For many years, political scientist Steven Levitsky has studied regimes he called “competitive authoritarianisms”. He distinguished these regimes from democracy on the one hand and full-scale authoritarianism on the other. Some of what he has said about them:
Competitive authoritarian regimes are civilian regimes in which formal
democratic institutions are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in
which fraud, civil liberties violations, and abuse of state and media resources so s...
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