Democratization by Elections?
postcommunist ambiguities
Valerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik
Valerie J. Bunce is the Aaron Binenkorb Professor of International
Studies and professor of government at Cornell University. Sharon L.
Wolchik is professor of political science and international affairs at
George Washington University. Their article “Debating the Color Revolutions: Getting Real About ‘Real Causes’” appeared in the January
2009 issue of the Journal of Democracy.
In the Balkans and the countries of the old Eastern Bloc, the years from
1996 to 2009 saw no fewer than fourteen major attempts to oust semiauthoritarian regimes by means of elections. Eight of these attempts actually toppled authoritarian leaders, bringing to power more-democratic
political forces in Romania (1996), Bulgaria (1997), Slovakia (1998),
Croatia (2000), Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and
Kyrgyzstan (2005). In six instances—Armenia (2003 and 2008), Azerbaijan (2003 and 2005), and Belarus (2001 and 2006)—the opposition
mounted a strong electoral challenge to dictatorial rule, but failed to secure victory.1 In order to tease out the relationship between elections and
democratic development, we compare various political and economic
aspects of the successful and unsuccessful cases.
Not only did these elections have contrasting outcomes, but the countries also experienced diverging patterns of democratic change afterward. Moreover, each case in our study is in the same region—a region
whose countries share a communist past and began around the same
time to confront the possibility of radical and simultaneous transitions
to totally new political and economic regimes. There are a number of
other, less obvious similarities that cross both sets of cases and help
to eliminate some plausible explanations for success and failure. For
example, with the exception of Bulgaria and Romania, all these states
are new, having arisen from the dissolution of the Soviet, Czechoslovak,
and Yugoslav states between 1991 and 1992. All else being equal, new
states are less likely than more established ones to support democratic
Journal of Democracy Volume 20, Number 3 July 2009
© 2009 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press
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development, if only because fledgling governments are less able to extract resources, monopolize coercion, or set and defend boundaries.
Moreover, both the failed and the successful cases of electoral turnover show as common features an array of structural and institutional
factors—ranging from level of economic development and performance
to regime type and degree of corruption—which therefore have limited
explanatory power. Perhaps most surprising is the range of regime types
that served as sites for the defeat of dictators. Thus, although dictators
may be easier to dislodge in more-democratic settings (though even here
the reelection of authoritarian leaders has been the norm), autocrats can
still suffer defeat in relatively authoritarian contexts. It appears, then,
that the regime parameters for electoral defeat of dictators in the postcommunist region are fairly elastic.
Our comparison also includes two more “controls” that may be helpful in identifying the sources of electoral breakthroughs. First, in ten of
our fourteen electoral confrontations between authoritarians and the opposition, public protests played a decisive role. The complication, however, is that such protests took place in all the failed cases, but only half
the successful ones. Protests arose primarily because of the widespread
perception that authoritarian incumbents or their anointed successors
had tried to steal the election—though in the Bulgarian case (1996–97),
large-scale demonstrations played a different role by bringing down the
communist-led government and forcing new elections that brought the
liberal opposition to power.
Second, every electoral episode discussed here featured a united opposition (though less so in the 2008 Armenian presidential election).
Indeed, this was a primary consideration when selecting our “negative”
cases, because a united opposition in an election distinguishes “serious
challenges” to authoritarian rule from elections where the opposition
collaborates with the regime, runs a lackluster campaign, or stands on
the sidelines. Opposition unity is rare in these settings, as it is in most
regimes that fall between the extremes of democracy and dictatorship,
and a unified opposition has been identified as a key factor in bringing
down regimes that allow political competition, even if they try to discourage or sabotage it.
Electoral Change and Democratic Development
Our two sets of electoral outcomes have yielded varying levels of
democratic performance after the elections—even among the successful cases (see the Table on p. 96). This should not be surprising, given
differences in political context across countries. On the eve of pivotal
elections in Romania, Slovakia, and especially Bulgaria (where the key
issue was consolidating an ongoing democratic project by rejecting an
ex-communist president), the atmosphere was already fairly democra-
Valerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik
95
cy-friendly. In Ukraine, Georgia, Croatia, Serbia, and Kyrgyzstan, by
contrast, the baseline of politics lay much closer to the authoritarian
end of the spectrum. In each of those countries, this led to predictable
problems for democratic governance even after elections had played a
role in pushing the old authoritarian rulers out. It is nonetheless striking
that the two polities in the more-authoritarian group which were also
emerging from years of warfare—Croatia and Serbia at the end of the
1990s—showed dramatic democratic improvements after their breakthrough elections in 2000.
