From Hope to Hesitation: The Reinterpretation of Elections in an Autocratizing Context

Elections in hybrid regimes embody a paradox: they are simultaneously institutionalized markers of democratic aspiration and tools of authoritarian control. Nowhere is this ambiguity more pronounced than in Kyrgyzstan, the only post-Soviet state outside the Baltics to experience three popular revolutions yet also one of the region’s most rapidly autocratizing systems since 2020. This paper examines how citizens interpret the meaning and purpose of elections in this context of conditioned uncertainty, and how these evolving interpretations shape participation. I advance the argument that revolutionary legacies fundamentally structure how individuals understand what elections can achieve. For many citizens, elections have come to symbolize a cycle of hope and disappointment: moments of anticipated change that repeatedly fail to transform institutions. As a result, elections become decoupled from expectations of accountability and are reinterpreted instead through frameworks of fatigue, distrust, and pragmatic adaptation to restricted political space. Understanding elections in a hybrid regime therefore requires attending not only to the institutional environment but also to the lived experience of revolutionary mobilization and autocratic consolidation. Empirically, the paper draws on two complementary sources. First, a survey experiment conducted in 2024 tests whether activating memories of Kyrgyzstan’s 2005, 2010, and 2020 revolutions influences individual inclination to vote. Primed respondents report significantly lower voting frequency and reduced motivation to participate, indicating that revolutionary memory suppresses electoral engagement by heightening perceptions of inefficacy and disappointment. This identifies a causal mechanism linking revolutionary experience to participation. Second, I analyze four waves of focus group discussions (2019, 2023, 2024, 2025) collected across Bishkek, Osh, Issyk-Kul, and Batken. These discussions trace how citizens make sense of elections in an increasingly uncertain political landscape. Participants describe elections as predictable in outcome but unpredictable in consequence: a source of risk, potential repression, or superficial change rather than genuine contestation. Many express “revolution fatigue,” narrating elections not as sites of choice but as procedural markers in a political cycle dominated by elite bargaining and public disillusionment. Under tightening autocratization, citizens shift toward what I conceptualize as modified Hirschmanian responses: Exit (withdrawal and non-voting), low-risk Voice (symbolic, digital, or issue-specific participation), and Conditional Loyalty (strategic acceptance of strong leadership and stability-oriented voting). Taken together, the experiment and qualitative data illuminate how elections in hybrid regimes acquire layered meanings that shape participation beyond institutional incentives. Revolutionary memory depresses voting propensity, while autocratization reshapes citizens’ expectations of elections and narrows the perceived returns to electoral engagement. In this way, elections become sites of conditioned uncertainty: simultaneously necessary, constrained, and hollowed of transformative potential. The paper contributes to debates on electoral behavior in hybrid regimes by showing how past mobilization, perceived institutional stagnation, and lived experience of authoritarian tightening interact to reshape electoral participation. It demonstrates that understanding elections in uncertain environments requires accounting for not only strategic behavior but also the narratives through which citizens interpret political possibility.