Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Elections, Electoral Fraud and Political Conflicts in Authoritarian Regimes

该奖项符合SEC第五章B组的要求。该项目探讨了独裁政权中选举操纵和选举后政治冲突的决定因素，重点关注中亚国家，这是世界上对美国国家安全利益至关重要的地区。尽管政治竞争受到严格限制，但大多数现代独裁国家仍举行选举。虽然最近对威权政治的研究开始阐明威权选举的各种功能，但目前尚不清楚独裁者如何决定选举舞弊的程度，以及导致选举后抗议和领导层更迭的情况。该项目的学术价值与其对威权选举及其后果的理论和分析方法的发展有关。该项目对在独裁政权下举行相对自由和公平的选举的好处和成本进行了建模，构建了威权选举理论，并推导出可检验的假设，以解释威权政权中选举舞弊和政治冲突的差异。为了严格检验理论命题，该项目使用了一种混合方法，包括对跨国数据集的统计调查，以及对哈萨克斯坦和吉尔吉斯斯坦实地考察过程中获得的访谈和原始量化数据的分析。这项研究将通过关注独裁者在选举中面临的两难境地的重要性，为威权政治的研究做出贡献：选举越公平和自由，选举结果就越可信，以传达政权的力量。然而，更公平和自由的选举使独裁者更难取得压倒性胜利，这可能会暴露独裁者的弱点，从而助长选举后的冲突，如政变和民众起义。之前的研究没有考虑到大获全胜的必然性和选举结果的可信度之间的权衡，尽管人们认为舞弊和冲突被认为受到独裁者如何从战略上处理这一选举困境的严重影响。这个项目揭示了威权统治中独裁者和精英之间的权力平衡，探索了独裁者应对这种困境的方式，以及独裁者何时可以利用威权选举来实现政权稳定。该理论建立了一个自相矛盾的假设，即更强大的独裁者对选举舞弊的依赖较少。该理论还预测，当独裁者未能将选举舞弊的程度与他们与精英事实上的权力平衡相匹配时，选举就会引发政治更迭和民众抗议。更广泛的影响尤其与该项目对政策制定者、民主化和发展的贡献有关。鉴于选举专制现象日益增多，以及选举监督做法的国际通行准则，政策制定者可能会得出结论，通过制裁迫使独裁者实行自由和公正的选举是促进民主化的有效战略。然而，该项目表明，现实可能会更加微妙。如果国际政策制定者对独裁统治中的权力平衡一无所知，强加的竞争性选举可能会在选举后成为冲突的根源，或者通过这种“自由化”选举成为合法的强大的独裁领导人。该项目的理论和经验贡献将提高我们对威权政治的理解，从而帮助美国和国际组织制定更有效的战略，使威权国家民主化，而不会遭受严重的暴力冲突。更具体地说，通过理解选举困境和威权领导人的战略性质，我们将能够了解在什么条件下国际援助和制裁将更有可能导致发展中国家建立民主、和平的社会。了解这些条件对美国显然很重要，美国的国家安全和世界经济利益都受到其他国家民主的普及和政治稳定的重大影响。

This award satisfies Division B, Title V, Sec. 543 of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013 (P.L. 113-6, enacted on March 26, 2013).The project explores the determinants of electoral manipulation and post-electoral political conflict in dictatorships, focusing on countries in Central Asia, an area of the world that has been critical for US national security interests. Most modern autocracies hold elections even though political competition is severely limited. While recent research on authoritarian politics begins to illuminate various functions of authoritarian elections, it is unclear how dictators decide the degree of electoral fraud to perpetrate and circumstances producing post-electoral protests and leadership change. The intellectual merit of the project is associated with its development of theoretical and analytical approaches to authoritarian elections and their aftermaths. Modeling both benefits and costs of holding relatively free and fair elections in dictatorships, the project constructs a theory of authoritarian elections and derives testable hypotheses to explain variation in electoral fraud and political conflict in authoritarian regimes. To rigorously test the theoretical propositions, the project uses a mixed methods approach, including statistical investigations of cross-national datasets and analyses of interviews and original quantitative data obtained in the course of fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.This study will contribute to studies of authoritarian politics by focusing on the importance of a dilemma that dictators face at elections: The more fair and free elections are, the more credible election results become to convey regime strength. More fair and free elections, however, make it more difficult for dictators to achieve a landslide victory, which may result in revealing the weakness of dictators and hence contribute to post-electoral conflict, such as coups and popular uprisings. Previous studies have not taken into account this tradeoff between the certainty of winning big and the credibility of election results, despite the fact that fraud and conflict are thought to be heavily affected by how strategically dictators deal with this electoral dilemma. Shedding light on the balance of power between the dictator and elites in authoritarian rule, this project explores the way in which dictators cope with this dilemma and consequently when dictators can use authoritarian elections to achieve regime stability. The theory establishes a paradoxical hypothesis that stronger dictators rely less on election fraud. The theory also predicts that when dictators fail to match the level of election fraud with their de facto power balance with elites, elections trigger political turnover and popular protests.The broader impacts are especially connected to the project's contributions to policy-makers, democratization, and development. Given the increasing phenomenon of electoral autocracies and prevailing international norms of election monitoring practices, policymakers might be tempted to conclude that forcing dictators to introduce free and fair elections via sanctions is an effective strategy to promote democratization. The project, however, suggests that realities might be more nuanced. If international policymakers are ignorant of the balance of power in dictatorship, imposed competitive elections might either become a source of conflict after elections or legitimate strong, dictatorial leaders through such "liberalized" elections. The theoretical and empirical contributions of the project will improve our understanding of authoritarian politics, thereby helping the United States as well as international organizations develop more effective strategies to democratize authoritarian countries without suffering serious violent conflict. More specifically, making sense of the electoral dilemma and the strategic nature of authoritarian leaders, we would be able to know the conditions under which international assistance and sanctions will be more likely to lead to democratic, peaceful society in developing countries. Knowing such conditions would be obviously important to the US, which national security and economic interests in the world are both significantly influenced by the pervasiveness of democracy and political stability in other countries.