After the failed attempts in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus, however, a trend more troubling than the mere absence of democratic improvements emerged—that of democratic deterioration, or “regime hardening.”
As our interviews with participants in these electoral episodes suggest, the
failure of elections to unseat autocratic rulers strengthened authoritarianism by alerting rulers to the dangers of “tolerating” electoral competition,
enabling them to identify and harass the opposition and its supporters,
and providing information needed to recalibrate regime patronage networks. Once the votes were counted, moreover, the fickle international
democracy-promotion community quickly shifted its focus to elections
taking place in other countries. Given that in the years leading up to the
breakthrough elections, the incumbent authoritarian regimes in Croatia,
Slovakia, and especially Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, and Ukraine had become
more rather than less authoritarian, the interpretation of postelection regime hardening in the failed cases is all the more convincing.
Alternatively, successful challenges to authoritarian rule contributed
to democratic improvements. Although we would not argue that elections “produce” democracy, especially given variations in the electoral
effects noted in the Table, we would suggest that a necessary condition
for democratization is the removal of dictators from office. In this sense,
elections can be defined as a mode of democratic transition, since they
are well-defined political episodes that promise to improve prospects
for democratic change. While elections do not guarantee democratic improvements, neither do the other two commonly cited modes of transition: pacting and mass mobilization. Moreover, the best predictor of
democratic progress across the entire postcommunist region is the election to office of the democratic opposition. This is less of a tautology
than it sounds, given the emphasis in earlier transitions literature on the
importance of electing former allies of authoritarian leaders, such as the
reformist Spanish prime minister Adolfo Suárez (appointed by King Juan
Carlos after General Francisco Franco died), to bridge dictatorship and
democracy and to reassure authoritarians that democratic change will
neither destabilize the country nor drive them out of the political game.
Surprisingly, successful versus failed cases do not sort themselves
into consistent patterns according to the level of economic development;
the type of government (as indicated by presidential powers); the in-
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Table—Elections and
Democratic Perfomance
cidence of corruption; or the
regime’s location along the
Country
NIT (Before) NIT (After)
continuum between democraFailed Cases
cy and dictatorship—though
Armenia (2003)
4.83
5.09
all the elections that failed
Armenia (2008)
5.68
N/A
to unseat dictators did take
Azerbaijan (2003)
5.59
5.75
place in relatively authoriAzerbaijan (2005)
5.55
5.97
tarian contexts. Moreover,
Belarus (2001)
6.25
6.38
even the existence of secesBelarus (2006)1
6.59
6.68
sionist warfare, with all the
Successful Cases
instability, economic disloBulgaria (1997)2
3.90
3.57
cation, and demobilization of
Croatia (2000)
4.36
3.54
the liberal opposition that it
Georgia (2003)
4.46
4.90
brings, does not predict how
Kyrgyzstan (2005)
5.67
5.68
things will turn out: ArmeRomania (1996)
N/A
3.90
nia and Azerbaijan suffered
Serbia (2000)3
5.67
4.52
from a prolonged secession3.80
2.71
Slovakia (1998)4
related conflict, as did GeorUkraine (2004)
4.82
4.34
gia and Serbia, respectively.
NIT = Nations in Transit Democracy Score;
In the former two countries,
Freedom House, Nations in Transit (New York:
elections failed to undercut
Freedom House, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003,
2002, 2001, 2000, 1998, 1997). Possible scores
authoritarian rulers. In the
range from 1 to 7, with 1 indicating the most free,
latter two, however, voting
and 7 indicating the most repressive.
succeeded in helping to do
1
The scores for “after” include only results from
2007, as the scores for 2008 are not yet available.
just that, secession-related
2
Score for 1997. Scores for 1996 and 1995 are
troubles notwithstanding.
not available.
There is some support for
3
Score for 1999–2000. Score for 1998 not available.
the
argument that strong eco4
Score for 1997. Scores for 1996 not available.
nomic performance protects
Note on methodology: The assessments in this
dictators from defeat, as Artable are two-year averages—before the electoral
menia, Azerbaijan, and Belarbreakthrough and after. For example, for Armenia
in 2003, the scores for 2001 and 2002 were averus all experienced relatively
aged for the “before” entry, and the scores from
strong economic growth in
2004 and 2005 were averaged for the “after.”
the years leading up to their
key elections. There are, however, reasons to be skeptical about the explanatory power of this variable. Economic growth in both Slovakia and
Croatia was relatively strong before the elections of interest. Economic performance in Georgia and especially Ukraine—also “successful”
cases—had improved substantially in comparison with the disastrous
decade prior to the elections that brought the opposition to power. In this
sense, the “Putin principle”—that people will embrace authoritarians
if they bring order and growth after a period of disorder and economic
decline associated with democracy—does not apply in a consistent way
in our cases. Then too, poor growth under authoritarianism need not
fuel the rise of democrats, but may create a path to power for still more
Valerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik
97
intensely authoritarian figures, as happened in both Armenia and Azerbaijan in the 1990s.
