Why do authoritarian leaders lose elections? This question is important for three reasons. First, regimes that combine authoritarian politics with electoral competition have proliferated over the course of the global wave of democratization. For example, these hybrid political systems have been estimated to comprise between one-fourth and one-fifth of all regimes that currently exist in the world. Second, elections have a habit of foreshadowing important changes in politics. The rise, consolidation, and termination of both democracy and dictatorship, for instance, seem to be very sensitive to the electoral calendar. Finally, because incumbents have more resources than their opponents in mixed regimes, electoral turnovers in such political settings are rare events. The norm of continuity in leadership has led some analysts to characterize elections in these political contexts not as a constraint on what authoritarian leaders can do, but rather “as a means by which dictators hold on to power.”

The purpose of this book has been to address the puzzle of electoral turnover in mixed regimes by comparing two sets of elections that took place in postcommunist Europe and Eurasia from 1998 to 2008. In the first set, we placed six elections that had the similar and surprising outcome of producing a victory for the opposition over the authoritarian incumbent or his designated successor.