Coordinating Against Auctocracy: A New Index of Pre-electoral Coordination

Elections in hybrid regimes generate an inherent tension between genuine competition and autocrats’ consistent efforts to tilt the playing field in their favor. While autocratic incumbents structure the electoral environment through institutional engineering and control, the uncertainty of elections is never fully eliminated; instead, it is conditioned. This conditioned uncertainty not only influences incumbents' strategies but also shapes the strategic options available to opposition actors. Under these conditions, pre-electoral coordination emerges as one of the few mechanisms through which opposition parties can meaningfully challenge incumbents. Yet such coordination succeeds in some countries but fails in others, raising the question of what conditions enable (or hinder) effective pre-electoral coordination. While existing research addresses this puzzle by identifying the institutional-structural (e.g., electoral system design, coalition size) and political (e.g., repression level, regime uncertainty, resource asymmetry, ideological distance) factors that drive opposition unity and fragmentation in hybrid regimes, it largely relies on single-case studies or paired comparisons. Addressing this gap, this study develops a novel pre-electoral coordination index that conceptualizes pre-electoral coordination as the joint product of institutional-structural incentives and the political costs associated with pre-electoral alliance formation. The index treats pre-electoral coordination as a multidimensional phenomenon shaped by (i) the strategic necessity of forming alliances, (ii) the organizational depth of cooperation, (iii) the mechanisms through which parties coordinate their pre-electoral strategies, and (iv) the ideological and structural compatibility among alliance members. It also incorporates (v) the stability of alliances over the electoral cycle, and (vi) the territorial scope of coordination. Moving beyond binary classifications of pre-electoral alliances, this framework views pre-electoral coordination along a continuum and enables cross-country analysis of how opposition alliances emerge, endure, and challenge autocratic incumbents in hybrid regimes. To demonstrate the analytical utility of this framework, the study applies the index to opposition alliances in three recent elections in hybrid regimes: Poland (2023), Hungary (2022), and Turkey (2023). Despite facing similar institutional constraints and conditioned uncertainties, these cases demonstrate how different configurations of the six index components lead to distinct patterns of opposition coordination: enabling effective alliance formation in Poland, producing fragile and ultimately unsuccessful cooperation in Hungary, and generating a broad yet unstable alliance that eventually failed in Turkey.