Civil Disobedience in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes

Can civil disobedience be justified in ‘hybrid’ or ‘electoral authoritarian’ regimes—i.e., political regimes which hold elections but are not democratic (Diamond 2002, Levitsky & Way 2002, Levitsky & Way 2010, Schedler 2013, Scheppele 2013 & 2018)? If so, do we need a special justificatory account of civil disobedience for such regimes? In this paper, I develop a novel theory of civil disobedience for hybrid or electoral authoritarian regimes. I argue that neither liberal nor radical democratic accounts of civil and uncivil disobedience are suitable for such contexts. We need a regime-specific theory because such regimes use and abuse the law in specific ways. On the one hand, standard liberal accounts of civil disobedience (e.g., Rawls 1999) characteristically apply to nearly just societies. Such accounts do not assume a profoundly unjust society—as hybrid or electoral authoritarian regimes typically are—where the authority of law is deprived of most of its value calls for an account of civil disobedience. Disobedience is often justified but theoretically uninteresting in such regimes (cf. Brownley 2012, Delmas 2018). On the other hand, radical democratic accounts of civil disobedience (e.g., Markovits 2005, Celikates 2016) recognize the justifiability of disobedience in non-democratic (and non-liberal) regimes, as their main normative concern shifts away from the authority of just law. However, while such accounts are applicable to hybrid or electoral authoritarian regimes, they also fail to show what is special about the justification of disobedience, and specifically ‘civil’ disobedience, in such regimes. In contrast to both standard liberal and radical democratic strands, I argue that the justification of civil disobedience in hybrid or electoral authoritarian regimes is theoretically interesting and regime-specific. The account rests on the observation that hybrid or electoral authoritarian regimes—as studies on the public law of autocracies have shown Przeworski (2014, Tushnet 2015)—aim to create a public appearance of democratic, legitimate authority: institutions such as elections, an elected legislature, and even judicial review exist; they just do not serve to uphold democratic or liberal values but rather to entrench the power of the regime party. This appearance or ‘façade’ (Scheppele 2013) of liberal democratic institutions is an impediment to both effective domestic resistance against hybrid or electoral authoritarian regimes and to effective international assistance promoting their democratization. I argue that citizens of such regimes have a collective duty to unmask the false appearance of the legitimacy of the regime. Civil disobedience can be justified in these regimes as an effective way to discharge the duty of unmasking illegitimacy.