This Pivot explores the mechanism of election manipulation in ostensibly democratic but essentially authoritarian systems called the hybrid regime, using the 2018 parliamentary elections in Bangladesh as an example. The 2018 election has delivered an unprecedented victory to the incumbent Bangladesh Awami League. Elections pose serious dilemmas for the leaders of hybrid regimes. While contested elections bolster their claims of democracy and augment their legitimacy, they can also threaten the status quo. Faced with the challenge, the incumbents tend to hold stage-managed elections. This book offers incisive examination of Bangladesh’s political environment, rigorous scrutiny of the roles of state institutions including the law enforcing agencies, and meticulous analysis of election results. It also fills in a gap in the extant hybrid regime literature which seldom explores the strategies of engineered elections.

Leaders of hybrid regimes in pursuit of political domination and material gain instrumentalize both hidden forms of corruption and public anti-corruption policies. Corruption is pursued for different purposes including cooperation with strategic partners and exclusion of opponents. Presidents use anti-corruption policies to legitimize and institutionalize political domination. Corrupt practices and anti-corruption policies become two sides of the same coin and are exercised to maintain an uneven political playing field. This study combines empirical analysis and social constructivism for an investigation into the presidencies of Leonid Kuchma (1994–2005), Viktor Yushchenko (2005–2010), and Viktor Yanukovych (2010–2014). Explorative expert interviews, press surveys, content analysis of presidential speeches, as well as critical assessment of anti-corruption legislation are used for comparison and process tracing of the utilization of corruption under three Ukrainian presidents.

Over the past thirty years the comparative study of policy agendas under the aegis of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) has become one of the fastest growing sub-field in policy research. Yet, similarly to policy studies in general, most of the agenda-setting literature focuses on well-established democracies. This edited volume offers a ground-breaking analysis of a hitherto less examined topic in comparative politics: the dynamics of policy agendas in Socialist autocracy and in hybrid regimes. We propose that policymaking in authoritarian and illiberal regimes is different from the practices of democracies which we analyse based on a unique historical policy agendas database built by the Hungarian CAP team at the Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. We find that punctuated equilibrium theory offers a good description of policy dynamics regardless of policy regimes, yet punctuations are more pronounced in autocratic and illiberal settings. These regime types also share a tendency towards centralization, a less efficient use of public information and a suppression of democratic participation in the policy process. This book may be of interest to scholars and students of policy studies, agenda-setting and the politics of authoritarianism.

Since the end of the Cold War, more and more countries feature political regimes that are neither liberal democracies nor closed authoritarian systems. Most research on these hybrid regimes focuses on how elites manipulate elections to stay in office, but in places as diverse as Bolivia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Thailand, Ukraine and Venezuela, protest in the streets has been at least as important as elections in bringing about political change. The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes builds on previously unpublished data and extensive fieldwork in Russia to show how one high-profile hybrid regime manages political competition in the workplace and in the streets. More generally, the book develops a theory of how the nature of organizations in society, state strategies for mobilizing supporters, and elite competition shape political protest in hybrid regimes.

This book fills research gaps in the field of Latin American electoral politics, explaining the causes and consequences of electoral manipulation in the hybrid regimes of Latin America between the 1980s and 2020s. This research falls within the field of comparative democratization with the ambition of deepening knowledge on the topic of electoral manipulation in hybrid regimes. 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 "hybrid" or "mixed", has led to a rapid expansion of empirical research. However, the current state of research in this field is unsatisfactory. Although existing scholarship tends to agree that the common feature of these regimes is the incumbents' tendency to interfere in political competition, little is known about how incumbents select between different forms of electoral manipulation and how such different forms go on to affect electoral results.

In recent years, competitive authoritarianism has become an increasingly common form of non-democratic politics. What is the relationship between the demand for particular public policies and a regime’s durability in office in such cases? How does policy-making interact with organizational power, the willingness to resort to coercion and patronage politics in countries home to democratic-looking institutions that none the less fall short of democratic standards? In this book we show that such regimes do more than just survive and collapse. Moreover, we argue that far from being passive pawns in the hands of their leaders voters in competitive authoritarian regimes, do matter are taken seriously. We investigate how regimes and voters interact in the cases of Georgia and Armenia, two post-Soviet countries in the South Caucasus, to identify how voters preferences feed into policy-making and gauge the extent to which the regimes’ adjustment of their policies crucially affects regime stability. To these ends, we draw on a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, including a survey experiment carried out in the two countries. The volume was originally published as a special issue of the journal Caucasus Survey.

A cutting-edge description of subnational democracy combined with a ground breaking explanation for why some regions are much less democratic than others.

Looking at recent developments around the world, it seems that democratic values -- from freedom of association and speech to fair and free elections and a system of checks and balances -- have come under threat. Experts have, however, disproportionately focused on the problems of democracy in the West, and pointed to familiar sets of shortcomings and emerging deficiencies. By contrast, and with few exceptions, there is less attention to assessing the numerous efforts and innovative activities that are taking place at local, national and international levels. They seek to counteract backsliding and subversion by improving resilience and consolidation and by promoting the expansion of democracy, especially in an era of limited sovereignty and, frequently also, statehood. The Governance Report 2017 focuses on those policies, programs, and initiatives meant to address the causes of the current democratic malaise, to foster democratic resilience, and to stimulate the (re-)consolidation and development of democratic regimes. The Report's ambition, reflecting its evidence-based approach, is to shed light on how to manage and care for democracy itself. Specifically, against the backdrop of an assessment of the state of democracy and enriched by cross-national, comparative indicators and case studies, the Report emphasizes solutions geared toward enhancing citizen participation and improving institutions in various contexts, including the rise of neo-populism. Going beyond descriptions of best practices, the Report also examines their origins, identifies the actual and potential trade-offs these solutions entail, and makes concrete recommendations to policymakers.

Comparative Politics: Continuity and Breakdown in the Contemporary World is an exciting new core text for introduction to comparative politics courses, focusing on the dynamics of politics: modernization, revolution, coups and democratization. Unlike other texts, Comparative Politics integrates thematic and extensive country-specific material in each chapter, striking a unique balance between discussing a wide range of countries and civilizations in detail, whilst using shorter focused textboxes to clearly illustrate key thematic points. Key features and benefits include: explanations of core concepts such as state, nation, regime, legitimacy, modernization, globalization, revolution, and mass movements an introduction of key theoretical approaches such as institutionalism, structural functionalism, political culture, political economy, and game theory detailed coverage of democratization, advanced democracies, developing countries and communist and post-communist states a range of perspectives to present a nuanced view of the discipline and contemporary political developments case studies of individual countries including Germany, the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Nigeria, Zaire/Congo, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Pakistan, India, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China country-focused textboxes giving a chronology of key developments, including the United Kingdom, France, Afghanistan, and Kosovo. Extensively illustrated throughout with maps, photographs, tables and explanatory boxes, Comparative Politics is an innovative core text, and essential reading for all students of Comparative Politics.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior explores the intersection of psychology, political science, sociology, and human behavior. This encyclopedia integrates theories, research, and case studies from a variety of disciplines that inform this established area of study. Aimed at college and university students, this one-of-a-kind book covers voting patterns, interactions between groups, what makes different types of government systems appealing to different societies, and the impact of early childhood development on political beliefs, among others. Topics explored by political psychologists are of great interest in fields beyond either psychology or political science, with implications, for instance, within business and management. This title will be available online on SAGE Knowledge, the ultimate social sciences library.