A final amendment to the economic interpretation is that the norm,
even when the economy is failing, is for leaders in competitive authoritarian regimes to win one election after another. If the economy were
critical, three long-ruling dictators in the region—Slobodan Miloševiæ
in Serbia, Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia, and Askar A. Akayev in
Kyrgyzstan—would have been ousted much earlier in their respective
tenures than they were. Miloševiæ and Shevardnadze managed to survive even as their countries’ economies shrank by roughly 30 percent.
Vulnerable Regimes and the Electoral Model
If structural and institutional factors cannot fully explain why some
elections brought down dictators and others did not, we can turn to two
variables that may prove more telling: regime vulnerability and the implementation of what we term the electoral model of democratization.
We see electoral change as a two-stage process. First, successful challenges to authoritarian rule present themselves as political possibilities
when there is widespread recognition by opposition leaders and citizens
alike that incumbents (or their anointed successors, as in Ukraine in
2004) have become too dangerous, unaccountable, corrupt, or incompetent to remain in office. With such recognition come defections from the
ruling circle—by former allies as well as ordinary citizens.
Yet numerous factors can make it hard to convince citizens that the
authoritarian incumbents can be defeated. These factors may include the
incumbents’ skill at manipulating elections, the “knowledge barrier” that
citizens face in trying to discern where most of their compatriots stand,
and the extent of citizens’ doubts about whether the opposition is worth
backing and can win. In all types of conflict situations, morale matters a
great deal. Citizens need to become convinced that voting for the opposition and using protests to defend the vote are actions that can and should
be taken and have a reasonable probability of success. Thus it is one thing
to argue that authoritarians are losing support, but another to establish the
necessary conditions for oppositions to win elections and take power.
The electoral model of transition becomes relevant at some point after the regime has begun to weaken, but before it falls. The electoral
model identifies a series of difficult, often tedious, and sometimes dangerous tasks that, if implemented by opposition groups and citizens, will
increase the likelihood of authoritarians’ a) losing at the polls, and b)
actually ceding power and leaving office in response to such a loss.
While naturally showing a degree of variation from country to country,
this set of tasks typically includes:
1) The reform of election procedures in response to pressure from
opposition and civil society groups;
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2) Massive voter-registration and turnout drives;
3) A unified slate of opposition candidates;
4) A truly nationwide opposition campaign;
5) Expanded use of the media, public-opinion polls, campaign rallies,
marches, and various types of street theater (where allowed) during the
campaign;
6) Well-organized parallel vote tabulations (again, where allowed) on
election day; and
7) Preparation for protests should the incumbents lose at the polls but
refuse to give up power.
The electoral model is distinctive in arming opposition leaders and
activists, civil society groups, and average citizens with an electoral
strategy for success, extensive citizen engagement in campaigns and
voting, and optimism about the ability of oppositions and citizens to
challenge authoritarian rule.2
In one sense, all fourteen regimes in this study were vulnerable, at
least potentially, as their leaders felt compelled to hold a regular and
at least semicompetitive vote, thereby exposing themselves to the possibility of losing power. Whether or not they lost at the polls, however,
depended in part—but only in part—on the strength of their regimes.
Although economic hardship is perhaps the most obvious among the
many threats to regime survival, the economic rationale was somewhat
variable in the successful cases and far less apparent in the failed ones,
given Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s strong growth rates. The economic story is more complex than GDP figures and growth rates alone can tell, however. First, economic decline had produced huge inequalities in Bulgaria,
Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, countries that had at one time
been quite egalitarian. Long-term economic decline also made it more
difficult for “patronal presidents,” such as the leaders of Serbia, Georgia,
Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, to maintain networks of political support. Not
only does this help to explain the combination of unusually authoritarian
leaders, popular mobilizations against fraudulent elections, and electoral
turnover in those cases, but also suggests how Robert Kocharian and his
designated successor, Serzh Sarkisian, of Armenia, Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, and Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus, were able to withstand
popular protests challenging their electoral “victories.”
