Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas—
The greatest political paradox of our time is this: there are more elections than ever before, and yet the world is becoming less democratic.
Nowadays, elections are held almost everywhere. The vast majority of governments at least go through the motions of election campaigns, and are rhetorically committed to allowing citizens to cast ballots to choose the leaders who will govern them. However, in many places, that choice is little more than an illusion: the contest is rigged from the start.
Take Azerbaijan’s 2013 elections, when the highly repressive government of President Ilham Aliyev sought to boost its democratic credentials by launching an iPhone app that enabled citizens to keep up to speed with the vote tallies as ballot counting took place. Touting its commitment to transparency, the regime said that the new technology would allow anyone to watch the results in real time. But those who were keen to try out the new technology were surprised to find that they could see the results on the app the day before the polls opened.
In other words, anyone with the app could see who had won, who had lost, and by how much, before any ballots had even been cast. When journalists asked how the government had managed this act of political time travel, the authorities back pedalled, claiming that these were results from a previous election. However, this explanation did not stand up to closer scrutiny: the candidates listed were those contesting the current poll. Inadvertently, the regime had shone a digital light on the fraud they intended to carry out in the shadows.1
It is tempting to think that Azerbaijan’s egregious election rigging is an outlier. We want to believe that elections are truly transformative political institutions and that the case of Azerbaijan is the exception that proves the rule. However, in other authoritarian states in which leaders hold elections despite not being committed to democratic values, rigging is the norm rather than the exception. Since the end of the Cold War, the majority of elections held in such states have featured some form of electoral manipulation. Partly as a result, authoritarian leaders win elections in such contexts about nine times out of ten.2 Despite the impression of competition and choice, then, these elections deliver more continuity than change.3
If you think that these kinds of poor-quality polls are a small proportion of all of the elections held around the world, think again: on a scale of 1 to 10, in which 10 reflects a perfect election and 1 reflects the worst possible, the average election around the world scores just 6. In Asia, Africa, post-communist Europe and the Middle East the figure is closer to 5 (see appendix 7).4 Moreover, even if we move away from a specific focus on authoritarian leaders to consider the entire universe of all elections globally, only about 30 per cent of elections result in a transfer of power.5 In other words, incumbents win seven times out of ten—and this figure has not moved much since the early 1990s.
The picture changes little if, for a moment, we shift the focus from elections to the broader context in which they are held. As the Cold War ended, some scholars and politicians were seduced by the belief that we were nearing the ‘end of history’6—that all countries were on a slow but inevitable march towards liberal democracy. In hindsight, that prediction appears to have been naïvely optimistic. Instead, the last decade has witnessed a gradual decline in the quality of democracy in the world. Moreover, there is little evidence that this trend is easing. According to Freedom House, the American pro-democracy think tank, in 2017, seventy-one countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties, with only thirty-five registering gains.7
This represented the worst annual democratic recession in quite some time, but the pattern is consistent: in each of the last twelve years more countries have experienced democratic back- sliding rather than democratic consolidation. Significantly, this process is not concentrated in only one part of the world and does not appear to reflect specific regional dynamics. Instead, the erosion of democracy can be identified in all of the regions caught up in the ‘third wave’ of democratization—Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa—as well as areas that have yet to democratize, such as the Middle East. This is reflected in the fact that the five countries that suffered the biggest democratic decline in 2017 were, in order of magnitude, Turkey, the Central African Republic, Mali, Burundi and Bahrain—with Venezuela and Hungary not far behind.8
These developments are particularly striking when stacked up against the other major trend of recent times: the growing prevalence of multiparty elections. How is it possible that the flourishing of elections has coincided with a decade of democratic decline? The answer is that dictators, despots and counterfeit democrats have figured out how to rig elections and get away with it. An increasing number of authoritarian leaders are contesting multiparty elections, but are unwilling to put their fate in the hands of voters; in other words, more elections are being held, but more elections are also being rigged.
- Brian Klaas (2016), The Despot’s Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy (London: Hurst), p. 83; and Max Fisher (2013), ‘Oops: Azerbaijan released election results before voting had even started’, Washington Post, 9 October 2013; available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/10/09/oops- azerbaijan-released-election-results-before-voting-had-even-started (accessed 10 November 2017). ↩︎
- Authors’ own calculation based on data from NELDA and Polity IV. See appendix 1 for more details. ↩︎
- See, for example, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (2002), ‘The rise of competitive authoritarianism’, Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2, pp. 51–65. ↩︎
- Michael Coppedge, John Gerring,Staffan I. Lindberg, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Frida Andersson, Michael Bernhard, M. Steven Fish, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Farhad Miri, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Rachel Sigman, Jeffrey Staton and Brigitte Zimmerman (2016), ‘Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Codebook v6’; available online at https://www.v-dem. net/en/reference/version-6-mar-2016/ (accessed 17 December 2017). ↩︎
- Susan D. Hyde and Nikolay Marinov (2012), ‘Which elections can be lost?’, Political Analysis 20, no. 2, pp. 191–201. ↩︎
- For the origins of this phrase see Francis Fukuyama (1992), The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press), pp. 1–20. ↩︎
- Freedom House (2017), ‘Freedom in the world 2017’; available online at http://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017 (accessed 29 January 2018). ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
From How to Rig an Election: Revised and Expanded Edition by Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas. Published by Yale Univeristy Press in 2024. Reproduced with permission.
Nic Cheeseman is professor of democracy and international relations at the University of Birmingham and founding editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Politics. Brian Klaas is associate professor of global politics at University College London and the author of Fluke.
Abolitionism and Environmental Justice: Lessons from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century