Mock democracies: authoritarian cover-ups.

• Author: Laborin, Mario Bours
• Position: Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War

Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War

Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 517 pages.

As ideological challenges to the West dissipated after the end of the Cold War, many authoritarian regimes found themselves political and economic orphans. In this context, a new breed of hybrid regime emerged--democratic in appearance but authoritarian in nature. The democratic aspects of these regimes were mostly a product of the desire to conform to Western norms in order to access aid as well as political good standing.

From 1990 to 1995, thirty-five authoritarian regimes were supplanted by facade democracies in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. These countries are the focus of Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War, by Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University, and Lucan A. Way, assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto. The authors provide a comprehensive study of the trajectories of the regimes that became "competitive" authoritarian states during the post-Cold War period, with a look at the drivers that shaped their evolution.

Levitsky and Way first introduce the concept of competitive authoritarianism as "civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist but ... they are not democratic because the playing field is heavily skewed in favor of incumbents." (1) Second, they offer an innovative theory, supported by empirical analysis, explaining why some countries democratized while others did not. They offer an almost formulaic analysis to situate regimes within a set of common variables, which allows for a classification method that makes states as diverse as Mexico, Taiwan and Croatia fit comfortably together into a single profile.

Levitsky and Way make the case that three independent factors determine whether a competitive authoritarian regime will become fully democratic or not: its linkage with states in the West, the leverage of the West on the regime and the regime's organizational capacity. Linkage to the West is defined as "the density of ties (economic, political, diplomatic, social, and organizational) and cross-border flows (of capital, goods and services, people, and information)." (2) This is the most crucial of the three variables, according to the authors. Devoting one section of the book to states with high linkages to the West, they demonstrate how these regimes...