This argument, however, cannot explain why these elections rather
than earlier ones were so successful at unveiling the bankruptcy of patronage networks. Moreover, public-opinion surveys show that citizens
were extremely concerned about economic issues not just in Georgia,
for example, but also in Azerbaijan—which, like most petrostates, did
not widely distribute the profits stemming from rising oil prices, pipelines, and fossil-fuel shipping.
Although economics no doubt played a role in either weakening or
bolstering regimes, other factors harder to express in numbers also af-
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99
fected electoral outcomes. The defection of key regime allies, for example, was critical to the electoral breakthroughs in Georgia and Ukraine,
where popular former cabinet ministers—Mikheil Saakashvili and Viktor Yushchenko, respectively—left the
government and became leaders of the
democratic opposition. Moreover, sevThe defection of key reeral years before Georgia’s 2003 elecgime allies was critical
tion, the Citizens’ Union of Georgia,
to the electoral breakShevardnadze’s ruling party, disintethroughs in Georgia and grated. Likewise, in Croatia, the CroaUkraine, where popular
tian Democratic Union fell apart in the
weeks between President Franjo Tudjformer cabinet minisman’s death on 10 December 1999 and
ters left the government
the presidential and parliamentary eleccamp and became leadtions of January and February 2000.
ers of the democratic
Key regime supporters also defected in
opposition.
Serbia, including the Serbian Orthodox
Church, which had played a central role
since the late 1980s in upholding Slobodan Miloševiæ as the defender of the Serbian nation. In Kyrgyzstan after
the May 2002 protests, President Akayev sacked his prime minister,
Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who became president in 2005; likewise, Akayev’s
onetime vice-president Feliks Kulov, jailed in 2000 but released during
the March 2005 protests, became an opposition leader and ultimately
prime minister under Bakiyev. In all these cases, former supporters of
the regime moved to the opposition camp after either resigning or being
fired from positions that they had held under the incumbent.
The Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Belarusian regimes, on the other
hand, did not suffer such defections on the eve of their elections. What,
then, caused this to happen in the other cases? One reason was the failure to institutionalize power. The leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and
Belarus worked hard to build political machines that penetrate the polity
and economy alike, and that defend their powers. The same, however,
could not be said of either Miloševiæ or Shevardnadze—which is remarkable, given their rise to power through the Communist party-state
apparatus and long tenures in office.
Changes in the international environment, such as the withdrawal of
external support or growing pressures on the regime for reform, including electoral reform, also help to weaken regimes. In Slovakia, Serbia,
Georgia, and Ukraine, a wide range of actors including the U.S. government and government-supported actors, the European Union (EU), the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and its
Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, and U.S. and European foundations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), provided assistance and pushed hard for elections that were free and fair.
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During the summer of 2003, for example, U.S. president George W.
Bush sent former secretary of state James Baker to Georgia to press Shevardnadze on election-law reform, and in Ukraine in November 2004,
the United States responded quickly to the efforts of the incumbents’
standard-bearer, Viktor Yanukovych, and his Russian allies to steal the
election.
The Serbian case reveals the impact that international involvement
can have on regime strength and electoral turnover. As the war in Bosnia
moved into its fifth year in the mid-1990s, the United States was working
to forge peace, and needed both Miloševiæ and Tudjman to do so. Thus
the three-month-long Serbian protests of 1996–97 against Miloševiæ’s
failure to respect local election results elicited little U.S. attention or
assistance. By the end of the decade, however, after the NATO bombing
of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis and with the Dayton Agreement no
longer a serious constraint, the United States had shifted its stance on
Miloševiæ, seeing him now as the main impediment to Balkan stability.
As a result, U.S. democracy-promotion assistance to Serbia skyrocketed, more than tripling between 1999 and 2000,3 when Miloševiæ called
early elections and declared himself a candidate.
In 2006, the United States and the EU, as well as democracy promoters from countries in the postcommunist region, worked together closely
for the sake of defeating Belarusian president Lukashenka, but failed.
In 2003 and 2005, Western support for free and fair elections and electoral change in Azerbaijan had been quite limited. Overall democracy
and governance assistance to Armenia, the third country where elections
failed to unseat an autocrat, was the highest on a per capita basis over
the course of the transition of any country in the postcommunist region,
save Bosnia, where high aid levels were connected to the Dayton Peace
Accords. In both Armenia and Azerbaijan, however, U.S. democracy assistance resulted in scant pressure on the regimes to clean up their electoral processes. In fact, U.S. government officials in Yerevan and Baku
believed that further democratic change was unlikely in these two countries and that such change could be destabilizing. Likewise, they did not
see democratic progress there as critical to U.S. interests—particularly
in the case of Azerbaijan, which shares a border with Iran, has oil reserves and recently discovered gas deposits, and serves as a transit area
for pipelines connecting Central Asia to Turkey and the Black Sea.
