Do Incumbents Choose from the Menu of Manipulation? Explaining Causes of Electoral Manipulation in Hybrid Regimes

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A Kellogg Work-in-Progress Seminar with Fulbright Visiting Scholar Jaroslav Bilek, Research Fellow at the Department of Politics, University of Hradec Králové

The international Zeitgeist after the Cold War has made it much harder for explicitly authoritarian and politically closed regimes to emerge and survive. However, we cannot say that with the third wave of democratization, all forms of authoritarianism would cease to exist around the globe. The very specific international constellation, a significant feature of which was a distinctive emphasis of the international community on free elections led to a formation of numerous political regimes where democratic institutions exist, but those who control all the power often resort to regular violations of democratic principles in order to keep the power they possess.  This trend is highly apparent in Latin America. 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 of "hybrid" or "mixed", has led to a rapid expansion of empirical research. However, the current state of research is unsatisfactory. Although authors seem to agree on the common feature of these regimes as the incumbents' tendency to interfere in political competition, little is known about how incumbents select between different forms of electoral manipulation and how the contextual factors shape their decisions. This research aims to fill the gap to understand how incumbents select among different forms of electoral manipulation in the hybrid regimes of Latin America from 1980 to 2020.