Hybrid Regimes are Not Democracies

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

The outbreak of war in Sudan illustrates the perilous trajectories facing “hybrid” regimes around the world. Just a few years ago, Sudan was considered to be ruled by such a regime – defined as one that holds elections but has strong autocratic characteristics.

Yet all that came to an end, and the downward spiral has led to more than six months of fierce fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the opposing Rapid Support Forces paramilitary organization, or RSF. 

According to the latest figures published by the International Organization for Migration, more than three million people have already been forced to flee their homes during the bloody conflict.

In Sudan, under former President Omar al-Bashir, elections were not a legitimate avenue for the expression of the will of the people, and so change only came through revolution in 2019. Even then, hopes for reform were dashed though a subsequent military coup, a troubled transition, and now the outbreak of war.

Hybrid regimes, also known as “electoral autocracies” or sometimes “illiberal democracies,” are governments that endeavor to be seen as democracies but lack the fundamentals to warrant such a label. They occupy a “grey zone” between liberal democracies on the one hand and closed authoritarian regimes on the other.

Hybrid regimes have the common feature that they all have competition, although the political elite in power deliberately rearranges state regulations and the political arena to grant itself undue advantages.

In a process some political scientists define as “autocratization,” elected presidents and prime ministers use their majorities to pass laws that give them sustained structural advantages over their opponents.

They use government funds to shower their supporters with benefits. They file tax and regulatory cases against independent media groups, investigate journalists and NGOs, and reshape independent agencies and courts into compliant arms of the ruling party.

Yes, they do hold elections, but the playing field is rarely level, as ruling parties utilize a diversified portfolio of election manipulation tactics to secure power, including corrupted voter registration systems, intentional logistical delays, targeted violence, strategic results tampering, and compromised electoral management bodies.

Without liberal rights and institutions democracy is not meaningful and unlikely to endure. Elections become an empty shell. Such rights and institutions include the rule of law, minority rights, and horizontal accountability through parliaments and courts. Fundamentally challenging these rights and institutions, as illiberals do, threatens the persistence of democracy.

Hybrid regimes also are more prone to internal conflict and instability because they often lack legitimacy among politically marginalized large swaths of the population. They are ill-equipped to effectively handle security challenges –- often resorting to heavy-handed tactics that inflame violence –- and have weak institutions that are unable to challenge abuses of executive power.

General expectations notwithstanding, the democratic upheaval of 1989-1991 did not end in turning all dictatorships into liberal democracies. Despite the momentous transformation that this so-called “Third Wave” brought to formal political structures in regions ranging from Africa to Asia to Latin America, only a limited number of countries have succeeded in establishing consolidated and functioning democratic regimes.

Instead, many of these new regimes have become stuck in transition, combining a rhetorical acceptance of liberal democracy with essentially illiberal and authoritarian traits. In fact, hybrid regimes most often result from democratic backsliding, rather than autocracies moving toward democratic reform.

The V-Dem Institute (Varieties of Democracy) is an independent research institute based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. It publishes an annual Democracy Report that describes the state of democracy in the world.

 It found that in 2022, almost one-half of countries globally --72 in total-- met the definition of hybrid or electoral autocracy and were present in every geographic region. Examples include Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Mexico, El Salvador, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines.

Of today’s 72 hybrid regimes, 20 were considered stronger democracies 20 years ago. Democratic backsliding is usually a gradual process, and the international community’s oftentimes muted response tends to facilitate this.

The susceptibility of hybrid regimes to political violence and instability is perhaps most acute in sub-Saharan Africa. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) collects information on political violence and protest events around the world.

According to its analysis of 2022 data, hybrid regimes experienced almost three times as many conflict incidents and five times as many conflict fatalities compared to stronger democracies. And data for the past decade shows that hybrid regimes in sub-Saharan Africa are seven times as likely to experience a coup or attempted coup compared to democracies.

There is a tendency to judge elections in hybrid regimes as “good enough” unless the fraud and violence are egregiously obvious. In February, for example, the U.S. State Department congratulated the declared winner of Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election, even though the election was widely criticized by observers for targeted violence, lack of transparency, significant voter disenfranchisement, and vote manipulation in some states.

When elections are held in these circumstances, and international observers note that the ballots were properly cast and counted and then certify such elections to be genuinely competition, they are doing the world a disservice. We need a new vocabulary to describe this phenomenon. Are such elections free? Technically, yes -- but they are also profoundly unfair.