Despotism, Desperation, and Regime Durability
What Vladimír Meèiar of Slovakia, Miloševiæ, Shevardnadze, Kuchma, and Akayev shared—and what distinguished them from leaders in
countries where electoral breakthroughs fell short—was a history of violating widely accepted norms of political behavior. The authoritarian
leaders who lost power went too far in the abuse of their powers—not
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just harassing the opposition and journalists, but also murdering them;
relying on increasingly blatant interventions to prevent people from
voting; introducing constitutional changes counter to accepted political
and constitutional practices; and beating and jailing large numbers of
young people.
These actions were in stark contrast to the peaceful and often humorous protests mounted by youth organizations such as Otpor (Resistance)
in Serbia, Kmara (Enough Is Enough) in Georgia, and Pora (It’s Time)
in Ukraine. Rising despotism, moreover, was linked in the public mind
with desperation. Although it is often assumed that crackdowns discourage antiregime mobilization by making people more fearful, the Serbian, Georgian, Ukrainian, and Kyrgyz cases remind us that tyranny can
actually encourage popular resistance, because using extreme measures
to safeguard power is a clear sign that a leader is losing both legitimacy
and control.
Although Miloševiæ, Shevardnadze, and Akayev each revealed himself as desperate to hang on to his office, none mounted an ambitious
political campaign. Shevardnadze, in particular, was largely disengaged
from the 2003 parliamentary elections in Georgia, despite every indication that the opposition was unusually committed and capable. Moreover, in Croatia, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, earlier protests and local
elections were clear evidence of popular dissatisfaction.
Why did so many authoritarian leaders run lackluster campaigns?
Force of habit may be one answer. None of their countries had any tradition of large-scale campaigning. Thus the incumbents carried on “as
usual” during the election cycle, while their opponents plowed ahead in
new directions. Moreover, because these leaders had already withstood
so many challenges to their power, and opposition movements in the
past had been fragmented and ineffective, the incumbent rulers likely
assumed that the forthcoming balloting would play out much as earlier
elections had. Finally, long tenure in office can cause leaders to take
their powers for granted, in part because they become captives of the
very support networks that they have built. This was especially true for
Miloševiæ, Shevardnadze, and Akayev.
What transpired in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus was different. While Kocharian, Aliyev, and Lukashenka all have records of unquestionable abuse of power, none ever took for granted either his
own power or the opposition’s weakness. All were active stewards
of authoritarian rule, orchestrating electoral details ranging from voting procedures to control over public spaces in anticipation of protests. Each of these leaders knew that power had to be won and held.
Interestingly, all three countries had experienced electoral turnover
during the transition from communism (though this was also true for
some of our successful cases, including Bulgaria, Georgia, Slovakia,
and Ukraine). Finally, although Yanukovych lost the 2004 elections
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in Ukraine, it was not for want of effort. In fact, he and Kuchma went
to extreme lengths, having a journalist murdered and rival candidate
Yushchenko poisoned, to secure victory.
The authoritarian regimes that proved vulnerable to election-aided
democratic challenges tended to display at least some of the weaknesses
catalogued above—economic stress, uninstitutionalized powers, defections of key allies, increased international pressure for free and fair elections, despotic excesses, and an unwillingness to campaign. In addition,
all these regimes were exceedingly corrupt. The presence of a cluster
of such vulnerabilities bespeaks a regime facing a rocky future. First,
they rouse public dissatisfaction with the regime. In each case of electoral breakthrough, the leader’s popularity had either declined significantly (Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, Serbia, and
Ukraine) or remained stagnant (Slovakia). By contrast, Kocharian (perhaps), Aliyev, and Lukashenka probably could have won their elections
even without manipulating them. Second, vulnerable regimes generate
not just growing resentment, but also expanding optimism—on the part
of the public, opposition groups, and civil society organizations—about
prospects for replacing them with something else.
Regime vulnerability does not guarantee a breakthrough election. The
Bulgarian, Serbian, Georgian, Ukrainian, and Kyrgyz regimes had all been
in serious trouble for years, yet their leaders held on to power. Moreover,
each of the “successful” cases, except those of Romania and Bulgaria,
occurred in a country with significant democratic deficits. Competitive
authoritarian regimes, and even more-democratic polities such as those in
place in Bulgaria and Romania on the eve of their elections, have strong
motives and ample means to shield themselves from electoral challenges.
