Such research suggests that, given the stability-providing function of illiberal elections, states governed under illiberal democracies may have low prospects for a transition to a democratic system protected by constitutional liberties. This enabled them to accumulate illicit wealth and draw from state resources without legal consequence. Lisa Blaydes shows that under Mubarak's lengthy rule, elections provided a mechanism through which elites bought votes to support the government (through distributing needed goods and resources to the public) to acquire regime-enforced parliamentary immunity. One example of the regime durability provided by illiberal democracy is illustrated in Mubarak's Egyptian regime.
Gandhi also claims that illiberal elections serve other useful purposes, such as providing autocrats with information about their citizens and establishing legitimacy both domestically and in the international community, and that these varied functions must be elucidated in future research. She first says that elections help leaders resolve threats from elites and from the masses by appeasing those capable of usurping power with money and securing the cooperation of the general public with political concessions. Below it is explained how illiberal democracies-in this case autocratic regimes-may try to demonstrate false liberal tendencies in order to consolidate their regime.Īuthor Jennifer Gandhi says that many autocrats allow elections in their governance to stabilize and reinforce their regimes. Zakaria initially wrote his paper using the term illiberal democracy interchangeably with pseudo-autocracies but today they are used to describe countries that are potentially democratically backsliding as well. This is because illiberal democracies can rise from both consolidated liberal democracies and authoritarian states. Regime type is important for illiberal democracies. In hybrid regimes, freedoms exist and the opposition is allowed to legally compete in elections, but the system of checks and balances becomes inoperative. Hybrid regimes are political systems in which the mechanism for determining access to state office combines both democratic and autocratic practices. Recent scholarship has addressed why elections, institutions commonly associated with liberalism and freedom, have led to such negative outcomes in illiberal democracies. He says that democracy without constitutional liberalism is producing centralized regimes, the erosion of liberty, ethnic competition, conflict, and war. But around the world, the two concepts are coming apart. Zakaria points out that in the West, electoral democracy and civil liberties (of speech, religion, etc.) go hand in hand. Īccording to Zakaria, illiberal democracies are increasing around the world and are increasingly limiting the freedoms of the people they represent. The term illiberal democracy was used by Fareed Zakaria in a regularly cited 1997 article in the journal Foreign Affairs.
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