Abstract
Why are some electoral authoritarian regimes immune to democratization for decades while others not? This article explores the impact of executive selection systems on democratic transitions from electoral authoritarianism. We argue that under electoral authoritarian regimes, Parliament-based systems permit dictators to more effectively deter democratization compared to Presidential systems. This is because Parliament-based systems indirectly allow electoral manipulation to achieve a victory at the ballot box, such as through gerrymandering and malapportionment. Parliament-based systems also make it difficult for opposition parties to coordinate and incentivize autocrats and ruling elites to engage in power-sharing and thus institutionalize ruling parties. We test our hypothesis as well as the underlying mechanisms employing a dataset of 93 electoral authoritarian countries between 1946 and 2012. Cross-national statistical analyses with instrumental variables estimation provide supporting evidence for our theory.
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28 April 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-022-09351-2
Notes
Ninety-five percent of electoral autocracy country-years were followed by another year of electoral autocracy, 2.7% were followed by transition to democracy, and only 1.3% were followed by transition to closed autocracy (i.e., regimes that allow only a single party/presidential candidate to participate in elections or those without elections).
In some parliamentary systems, prime ministers are called with various names, including President in South Africa, Chancellor in Germany, and Taoiseach in Ireland. Further, in some cases, the body electing the chief executive is separate from the legislature. For example, the constitutions of Taiwan in 1946, Indonesia in 1945, and Myanmar in 2008 created separate bodies of legislators and appointed members. Under these constitutions, indirectly elected chief executives are called presidents, not prime ministers. Following Roberts (2015), a system with an electoral college that functions solely to elect a president is classified as Presidential.
Our emphasis here is credible power-sharing, meaning regime elites expect long-lasting and stable power-sharing with the autocrat. This notion differs from a presidential cabinet coalition (e.g., Neto 2006).
Templeman (2012) calls a similar phenomenon, encompassing both autocracies and democracies, as a Cinderella effect.
Presidential systems usually have a constitutionally fixed election schedule, but autocrats in these systems often change the election timing at their own will. Examples include the “snap” presidential elections in Zambia in 1991 and the Philippines in 1986.
Exceptions are those presidential elections that use an electoral college as in the USA and Argentina until the 1994 presidential election.
Although some important cases strongly suggest the validity of this mechanism, such as the ouster of the Philippines’s Marcos in 1986, it should be noted that this is a hypothesized mechanism. The opposition coordination mechanism is not cross-nationally tested due to the absence of cross-national data measuring the presence of charismatic opposition leaders. In this respect, future research may be needed to further illuminate the mechanism.
Malapportionment can be an available tactic in the presidential systems that use the electoral college to elect the chief executive, as in the case of the USA. However, Presidential systems adopting the electoral college are rare. Shugart and Carey (1992, p.211) list only two such systems, namely, the USA (1824–1988) and Argentina (1983, 1989), as of the time of their writing.
In our sample of countries, Kyrgyzstan (2007–present), Kazakhstan (2007–present), Peru (2000–2006), and Russia (2005–2011) use PR systems. Our main results remain robust even if we exclude these countries from our sample.
In reality, all the three mechanisms may not always exist. Relatedly, our empirical analysis does not test how these mechanisms are intertwined and when one or two mechanism(s) becomes dominant over the other(s). However, a couple of observable implications (the results of our statistical analyses) suggest that on average, these tend to be at play.
See also Yan (2019) that investigates the impact of constitutional structures on the formation of hegemonic personalist regimes.
Templeman (2012) argues similarly about the effect of executive selection systems on the longevity of one-party dominant regimes, but his scope covers both democracies and autocracies.
In some closed authoritarian regimes, parties other than the ruling party may participate and win seats in elections, as in China and Vietnam. However, their presence does not satisfy conditions necessary to classify them as electoral authoritarian because these parties are regime-supported and electoral competition is not substantially meaningful.
We do not use Cheibub et al. (2009), a widely used dichotomous measure of democracy and dictatorship, because once democratization occurred through an election, the dataset codes a country as democratic even during the period that preceded the change in power as long as it had held competitive elections.
Beck et al. (2001) and Brownlee (2009) cover the period from 1975 to 2006. Other conventional indicators such as Polity IV and the Freedom House Index measure political contestation and thus poorly match the institutional characteristics of electoral authoritarian regimes (Schedler 2002; Brownlee 2009: 523–524). Furthermore, they do not necessarily provide clear-cut distinctions between the three regimes; thus, we do not use them.