Even poorly performing regimes tend to have a solid group of supporters
who depend upon them for protection and money, and who may prefer
“the devil they know” to the prospect of political instability or criminal
prosecution should the dictator lose power. Thus it is not surprising that
all the breakthrough elections, except Georgia’s, were relatively close.
At the same time, oppositions in all these countries historically had
been divided, incompetent, disorganized, and confined mostly to cities.
Their leaders often bore the taint of past ties to the regime. The opposition parties in some countries (Bulgaria and Slovakia, for example) had
once held power but proved inept. They were distanced from—and often
showed scant interest in—the voters and NGOs supporting democratic
change. This is a major reason why the fall of most authoritarian regimes
has been followed not by democracy, but instead by more authoritarianism.4 Given the poor track record of both the regime and the opposition,
citizens had few reasons to vote or, if they did exercise the franchise,
to prefer the democratic opposition over the incumbents or other parties
independent of either. All this points to the conclusion that vulnerable
rulers in competitive authoritarian regimes or even largely democratic
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polities are unlikely to lose power through elections until the nature of
the elections themselves changes.
Implementing the Electoral Model
The pivotal elections that took place between 1996 and 2005 in Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan
were indeed different than the votes that had gone before in those countries. In each case, the electoral model of transition unfolded more or less
fully (the less-complete unfoldings came in the pathbreaking early cases
of Bulgaria and Romania and at the end of the wave of electoral change in
Kyrzyzstan). The elections that have taken place in Armenia, Azerbaijan,
and Belarus since 2000, however, have lacked such core elements of the
electoral model as rigorous election monitoring, impressive campaigning,
and voter-registration and voter-mobilization drives, advance preparation
for protests, and parallel vote tabulations. In short, there was a radical
break with “elections as usual” in the first group of countries and far more
continuity with the electoral past in the second.
The electoral model’s first requirement is a unified opposition. Individual opposition leaders must put aside their personal ambitions and
work together, and, in most successful cases, agree to back a common
candidate. Such accord is often hard to achieve—not just because of the
habit of going it alone, but also because wider opportunities for electoral
success can feed individual ambitions while starving the urge to collaborate.5 In the case of Serbia, for example, Zoran Djindjiæ agreed to
support Vojislav Koštunica after public-opinion polls conducted in the
summer of 2000 showed that citizens trusted Koštunica, who had never
been involved with the Miloševiæ regime and who, in contrast to Djindjiæ, had remained in Serbia during the Miloševiæ years. In Kyrgyzstan,
collaboration took another form. Leaders of the opposition agreed to
cooperate and divvy up the top government posts.
In most of our successful cases but none of the failed ones, the opposition had experimented earlier with various forms of collaboration that
yielded partial successes. The opposition collaborated in local elections
in Serbia, Croatia, Georgia, and Ukraine leading up to the “big” vote, for
example, as well as in joint protests in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine that
forced powerholders to drop unpopular policy initiatives. These developments demonstrated the benefits of cooperation, while showing citizens
that the opposition could work together and achieve results. Likewise,
there was ample evidence before the breakthrough elections that the absence of cooperation was costly—for instance, the Slovakian parties that
had formed a broad coalition government in mid-1994 but did not run together in 1998 met with defeat; and the “Ukraine Without Kuchma” and
“Arise Ukraine!” campaigns of 2002 and 2003, respectively, also failed to
deliver. Nonetheless, these misfires gave the political activists who would
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later emerge as leaders valuable experience with mobilization, and in many
cases served as the politicians’ first occasion for serious contact with nongovernmental sectors that long had seen themselves as apolitical.
The electoral model also provided a powerful answer to the question of
how to overcome citizens’ feelings of apathy and alienation. Through the
dynamic use of locally novel techniques such as door-to-door campaigning, citizens’ forums, and public-opinion polls, political leaders energized
the populace, increased turnout, and created a sense of optimism—a belief that change was both desirable and achievable. NGOs organized campaigns that supported these efforts. In all the successful cases except Kyrgyzstan, NGOs—often including youth organizations or actions directed at
mobilizing young people—played a crucial role in empowering ordinary
citizens to take part in politics. The model allowed NGO activists, many
of whom were adamantly opposed to being involved in partisan politics, to
see political activity aimed at ensuring free and fair elections and ousting
autocratic leaders not as a betrayal of their mission but integral to it.
