When people worry about democracy backsliding, one word usually comes to mind: “fascism” or “dictatorship.” These words bring up images of tanks, banned elections, or one party in total control. But political scientists who study how democracies actually die point to something quieter. It’s also more common. They call it competitive authoritarianism.
The term comes from Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way. They coined it while researching hybrid regimes in the post-Cold War world. It describes a system where the formal machinery of democracy still exists. Elections, courts, a free press, and opposition parties still function, at least some of the time. Nobody cancels the vote. Nobody shuts down the newspapers. But the playing field is no longer level. The people in power use the state itself to keep winning. They use its money, its law enforcement, and its regulatory levers, all without admitting that’s what they’re doing.
What It Looks Like in Practice
Competitive authoritarianism isn’t one dramatic event. It’s a set of everyday tools, used steadily and often legally.
State resources for the incumbent’s benefit
Government advertising budgets, public contracts, or regulatory approvals start flowing disproportionately to allies. They flow away from critics.
Recent examples:
- Public Citizen and the Revolving Door Project reported that the Trump administration awarded nearly $103 million in federal contracts and grants for the nation’s 250th anniversary. The money went to a network of entities controlled by Trump officials and political allies, with over 80% of the awards going toward a politicized series of events. (Source: Public Citizen)
- Senators Welch and Blumenthal are investigating a $143 million no-bid DHS ad contract. It was subcontracted to a firm with ties to Trump campaign veterans. (Source: NBC News)
- House Democrats opened an investigation into DHS immigration ads. They allege the contracts went to firms with Trump campaign ties and may have violated federal spending rules. (Source: Yahoo News)
- Rep. Garcia asked the DOD Inspector General to probe a $24 million Pentagon contract. It was awarded to a robotics firm employing Eric Trump. (Source: House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Democrats)
Selective enforcement of law
The same statute gets applied aggressively to opponents. It gets applied loosely, or not at all, to allies. Tax audits, licensing reviews, and prosecutions become tools of leverage rather than neutral processes.
Recent examples:
- Trump directed the DOJ to pursue charges against former FBI Director James Comey. He had publicly called on AG Pam Bondi to prosecute him. The prosecutor who refused to bring the case resigned or was fired before a Trump-appointed replacement secured the indictment. (Source: Time, NBC News)
- The DOJ opened an investigation into Sen. Elissa Slotkin after she urged military personnel to refuse illegal orders. This came alongside continuing scrutiny of NY AG Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff. (Source: Straight Arrow News)
- A Protect Democracy tracker documents a broader pattern. It includes a DOJ effort to build an internal architecture for prosecuting left-leaning protesters, and charges against a candidate who filmed herself being pushed by federal agents at an ICE facility. (Source: Protect Democracy)
Pressure on referees
Courts, election commissions, anti-corruption bodies, and the press are technically independent. But their leaders face firing, funding cuts, licensing threats, or lawsuits designed to make independence costly.
Recent examples:
- Trump revived his threat to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook over unproven mortgage-fraud allegations. He had first tried this and been blocked by the Supreme Court. Cook’s attorney called the allegations baseless, accusing Trump of trying to interfere with the Fed’s independence. (Source: CNBC)
- Democratic leaders, including Sen. Schumer, called the initial firing attempt “authoritarian overreach” that “shreds the independence of the Fed.” (Source: Fox News)
Media squeeze, not media ban
Outlets aren’t shut down outright. Instead, they’re bought out, starved of advertising, hit with defamation suits, or denied access, until self-censorship does the rest of the work.
Recent examples:
- ABC/Disney sued the FCC. They allege its early review of ABC’s broadcast licenses was retaliation tied to Trump’s anger over Jimmy Kimmel jokes and “The View.” The network’s suit states the administration wants to send a message: only favorable stories get told, or networks face the government’s coercive machinery. (Source: PBS)
- This followed ABC paying $15 million to settle a separate Trump defamation suit, and CBS/Paramount paying $16 million over a “60 Minutes” edit. Some free-speech advocates saw these as capitulation rather than cases the networks were likely to lose. (Source: The Free Speech Center)
- Trump had separately called for CBS to “lose its license” over the Harris “60 Minutes” interview. He told Fox News he would subpoena their records. (Source: Yahoo News)
Uneven playing field for opposition
Rivals can run for office, but they face barriers their opponents don’t. Frozen bank accounts, disqualification on technicalities, unequal airtime, or sudden legal jeopardy right before an election are common tactics.
