Democratic Recession,” 144.
12. Cf., Merkel, “Are Dictatorships Returning?,” 23.
13. Huntington, The Third Wave, 13–6.
14. See Diamond, “Facing up to the Democratic Recession,” Levitsky and Way, “The Myth of Democratic Recession.”
15. Diamond, “Facing up to the Democratic Recession,” 145.
16. The years of non-democracy are: Nepal (2002–2012), the Philippines (2007–2009), and Sri Lanka (2010–2015). The coding of Sri Lanka as an electoral democracy in 2015 is based on Freedom in the World 2016.
17. Przeworski and Limongi, “Modernization”; Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development.
18. These countries (and the first year they were coded as electoral democracies) are: Albania (1992), Bangladesh (1991), Benin (1991), Bhutan (2012), Bulgaria (1991), Cape Verde (1991), Chile (1990), Comoros (2004), East Timor (2002), Ghana (1996), Guyana (1992), Hungary (1990), Indonesia (1999), Kosovo (2014), Malawi (1994), Mexico (2000), Moldova (1995), Mongolia (1991), Namibia (1990), Panama (1990), Paraguay (1993), Poland (1990), Romania (1992), São Tomé and Príncipe (1991), Senegal (2000), Seychelles (1993), Sierra Leone (2000), South Africa (1994), Taiwan (1996), Tanzania (2011), Tonga (2011), Tunisia (2011), and Ukraine (1994).
19. Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy.”
20. Przeworski and Limongi, “Modernization,” 161.
21. The most prominent critics do not dispute that wealth stabilizes democracy. They contend, in addition, that wealth helps produce democracy. See, for example, Boix and Stokes, “Endogenous Democratization.”
22. Ross, The Oil Curse.
23. Even these outliers, which highlight the sizeable set of theory-conforming cases, would not be considered dispositive for Przeworski et al. The authors exclude microstates and they backdate non-democratic periods when no turnover occurs.
24. Diamond, “Facing up to the Democratic Recession,” 148; on Poland, cf. Foa and Mounk, “The Democratic Disconnect.”
25. Cooley, “League of Authoritarian Gentlemen”; Jackson, “The Role of External Factors in Advancing Non-Liberal Democratic Forms of Political Rule.”
26. Although Russia is formally considered a democracy through 2004, the entirety of Putin’s tenure has been the relevant period for analysis of possible authoritarianism promotion by the Kremlin. For the complexities of Russian influence in its near abroad, see Delcour and Wolczuk, “Spoiler or Facilitator of Democratization?”; Tolstrup, “Studying a Negative External Actor.”
27. Another potential authoritarian network would be the Cuban and Venezuelan-led Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). There too, however, there is no sign of an autocratizing influence. Eight of ALBA’s 11 member-states have maintained electoral democracy throughout 1989–2015: Bolivia, Dominica, Ecuador, Grenada, Nicaragua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Source: http://alba-tcp.org/en Accessed February 5, 2016.
28. Way, “The Limits of Autocracy Promotion,” 697–8.
29. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism. Extending the data back to 1989 does not alter the findings.
30. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism; cf., Brownlee, Democracy Prevention; Hassan, “Undermining the Transatlantic Democracy Agenda?”
31. The difference is not statistically significant at the 0.05 level.
32. Among this subset, breakdowns occurred in the Gambia, Zambia, Niger, Congo (Brazzaville), Central African Republic, Madagascar, Mozambique, Mali, and Libya, while democracy was established and maintained in Benin, Malawi, South Africa, and Tanzania.
33. Jackson, “The Role of External Factors in Advancing Non-Democratic Forms of Political Rule.”
34. Tolstrup, “Black Knights and Elections in Authoritarian Regimes.”
35. Hackenesch, “Not as Bad as It Seems.”
36. Bunce and Wolchik, Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries.
37. Way, “The Limits of Autocracy Promotion,” 701.
38. Ibid., 698.
39. Bratton and van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa.
40. Bader, Gravingholt, and Kastner, “Would Autocracies Promote Autocracy?”
41. Schmitter and Karl, “What Democracy Is … and Is Not.”
42. Bader, Gravingholt, and Kastner, “Would Autocracie Promote Autocracy?”
43. Bader, “Propping Up Dictators?”
44. The Economist, “Nicaragua’s Presidential Election.”
45. “A Coup That is Not Yet Irreversible: The Island’s New Leader Has Yet to Consolidate His Power,” The Economist, 26 March 2009, http://www.economist.com/node/13381488; Ploch and Cook, Madagascar’s Political Crisis, 1.
46. J. C., “A Coup in Mali”; J. C., “Mali’s Coup.”
47. Brownlee, Masoud, and Reynolds, The Arab Spring.
48. Freyburg and Richter, “Local Actors in the Driver’s Seat.”
49. See also Tansey, “The Problem with Autocracy Promotion”; Börzel, “The Noble West and the Dirty Rest?”
50. See Obydenkova and Lipman, “Understanding the Foreign Policy of Autocratic Actors”; Von Soest, “Democracy Prevention.”
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Jason Brownlee
Jason Brownlee is a professor of Government and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he researches and teaches about authoritarianism and foreign military intervention. His major publications include two books with Cambridge University Press, the co-authored Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform (Oxford University Press), and articles in the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, and the Journal of Democracy.