Improving Election Quality: An Effective Legitimisation Strategy for Authoritarian Regimes?

Authoritarian regimes try to gain legitimacy through elections while limiting electoral integrity (Levitsky, Way 2010; Schedler 2006; Gandhi 2008). Incumbents have a whole “menu of manipulation” at hand, including lacking electoral transparency, opposition repression and limiting the power of elected officials (Schedler 2002). Even the Global Commission on Electoral integrity under the leadership of Kofi Annan acknowledged that “many authoritarian governments (…) seek to wrap themselves in the veneer of democratic legitimacy.” (Global Commission on Elections 2012: 12). To this end, authoritarian rulers might seek to improve the quality of elections with the support of international electoral assistance, but still limit electoral competition. Under which conditions and to what extent might this legitimisation strategy be effective? In order to shed light on this question, this paper applies a mixed-method strategy. First, the empirical relevance of this legitimization strategy is shown using an original dataset with all elections and electoral assistance (2007-2012). Almost half of all elections in authoritarian regimes received UN electoral assistance during this time period. Second, based on Weber’s emphasis (1921) on citizen’s beliefs in the legitimacy of their rulers, this paper discusses several approaches to operationalize regime legitimacy, including voter turn-out, opposition boycott, protest, expert assessments and changes in legitimisation strategies. Third, using process-tracing techniques, changes in regime legitimacy will be assessed in two case studies with field research (Sudan 2010 and Libya 2012). The aim is to develop a plausible causal chain linking improvements in election quality to the legitimacy of non-democratic regimes. In a nutshell, this paper contributes to this workshop’s aims in two ways. First, an empirical assessment of a relevant legitimisation strategy involving institutional reform will be provided. Second, an innovative approach will be developed for operationalizing regime legitimacy in case studies on non-democratic regimes.