Recent examples:
- Texas Gov. Abbott responded to a Democratic quorum-break over mid-decade redistricting with civil arrest warrants, suspended pay, docked office budgets, and $500-per-day fines. Sen. Cornyn said the FBI would help locate the absent lawmakers, a move Trump touted despite no criminal charges being filed. (Source: Texas Public Radio)
- Texas Republicans later imposed roughly $422,000 in penalties on the more than 50 Democratic members over the walkout. (Source: Houston Public Media)
- The redrawn map reportedly moved Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s residence into a neighboring district. Texas AG Paxton sued Beto O’Rourke’s group for funding the Democrats’ expenses during the walkout. (Source: The Hill)
Individually, each of these can happen in a healthy democracy too. Governments always favor allies somewhat. Prosecutors always have discretion. What defines competitive authoritarianism is the pattern and direction. The tilting consistently benefits incumbents. It weakens their opponents’ ability to compete. And it never quite crosses the line into outright abolishing the vote.
Why the Distinction Matters
Levitsky and Way’s follow-up point, laid out with Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die, isn’t that this framework is more “correct” than talking about fascism. It’s that it makes a different prediction, and predictions are useful.
Fascism, or a classic authoritarian takeover, predicts rupture. Think a coup, a suspended constitution, an obvious before-and-after moment that’s easy to identify because it’s designed to be seen. Competitive authoritarianism predicts the opposite: a slow, uneven decline. Formal democracy persists on paper for years, sometimes decades, while its substance erodes.
Elections keep happening. Sometimes the incumbent even loses one, especially early on. Courts issue real rulings, some of them against the government. From the outside, and often from the inside, things look mostly normal for a long time. That’s exactly what makes the erosion hard to see and hard to organize against. There’s no single moment that triggers alarm. Each individual step can be defended as ordinary politics, a policy dispute, or an isolated legal case.
This is why scholars in this tradition emphasize watching patterns over time rather than any single incident. A biased ruling, one hostile press law, one questionable investigation: any of these could be a one-off. It’s the accumulation, and the consistent direction of who benefits, that signals something structural rather than incidental.
Where the Framework Has Been Applied
Levitsky and Way originally developed the concept while studying regimes like Hungary under Viktor Orbán, Russia under Vladimir Putin’s early consolidation, Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, and Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In each case, elections continued. But incumbents used state media dominance, judicial appointments, and selective legal pressure on opponents to make the contest progressively less fair, even as it remained nominally open. Some of these countries later moved further toward more closed authoritarianism. Others have oscillated between more and less competitive phases.
Whether the term applies to any specific country at any specific moment is a matter of active, often contested debate among political scientists and journalists. Reasonable people disagree about where a given government sits on that spectrum, and about how much of what looks like tilting is actually just ordinary, if hardball, politics. That’s a judgment call. It depends on close, current analysis of a particular case, not something a general framework can settle on its own.
Why It’s Worth Knowing the Term
The point of learning this framework isn’t to have a scarier word to reach for. It’s closer to the opposite. It’s a more precise word, one that resists the urge to treat “still having elections” as proof that everything is fine. At the same time, it doesn’t require anyone to claim a coup is imminent.
It gives people a vocabulary for a real, well-documented category of political change. The danger isn’t that democracy disappears overnight. It’s that it gets hollowed out gradually enough that by the time the shift is obvious, the tools to reverse it have already been narrowed too.
If you want the fuller argument, Levitsky and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die is the accessible starting point. Levitsky and Way’s academic work, particularly their book Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War, is where the concept was originally built out in comparative detail.