This Workshop examines the functions and significance of elections in hybrid regimes where political competition is genuine yet unfair. We aim to (1) clarify the multiple roles elections play (e.g. legitimation, co-optation, competition and control, (2) specify the institutional, cultural, historical, and informational conditions that shape electoral outcomes, and (3) develop new conceptual tools to understand electoral practices in hybrid regimes. Our objectives include advancing new conceptual and analytical tools, developing comparative insights, and using multiple methodological approaches such as event data, survey/field experiments and case studies across regions and time.
Elections in hybrid regimes create unpredictability, but these outcomes are deliberately constrained by a series of factors that we prefer to label 'conditioned uncertainties'. Rulers narrow the range of possible outcomes through media manipulation, legal engineering, patronage, selective repression, and administrative bias while retaining the facade of electoral competition. Opposition parties may still win office at the subnational level, yet executive office rarely changes hands. Despite a growing literature on electoral authoritarianism, the extant scholarship lacks a unified and comprehensive framework to understand these trends.
Our theme builds on and bridges existing scholarship on regime classification by exploring how and to what extent inter-party competition occurs in hybrid regimes. We plan to examine the repertoires of manipulation for authoritarian incumbents and opposition strategies to address these challenges. Our Workshop also speaks to new methodological frontiers, such as text-as-data for media bias, event data on harassment, geospatial audits of turnout anomalies, causal designs around legal shocks or observation missions, philosophical approaches and mixed-method fieldwork that reveals the mechanisms behind aggregate patterns.
Although elections have recently become prevalent, their democratising potential is increasingly undermined by a global wave of autocratisation. Bringing together scholars from diverse analytical and methodological backgrounds, this Workshop aims to build a new research agenda that explores the multifaceted role of elections in illiberal contexts across regions. Our objective is to raise new questions, develop new conceptual and theoretical insights, and increase our stock of knowledge on the broader role of elections.
1: What new concepts and practices capture elections as a 'technology of rule' in hybrid regimes?
2: How do 'conditioned uncertainties' differ across regime types and regions?
3: When and how do elections matter in preserving or undermining authoritarian rule?
4: How do opposition actors navigate 'conditioned uncertainty' in elections?
5: What is the role of the media during electoral campaigns?
1: Theoretical papers defining and exploring the role of elections in hybrid regimes.
2: Papers from different disciplines which bridge the different dimensions of electoral competition.
3: Diverse methodological approaches: event-data studies, survey/field experiments and comparative case studies.
4: Papers about electoral integrity, electoral violence and fraud
5: Papers about media control, administrative bias and observer mission variation.
