Measuring Authoritarian Regimes with Multiparty Elections

Abstract

In order to study the causes and consequences of multiparty elections in authoritarian regimes, I first need to identify the universe of relevant elections. For this purpose, I explain what constitutes an authoritarian regime more generally. Following the work by Schumpeter (1946), I rely on a minimalist conception of political regimes. Extending from a dichotomous classification into democracy and authoritarianism, I differentiate between authoritarian regimes based on their level of political competition and thus identify regimes that allow for multiparty elections. Last but not least, I introduce an original dataset on election outcomes under authoritarianism that can be used to measure the actual level of electoral competition within multiparty authoritarian regimes.