This Pivot explores the mechanism of election manipulation in ostensibly democratic but essentially authoritarian systems called the hybrid regime, using the 2018 parliamentary elections in Bangladesh as an example. The 2018 election has delivered an unprecedented victory to the incumbent Bangladesh Awami League. Elections pose serious dilemmas for the leaders of hybrid regimes. While contested elections bolster their claims of democracy and augment their legitimacy, they can also threaten the status quo. Faced with the challenge, the incumbents tend to hold stage-managed elections. This book offers incisive examination of Bangladesh’s political environment, rigorous scrutiny of the roles of state institutions including the law enforcing agencies, and meticulous analysis of election results. It also fills in a gap in the extant hybrid regime literature which seldom explores the strategies of engineered elections.

Elections under non-democratic regimes have been studied so far mostly from an elite point of view, focusing on how elections support a regime's stability and provide opportunities for its opposition. Consequently, the role of ordinary voters in elections in non-democratic countries has thus far been neglected on the grounds that these elections are meaningless to ordinary voters due to the absence of a real choice, as well as voters' general lack of efficacy. Despite this claim, this dissertation argues that elections and voters in "hybrid" regimes need to be studied independently, as different from the other non-democratic political systems. The 25-year period of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, as discussed in this research, presents ample and important experience to make such a case. Thus, based on the analysis of the existing studies and literature, this dissertation begins by asking, "Why do voters keep voting in 'hybrid' regimes when they know the regime is non-democratic and they possess high levels of mistrust in the elections?" Are there any other reasons for them to vote beyond compulsions of state-run mobilization, coercion or manipulation? How do elections in the "hybrid" regimes differ from elections in strictly authoritarian ones? Based on analysis of election results and voter-level data in the case of Kyrgyzstan, this dissertation argues that elections in "hybrid" regimes do have important implications and meanings both for the opposition and for ordinary voters. Kyrgyzstan's example confirms Levitsky & Way's (2010) assertion that elections in such regimes polarize a ruling elite and help the opposition. But this dissertation goes on to discern how elections also affect voters. In particular, the findings of this research demonstrate that individual voter turnout is positively influenced by such objective sociodemographic factors as age, marital status, ethnicity, religion, education, and income as well as by attitudes towards a country's direction, state of democracy, electoral efficacy, political affiliation, and interest in politics. On the subjective level, most Kyrgyzstanis consider the "right to choose" to be the most important reason for voting, but they likewise refer to voting as an important act of "civic duty" and "contribution for the better future of the country." The voters of Kyrgyzstan enjoy having choice and opportunities for contribution to the country's development provided by the elections, even under the uncertain conditions of a "hybrid" regime. The findings of this dissertation, generalized to other Central Asian states, offer a new perspective in understanding of voters' behavior in the post-Soviet region and suggest important implications for the study of prospects of democratization in the other "hybrid" regimes in the Central Asian region and beyond. Regular elections provide opportunities not only for the government and its opposition, but also for ordinary voters who view elections not only as a fulfillment of their civic duty, but also as a meaningful contribution to the country's overall well-being, even though they know they cannot trust their government. In addition, elections play an important role in the political socialization and learning process, which has longer-term implications for the regime: should the government ever arrive at a breaking point, voters will be there to support the change and legitimize a new political order, as happened in the Soviet Union during Gorbachev's perestroika and in Kyrgyzstan since independence and onward.

This book fills research gaps in the field of Latin American electoral politics, explaining the causes and consequences of electoral manipulation in the hybrid regimes of Latin America between the 1980s and 2020s. This research falls within the field of comparative democratization with the ambition of deepening knowledge on the topic of electoral manipulation in hybrid regimes. In the last decade there has been a clear shift towards hybrid regimes in a considerable number of states (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Honduras). The common occurrence of such regimes, often referred to by the collective term "hybrid" or "mixed", has led to a rapid expansion of empirical research. However, the current state of research in this field is unsatisfactory. Although existing scholarship tends to agree that the common feature of these regimes is the incumbents' tendency to interfere in political competition, little is known about how incumbents select between different forms of electoral manipulation and how such different forms go on to affect electoral results.

Based on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized.

This comprehensive study of Russian electoral politics shows the vulnerability of Putin's regime as it navigates the risks of voter manipulation.

Following a normative approach that suggests international norms and standards for elections apply universally, regardless of regime type or cultural context, this book examines the challenges to electoral integrity, the actors involved, and the consequences of electoral malpractice and poor electoral integrity that vary by regime type. It bridges the literature on electoral integrity with that of political regime types. Looking specifically at questions of innovation and learning, corruption and organized crime, political efficacy and turnout, the threat of electoral violence and protest, and finally, the possibility of regime change, it seeks to expand the scholarly understanding of electoral integrity and diverse regimes by exploring the diversity of challenges to electoral integrity, the diversity of actors that are involved and the diversity of consequences that can result. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of electoral studies, and more broadly of relevance to comparative politics, international development, political behaviour and democracy, democratization, and autocracy.

Since the end of the Cold War, more and more countries feature political regimes that are neither liberal democracies nor closed authoritarian systems. Most research on these hybrid regimes focuses on how elites manipulate elections to stay in office, but in places as diverse as Bolivia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Thailand, Ukraine and Venezuela, protest in the streets has been at least as important as elections in bringing about political change. The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes builds on previously unpublished data and extensive fieldwork in Russia to show how one high-profile hybrid regime manages political competition in the workplace and in the streets. More generally, the book develops a theory of how the nature of organizations in society, state strategies for mobilizing supporters, and elite competition shape political protest in hybrid regimes.