Non-Democratic Politics: Authoritarianism, Dictatorship and Democratization.

• Author: McKinnon, Malcolm
• Position: Book review

NON-DEMOCRATIC POLITICS: Authoritarianism, Dictatorship and Democratization

Author: Xavier Marquez

Published by: Palgrave, London, 2017, 273pp, 75 [pounds sterling].

In the week this review was drafted, opposition political figures were in the news--and in strife--in countries as diverse as Venezuela, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Maldives (a tragic death), Uganda, Zambia, Turkey and Russia. Xavier Marquezs Non-Democratic Politics makes sense of this pervasive phenomenon and deserves to be as widely read in New Zealand as in any place where people are interested and anxious about the fate of democracy in seemingly 'dark times'.

Non-Democratic Politics has the form of a university text, with chapter introductions, subsections, conclusions and case studies presented in sometimes tantalising topic boxes: 'constitutional parodies'; 'rituals of mourning and the personality cult in North Korea. Marquez is a political scientist (at Victoria University) and draws extensively on social science statistical method to develop his arguments. This approach pushes at times against the practicality of treating the world's very diverse polities as interchangeable (can useful generalisations be arrived at when China, Iraq and Tonga are units in the same data set?), but in fact Marquez at all times informs his findings with a sensitivity to historical specificities.

The subtitle--authoritarianism, dictatorship and democratisation --provides a guide to the book's content and structure, but for 'non-democracy' itself Marquez sensibly adapts Adam Przeworski's no-nonsense even brutal definition: democracies are political systems in which parties--governments--can lose elections; by extension, non-democracies are those in which they cannot.

That binary is shaped by an important wrinkle, however. Marquez points out that ever since modern democracy's advent more than 200 years ago it has shaped the forms of authoritarian rule. In recent times, this has meant multiparty elections, now the practice in more than 70 per cent of authoritarian regimes. Such 'competitive authoritarianism' captures the reality that 'most authoritarian regimes [in recent times] do not look very different from democracies'. But--and it is a big but--opposition figures 'compete against incumbents in a playing field that is neither free nor fair'.

Marquez's book is not particularly normative or teleological though there is no mistaking his preference for democracy over its opposite. But three of its...