Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Elections, Electoral Fraud and Political Conflicts in Authoritarian Regimes

Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

This award satisfies Division B, Title V, Sec. 543 of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013 (P.L. 113-6, enacted on March 26, 2013). The project explores the determinants of electoral manipulation and post-electoral political conflict in dictatorships, focusing on countries in Central Asia, an area of the world that has been critical for US national security interests. Most modern autocracies hold elections even though political competition is severely limited. While recent research on authoritarian politics begins to illuminate various functions of authoritarian elections, it is unclear how dictators decide the degree of electoral fraud to perpetrate and circumstances producing post-electoral protests and leadership change. The intellectual merit of the project is associated with its development of theoretical and analytical approaches to authoritarian elections and their aftermaths. Modeling both benefits and costs of holding relatively free and fair elections in dictatorships, the project constructs a theory of authoritarian elections and derives testable hypotheses to explain variation in electoral fraud and political conflict in authoritarian regimes. To rigorously test the theoretical propositions, the project uses a mixed methods approach, including statistical investigations of cross-national datasets and analyses of interviews and original quantitative data obtained in the course of fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. This study will contribute to studies of authoritarian politics by focusing on the importance of a dilemma that dictators face at elections: The more fair and free elections are, the more credible election results become to convey regime strength. More fair and free elections, however, make it more difficult for dictators to achieve a landslide victory, which may result in revealing the weakness of dictators and hence contribute to post-electoral conflict, such as coups and popular uprisings. Previous studies have not taken into account this tradeoff between the certainty of winning big and the credibility of election results, despite the fact that fraud and conflict are thought to be heavily affected by how strategically dictators deal with this electoral dilemma. Shedding light on the balance of power between the dictator and elites in authoritarian rule, this project explores the way in which dictators cope with this dilemma and consequently when dictators can use authoritarian elections to achieve regime stability. The theory establishes a paradoxical hypothesis that stronger dictators rely less on election fraud. The theory also predicts that when dictators fail to match the level of election fraud with their de facto power balance with elites, elections trigger political turnover and popular protests. The broader impacts are especially connected to the project's contributions to policy-makers, democratization, and development. Given the increasing phenomenon of electoral autocracies and prevailing international norms of election monitoring practices, policymakers might be tempted to conclude that forcing dictators to introduce free and fair elections via sanctions is an effective strategy to promote democratization. The project, however, suggests that realities might be more nuanced. If international policymakers are ignorant of the balance of power in dictatorship, imposed competitive elections might either become a source of conflict after elections or legitimate strong, dictatorial leaders through such "liberalized" elections. The theoretical and empirical contributions of the project will improve our understanding of authoritarian politics, thereby helping the United States as well as international organizations develop more effective strategies to democratize authoritarian countries without suffering serious violent conflict. More specifically, making sense of the electoral dilemma and the strategic nature of authoritarian leaders, we would be able to know the conditions under which international assistance and sanctions will be more likely to lead to democratic, peaceful society in developing countries. Knowing such conditions would be obviously important to the US, which national security and economic interests in the world are both significantly influenced by the pervasiveness of democracy and political stability in other countries.