In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, political scientists devoted themselves to the study of countries moving toward democracy. Proof of this are the four volumes written by Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead in the 1990s, called Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, which analyze the moments, factors, and actors that gave way to democratization in Latin America and post-Soviet Europe.

Now, during the second decade of the 21st century, social scientists are interested in understanding the setbacks, institutional erosion and the rise of authoritarian leaders in various parts of the world. Hence, the title of this article, Transitions from a Democratic Government, alluding to the texts mentioned above and the authoritarian phenomenon that several nations are currently experiencing.

One argument that has been used to question these texts is that numerous of the countries analyzed at the time were not necessarily in a democratic transition. The notion of democracy was reduced to free and competitive elections and alternating presidencies. Under these criteria, many countries such as Poland, El Salvador, Bolivia, or Singapore would be considered democracies.

Democracy goes beyond elections: it implies the division of powers, electoral integrity, respect for the Constitution and respect for human rights. In the 1990s, several countries had implemented elections, the ruling parties lost power and adopted free market economies. The premise was that the adoption of these conditions entailed democratization, so the countries were at this midpoint between authoritarianism and democracy.

It should be noted that the concept of transition has been much debated by the scientific community and a consensus has been reached that transitions are a long process of advances and setbacks that have no particular end. That is to say, given the difficulty of analyzing transitions to democracy or authoritarianism, they do not establish a point of conclusion whether a country has reached the fullness of democracy or has reached a totalitarian regime.

That is why, currently, when analyzing countries such as Russia, Hungary, Poland, Mexico, El Salvador or Malaysia, it is mentioned that they are hybrid regimes, which in the 1990s began their democratization processes but at some point showed setbacks. However, neither can they be classified as dictatorships or totalitarian regimes because they do not show characteristics to be defined as such. 

This is why the category of hybrid regimes has been used to define countries with authoritarian and democratic overtones. The political science debate has been marked by concepts that have emerged as a way of studying nations. For example, the competitive authoritarianism coined by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way; the illiberal democracies of Fareed Zakaria, the sultanistic regimes of Juan Linz, the electoral authoritarianisms of Andreas Schedler or the democratura of Pierre Rosanvallon.

In the 21st century, political scientists have before us a palette of regimes that must be studied and analyzed in depth in order to understand the evolution of countries. One relevant factor is that, unlike classic authoritarianism, power is no longer assaulted, but is now competed for in elections. When they win power, the system and the rules are demolished or changed from within.

Leaders such as Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador weakened the institutional system and in some cases colonized the powers of the State to submit them to their will. In Latin America, these two cases are emblematic of what represents the rise of charismatic leaders who embedded their political and ideological project in the State, not only in government. Thus, these nations were conceived as hybrid regimes by various projects such as V-DEM, Freedom House and International IDEA.

In Europe, Russia, Hungary, and Poland have been catalogued as illiberal democracies, in which their main distinctive feature is that liberalism has ceased to be a pillar of the State; then, the State is ruled by the ideology of the leader in power, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and the Law and Justice Party, respectively. They exercise control over the opposition and civil society, but they do not make it disappear in its totality and in some cases the opponents reach positions of power.

In Asia, there is a range of countries that have hegemonic party regimes: Singapore, the rise of authoritarian leaders such as Prabowo Subianto in Indonesia, the authoritarian legacy in the Philippines of Rodrigo Duterte, the one-party regime in China of Xi Jing Ping or the dictatorship of Kim Jong-un in North Korea. These countries did not necessarily undertake transitions to democracy or liberalizing reforms to make way for pluralism; in some cases they never arrived, such as China and North Korea.

On the other hand, the legacy of tyrannies such as the Marcos dynasty and the iron fist of Rodrigo Duterte are elements that to this day mark the fate of the Philippines. In Singapore, the hegemonic People’s Action Party has ruled since independence and remains the cornerstone of the political system. Meanwhile, countries like Indonesia, which had a fragile democracy, are today led by strong characters like Subianto, who have a long repressive history and were formed during the decolonization era in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century.  

The world is witnessing the emergence of characters that challenge the status quo, promote anti-system agendas and promise a true democracy that is marked by authoritarian overtones. The political offers challenge liberalism and thus reach the highest levels of leadership of nations; it is not the first time this has happened and it will not be the last. Reality is showing us that transitions are not only towards democracy, but can also be towards authoritarianism.

_{*Machine translation proofread by Janaína da Silva.}