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Nearly two decades ago, our article on "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism" appeared in these pages. Today competitive authoritarianism remains alive and well. Membership in the category was relatively fluid during the post-Cold War period, as Christopher Carothers has observed. 2 Some competitive authoritarian regimes democratized (including Peru, Slovakia, and Taiwan), while others hardened into full-blown authoritarianism (such as Belarus, Cambodia, and Russia). Still others (including Albania, Benin, and Ukraine) careened back and forth between democracy and competitive authoritarianism. he 35 competitive authoritarian regimes we examined in our 2010 book Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War followed diverging paths between 1990 and 2019: Fifteen democratized; 4 six democratized but later regressed into (usually competitive) authoritarianism; 5 four slid into full-scale authoritarianism; 6 and ten remained continuously competitive authoritarian. ut as competitive authoritarianism has broken down in some countries, it has emerged in others. Some regimes, as in Guinea, Kyrgyzstan, and Uganda, liberalized from hegemonic to competitive authoritarian rule. Others, as in Bolivia, Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, and Venezuela, decayed from democracy into competitive authoritarianism (Venezuela has since crossed the line to full authoritarianism). 8 Overall, the number of competitive authoritarian regimes has remained relatively
Levitsky et al. (Wed,) studied this question.