Topic summary
Authoritarian regime
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Authoritarianism.
Competitive authoritarian regimes
Another type of authoritarian regime is the competitive authoritarian regime, a type of civilian regime that arose in the post-Cold War era. In a competitive authoritarian regime, "formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but ... incumbents' abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents." The term was coined by Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way in a 2002 Journal of Democracy article, and later expanded upon in their 2010 book of the same name, to discuss a type of hybrid regime that emerged during and after the Cold War.