The electoral model also included efforts to improve the quality and
transparency of electoral procedures by reducing fraud in candidate selection, compiling accurate voter rolls, and safeguarding honest vote counts.
Application of the model also typically involved preparations to use exit
polls, parallel vote tabulations, and foreign and domestic election monitors, when allowed by the regime. The model likewise called for the exploitation of media openings and institutional loopholes favorable to the
opposition where these existed, such as the legal requirement in Serbia
that election results be posted outside each precinct or the willingness of
Ukraine’s relatively independent Supreme Court to order new elections.
In the more deeply authoritarian settings, with incumbents expected to
steal the elections, the electoral model also included preparations for mass
demonstrations to protest fraudulent results and demand that incumbents
step down.6 In Serbia, Croatia, Georgia, and Ukraine, these preparations included talks with military and security-force officers to make sure that they
would not fire on peaceful protestors. Civil society groups often helped
with preparations for the protests that they joined. In Georgia, for example,
activists from the Liberty Institute, the Georgian Young Lawyers Association, Kmara, and other NGOs participated in the march on Parliament
that led to Shevardnadze’s resignation. In Ukraine, Yushchenko campaign
staffers as well as Pora leaders and members of other civil society groups
did advance planning for street protests after the first round of elections
and also benefited from the financial backing of Ukrainian oligarchs.
The electoral model is demanding: It requires dedication, coordination, hard work, and sometimes risk taking. Even the failed cases included some of the model’s aspects such as opposition unity. In 2006, much
of the Belarusian opposition united in support of Alexander Milenkevich, just as several opposition groups had supported a common candidate in 2001. In Azerbaijan in 2005, youth groups such as Yeni Fakir
Valerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik
105
attempted to stage “rock the vote” campaigns and other events to appeal
to young voters. Still, key elements of the model remained missing. In
Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus, the opposition made little headway
toward changing electoral procedures to prevent fraud or gaining acceptance for election monitoring.
In addition, in these cases there was no parallel vote tabulation to compare with the regime’s official election results. The opposition could have
used an independent vote count—if it proved cheating—to confront the
regime, expose the fraud before voters, and incite public outrage. Citizens,
especially in new democracies, tend to associate democracy with free and
fair elections; clear evidence of vote fraud arouses anger. In Belarus in
2006, the level of ire so surprised the opposition that after twenty-thousand people showed up in the capital of Minsk to rally against vote fraud,
no lasting momentum resulted. In Armenia the previous year, a lack of opposition planning for follow-up mobilization had allowed the authorities
to get away with beating and jailing protestors when their demonstrations
went beyond the time limit announced by the regime.
Failures in application aside, the electoral model’s clear tendency is
to impede antidemocratic leaders, whether in a relatively democratic or
relatively authoritarian setting, from winning elections and from staying
in power after losing. On the one hand, it weakens authoritarian leaders’ control over the media, political campaigning, voter registration and
turnout, vote tabulation, and sometimes even the security forces. On the
other hand, the electoral model counsels the wisdom of “investing” in a
more effective opposition—that is, an opposition that can convince voters to take the necessary steps of registering to vote, voting, supporting
the opposition, and, if necessary, defending their votes in the streets.
The electoral model offers a path to solving two collective-action problems that have long dogged hopes for democratic transition. The first is
the problem of opposition coordination: How can democratic foes of the
regime come together, coordinate a welter of moving parts and varied
agendas, and mount efforts that have direct electoral payoffs? The second
problem is one of citizen confidence: How can electors be convinced that
their votes will count, and that it is worthwhile for them to back the opposition actively, to demand free and fair elections, and to have faith that
others will act in like fashion? In this sense, the electoral model plays a
key role in linking regime vulnerability to electoral change—a linkage
that is by no means easy to establish, as so many of the elections that have
failed to unseat dictators have amply demonstrated.
Elections and Democratization
Based on our study of fourteen electoral episodes in postcommunist
Europe and Eurasia, two factors seem best to explain why some dictators met defeat at the polls and others did not. The first is the degree
106
Journal of Democracy
of the authoritarian regime’s vulnerability. The second is the skill and
determination with which the opposition and civil society implemented
the electoral model of democratic change. Taken separately, the model’s
elements are insufficient. It is possible to cite both failed and successful cases that featured united oppositions or large postelection protests.
Likewise, only limited evidence supports the claim that greater chances for victory lead oppositions to coalesce. Not only is the opposite as
likely to occur, but pressures on oppositions from civil society organizations as well as the donor community also play an important role in
determining whether oppositions will first unify and then maintain unity
throughout an election cycle. Other factors must be incorporated into
any argument attempting to explain why electoral challenges to authoritarian rule succeed.
