Democratic Pieces: Hybrid Regimes, Electoral Authoritarianism, and Disaggregated Democracy

Over the past four decades, the majority of autocracies have held multi-party elections. This dissertation investigates the influence of these elections on policy and democratic development. I break up the analysis into four substantive chapters. First, I introduce a new dataset that disaggregates democracy into the two dimensions of participation and contestation to map the evolution of hybrid regimes from 1815--2004. I find that nearly all hybrid regimes prior to 1940 featured high contestation and low participation, but the opposite is true for modern regimes. I also show that experience with autocratic elections is a positive predictor of democratization and democratic stability. In the second chapter, I theorize that autocratic elections are used to gather information on citizen preferences and then adjust policy. I conduct the first cross-country empirical study of policy-setting based on autocratic election outcomes, finding that as a ruling party's vote support wanes, it increases its education and social welfare spending and decreases its military spending. In the third chapter, I introduce the first formal model of hybrid regime transitions. Class conflict over redistribution and the pressure of popular revolt frames an autocrat's choice between closed authoritarianism, electoral authoritarianism, and democracy. Among the empirical implications is that we should find electoral autocracies at middle values of economic inequality and regime strength. Finally, I argue that regime strength plays a critical mediating role between country-level variables and democratic transitions. Although this framework is tested on economic development, it also helps explain the patterns found for autocratic electoral history and democratic development.