Overlooked forms of non-democracy? Insights from hybrid regimes

Abstract

In the last two decades, significant advances have characterised the study of hybrid political regimes. Yet, when distinguishing democratic from non-democratic varieties, this field has apparently been affected by the tendency to largely focus on the role of incumbents and the state. Drawing on the Colombian, El Salvadorean and Guatemalan examples, I argue that, because of this bias, a category of countries sharing distinctively non-democratic features has been incorrectly considered democratic, thus affecting the recognition of forms of democracy and non-democracy. In these countries, actors other than the state and the government have blatantly violated the fairness of elections through well-known practices generally considered problems of low democratic quality, such as vote-buying, political violence, and illegal campaign financing. I maintain that, when associated with certain conditions, such problems are in fact symptoms of a non-democratic regime. To describe these unrecognised non-democracies, I propose the concept of non-state electoral autocracy.