Compared to other types of polities, competitive authoritarian regimes,
as Marc Howard and Philip Roessler have argued, tend to veer back and
forth along a continuum anchored by democracy on one end and dictatorship on the other, with oscillations such as these being particularly common in the postcommunist region.7 Elections have played a notable role in
this dynamic, contributing both to democratic and authoritarian development. The defining factor in this regard seems to be whether authoritarian
rulers (or their chosen successors) win or lose at the polls. In other words,
elections can serve as an investment in and pretext for consolidation of
authoritarianism as much as they can lead to democratization.
At the same time, however, we find less support for what seems to be an
obvious claim—that is, that more-authoritarian settings are less hospitable
to democratizing elections. While fully authoritarian regimes, such as that
of Islam Karimov’s Uzbekistan, have the ability to block democratizing
elections, even relatively authoritarian settings can experience democratic
breakthroughs through elections, as Serbia and Croatia demonstrate well.
This is not just because vulnerable regimes can be upended via the implementation of the electoral model, but also because agency—the availability
of a successful model, the hard work of oppositions and the NGO sector,
and the willingness of citizens to demand democracy while taking a chance
on the opposition—can transform a political setting well-situated to defend
authoritarianism into one more supportive of electoral change.
Thus the trend toward making ever more fine-grained distinctions
among competitive authoritarian regimes may miss the larger point
about the unstable nature of such regimes: These regimes, especially
when power is more personalized than institutionalized, often feature
remarkably elastic parameters that allow for different kinds of political
shifts at different points in time. Depending upon the outcome of the
electoral process, competitive authoritarian regimes may become either
more competitive or more authoritarian. While the accumulated weaknesses and strengths of the regime matter, so too do the shorter-term
consequences of more-effective challenges to their political monopoly.
Valerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik
107
Effective challenges, however, are the exception, not the rule—otherwise, fewer dictators would win reelection in regimes that tolerate some
(if only limited) political competition for office. Moreover, as the cases
of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus show, vigilant leaders stay fully
abreast of the threats posed by the successful application of the electoral
model in their neighborhood. While this is a prime reason why the trend
toward opposition victories in the postcommunist region seems to have
abated in recent years, this consideration must be joined with an equally
important one—the existence throughout the region of many of the very
factors that we identified as supporting electoral change in semiauthoritarian regimes.
NOTES
The authors thank Melissa Aten, Aida Badalova, Aghisi Harutyunyan, Igor Logvinenko,
Vladimir Micic, Keti Nozadze, Tsveta Petrova, Aaron Presnall, and Sara Rzayeva for
their assistance with this project; Marc Howard and Staffan Lindberg for their comments
on an earlier draft of this essay; and the Smith Richardson Foundation for supporting
our research.
1. Our analysis is based on studies of these elections and on more than two-hundred interviews with domestic and international participants in these events in the United States,
Germany, Great Britain, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Georgia, Serbia, Slovakia, and
Ukraine.
2. We have addressed elsewhere the questions of how the electoral model developed,
its diffusion from one country to another, and the role of demonstration effects, similar
conditions, and transnational democracy-promotion networks. See, for example, Bunce
and Wolchik, “Transnational Networks, Diffusion Dynamics, and Electoral Change in
the Postcommunist World,” in Rebecca Kotlins Givan, Sarah A. Soule, and Kenneth M.
Roberts, eds., The Diffusion of Social Movements (New York: Cambridge University
Press, forthcoming, 2010).
3. Steven F. Finkel, Aníbal Pérez-Li~nán, Mitchell A. Seligson, and Dinorah Azpuru,
“Effects of U.S. Foreign Assistance on Democracy Building: Results of a Cross-National
Quantitative Study,” Final Report, U.S. Agency for International Development, 12 January 2006.
4. Axel Hadenius and Jan Teorell, “Pathways from Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 18 (January 2007): 143–56.
5. Nicolas van de Walle cites the opposite dynamic in his “Tipping Games: When Do
Opposition Parties Coalesce?” in Andreas Schedler, ed., Electoral Authoritarianism: The
Dynamics of Unfree Competition (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2006).
6. Croatia, with Tudjman’s death and the subsequent disintegration of his Croatian
Democratic Union, was an exception here, because despite an authoritarian political context, there was no organized force defending the regime.
7. See Marc M. Howard and Philip G. Roessler, “Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in
Competitive Authoritarian Regimes,” American Journal of Political Science 50 (April
2006): 365–81.
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