Electoral Resistance Against Autocratization: Insights from Southeast Europe

Southeast Europe stands as a one of the world’s regions most significantly impacted by autocratization in the forms of democratic decline and breakdown. Nevertheless, it has also emerged as a vanguard in resisting the autocratization tide, culminating in electoral transfers of power and turnovers of autocratic or would-be authoritarian incumbents. This paper examines Southeast European countries that have recently undergone or are currently experiencing autocratization episodes. The definition of autocratization episodes (as time spans with a durable and significant downturn of electoral democracy) adopts the Episodes of Regime Transformation framework and adjusts it to meet case-related validity criteria related to the electoral cycle. The paper presents evidence from a new qualitative dataset on elections in: Bosnia and Herzegovina (2004-7), Bulgaria (2001-2024), Croatia (2013-2017), Greece (2019-2024), Moldova (2001-2024), Montenegro (2008-2024), North Macedonia (2000-1, 2005-2012), Romania (2021-2024), Serbia (2010-2024), Slovenia (2011-21), and Turkey (2005-2024). The article adopts a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), taking national elections (˜90) during and slightly after autocratization episodes as unit of analysis. The aim of this study is to investigate the crucial (combinations of) conditions which can explain the electoral defeat of an autocratizing incumbent. As explanatory conditions, we analyze the presence of an alliance among opposition parties, their electoral record, the co-occurrence of a social mobilization, factors related to the electoral system and finally to the cohesiveness of the incumbent. The analysis is corroborated with robustness tests and diagnostics related to country-specific conditions, and short narratives from representative cases. This paper makes contributions to several strands of the literature: it represents a comprehensive analysis of Southeast Europe, by enriching the literature on autocratization and resistance against it, with a focus on electoral resistance and incumbent electoral loss.