Have your Cake and Eat it too: Manipulated Elections as Legitimation Strategy in Non-democratic Regimes

Authoritarian rulers often use elections to gain legitimacy, but manipulate them to limit the risk of electoral defeat. Surprisingly, in some cases, such strategies might work as even manipulated elections can be popularly perceived as legitimate. For example, Russian citizens tend to praise the 2007 Duma elections even though the process was deeply flawed (Rose, Mishler 2009). Likewise, according to the latest data of the World Value Survey, the majority of citizens in such diverse non-democratic regimes as Rwanda, Kazakhstan and Singapore report their elections to be of high integrity despite reports of substantial electoral manipulation. How can autocrats use manipulated elections to boost popular regime legitimacy? Why do citizens express confidence in non-democratic elections? In this paper we examine election-level, contextual and individual level explanations for this puzzle. Blunt electoral manipulation might reduce electoral credibility more than more skillful manipulation strategies (Schedler 2013). Likewise, contextual factors might lower the legitimacy costs of electoral manipulation, such as the extent of media freedom and economic performance. Moreover, individual factors might play a role too, such as citizens’ support for the incumbent, understandings of democracy, and level of political knowledge. Hence, we expect that public confidence in non-democratic elections does not correspond directly to expert-based indictors of election quality – such as V-Dem data – but that other factors mediate this relationship. This paper empirically investigates these hypotheses using recent WVS and Afrobarometer survey data on electoral credibility and regime legitimacy for 40 non-democracies. Preliminary findings suggest that in regimes with severe media restrictions, citizens perceive elections as credible even when they are flawed, showing that under these conditions, authoritarian incumbents can have their cake and eat it too.