Entrenchment and Erosion, One Reform at a Time: Leveraging Constitutional and Electoral Legislation across Regime Types

Though regime collapse and military coups played an important role in the ongoing surge of authoritarianism, autocratization is also creeping, incremental and – unlike regime breakdowns – more difficult to quantify. This will paper will investigate incremental regime transformations through constitutional and electoral reforms in hybrid and authoritarian regimes. There is consensus in existing research that constitutional and electoral reforms are an important tool in opening or restricting democratic systems by changing the parameters of electoral competition. However, the study of electoral or constitutional reforms and their impacts is also narrowly focused on major reforms in Western European polities even though they take place in any regime, regardless of its type. Elections take place across non-democratic regimes as well and autocratic incumbents strive to ensure apparent electoral success for various reasons ranging from legitimacy to criminalizing the opposition. The analysis is driven by two main questions: What kinds of constitutional and electoral reforms take place in hybrid and authoritarian regimes? And how do they differ from reforms initiated by incumbents in democracies? By revisiting the classic literature on electoral and constitutional reforms in democracies, the goal of this paper is to build a conceptual framework to systematically classify constitutional and electoral reforms and compare them across regime types.