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Competitive authoritarianism in Africa revisited

Editorial
Part of the Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft – Sonderhefte book series (ZfVP)

Abstract

Competitive authoritarianism has emerged as a major concept in the study of political regimes. The introduction of this special issue revisits Levitsky and Way’s seminal study Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Although Africa is the world region with the highest absolute number of competitive authoritarian regimes, political scientists working on Africa have rarely engaged with Levitsky and Way’s modern classic. In this introduction, we summarize their arguments, outline the empirical findings for Africa, and review the critiques. In doing so we provide the background for the contributions to this special issue.

Keywords

Comparative politics Political regimes Autocratization Competitive authoritarianism Africa 
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Copyright information

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Political StudiesUniversity of Cape TownCape TownSouth Africa
  2. 2.Department of Political ScienceUniversity of FloridaGainesvilleUSA

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