The Politics of Uncertainty

Abstract Electoral authoritarian regimes practice authoritarianism behind the institutional facades of representative democracy. They hold multiparty elections, yet violate democratic minimum standards in systematic and profound ways. Today, they have turned into the most common form of dictatorship in the world. The Politics of Uncertainty studies their internal dynamic. Grounded in a general theory of authoritarianism, it develops a theory of regime struggles under electoral authoritarianism. Both revolve around the politics of uncertainty. All authoritarian governments, the theory posits, suffer from two forms of uncertainty. They suffer from institutional uncertainties: their hold on power is never secure. And they suffer from informational uncertainties: they can never know for sure how secure they are. They suffer these uncertainties and they try to shape them. And so do their adversaries. The politics of uncertainty comprises their twin competition over these uncertainties. It constitutes the structuring principle of regime conflicts. In electoral autocracies, it unfolds as two-level competition over electoral uncertainty. At the game level, government and opposition compete for electoral support. At the meta-level, they compete over institutional rules. In its empirical part, the book explores the politics of uncertainty contending actors pursue within the electoral arena on the basis of an original dataset on authoritarian elections worldwide. It seeks to explain governmental strategies (electoral manipulation) as well as opposition strategies (electoral protest). It also seeks to account for institutional outcomes within the electoral arena (electoral competitiveness) and beyond (regime change).