Specifically, if the DPI codes its national elections such that (1) multiple parties exist, but only one party wins seats; (2) multiple parties win seats, but the largest party receives more than 75% of them; or (3) the largest party obtains fewer than 75% of seats, then the country is coded as an electoral authoritarian regime.
On the DPI coding, this corresponds to either of these four scenarios: (1) there is no legislature; (2) there is an unelected executive/legislature; (3) only one candidate is allowed, even though there is an elected executive/legislature; or (4) there is only one political party although multiple candidates run for an election.
Using Roberts’s data (2015), we extend our time scope to 2012. As an exception, Madagascar (1983–1993) is excluded from the sample of electoral authoritarian regimes even though the country-years satisfy with the conditions of DPI, because all parties had to operate within the National Front of Madagascar Revolution.
In other words, we do not consider whether legislative elections involve multi-party competition under presidential systems when defining electoral authoritarian regimes.
The conditions here are (1) if a two-thirds vote is needed to impeach the chief executive, or (2) the legislature must dissolve itself while forcing the chief executive out (Beck et al. 2001: 4). For further robustness checks, we recoded the executive selection system variable by using several V-Dem measures on veto and other powers of the chief executive, finding that results were substantively identical.
The DPI codes countries that have unelected leaders (such as monarchs) as “presidential” but these are not included in our analysis because we exclude monarchy dictatorships and autocracies without multi-party competition.
We do not use V-Dem’s variable coding for whether a country holds direct executive elections (v2ex_elechos; v2ex_elechog) as an alternative because the variable primarily focuses on the de facto leadership selection and thus examines whether the current leader is selected via direct elections or not. For instance, in this measure, if the former president resigned for a particular reason and the successive president is not elected through a popular election, the country is not seen as a Presidential system until the next election is held. In contrast, our variable of executive selection systems focuses on de jure rule of leadership selection, measuring the legal procedures of selecting political leaders on constitutions.
Controlling for leaders’ tenure length is important in the context of electoral autocracies because autocrats may become better at manipulating elections to stay in power by learning from the past experience. Without controlling for tenure length does not change the main results (Appendix B Table B6). Regarding data sources for those variables, see Appendix A and E.
The overall results do not change when we replace the half decade dummies with dummies specifying the period of the third wave during the Cold War (1974–1991) and the post-Cold War (1992–).
As using only one of these two variables weakens the predictive power of the instrumental variable, we introduce both variables simultaneously to model the IV estimators.
The correlation coefficient between foreign aid in the target country with the British colonial origin and the proportion of British colonies in the neighborhood is extremely small, 0.0021.
Using the Driscoll-Kraay standard errors needs a long time-series dimension. Our data covers 55 years in models with controls. In other words, we have a long enough time to use the estimation.
Regarding the first-stage models, see Appendix F, Table F-1.
An often-used way to check the exclusion restriction is to regress the instruments (Z) is the variable of interest (X) on the dependent variable (Y) to determine if Z is not correlated with Y in a statistically significant way. As Sovey and Green (2011: 190) warn, however, this regression does not provide reliable information about whether Z is excludable, because when X is suspected to be endogenous with Y, then Z’s effects on Y are likely to be biased.
Our robustness tests use model 3 in Table 1 as the baseline.
For details on model specification, see Table B-2.
We also examined whether dictators are less likely to manipulate elections under single-member-district (SMD) systems than non-SMD ones but did not find a statistically significant effect.
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Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association (2014), Japanese Political Science Association, and Japan Association for Comparative Politics (2016). The authors appreciate valuable feedback from the participants of these conferences. We are also grateful that Stefano Bartolini, Charles Crabtree, Shingo Hamanaka, Yusaku Horiuchi, Kosuke Imai, Austin Mitchell, Kota Mori, Yoshikuni Ono, Manabu Sengoku, and Yuki Shiraito provided helpful comments in the process of revising this paper. Lastly, the two anonymous reviewers made constructive and helpful feedback, which we really appreciate.
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Higashijima, M., Kasuya, Y. The Perils of Parliamentarism: Executive Selection Systems and Democratic Transitions from Electoral Authoritarianism. St Comp Int Dev 57, 198–220 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-022-09350-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-022-09350-3