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After the Revolution: Long-Term Effects of Electoral Revolutions

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After the Revolution: Long-Term Effects of Electoral Revolutions Problems of Post-Communism ISSN: 1075-8216 (Print) 1557-783X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mppc20 After the Revolution Long-Term Effects of Electoral Revolutions Grigore Pop-Eleches & Graeme Robertson To cite this article: Grigore Pop-Eleches & Graeme Robertson (2014) After the Revolution, Problems of Post-Communism, 61:4, 3-22, DOI: 10.2753/PPC1075-8216610401 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2753/PPC1075-8216610401 Published online: 07 Dec 2014. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 503 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 2 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=mppc20 After the Revolution Long-Term Effects of Electoral Revolutions Grigore Pop-Eleches and Graeme Robertson Although none of the color HE color revolutions in the former Soviet bloc and Tthe uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa revolutions has proved to be demonstrate once again that dictators can be overthrown by pressure from the streets and that seemingly stable completely successful in bringing authoritarian regimes can unravel in a matter of weeks. about long-term democratic The capacity of such revolutions to contribute to longer- term democratic development is, however, far less certain. change, differences in outcomes While politicians and journalists highlight the transforma- tive power of revolutions in the street, political scientists among them cast light on and sociologists tend to be more skeptical, stressing the both the possibilities and the importance of deep structural factors in shaping longer- term regime trajectories. limitations that countries face In this article, we look at four key cases in former communist states where authoritarian incumbents were when liberalization opportunities overthrown in large part in response to protest in the present themselves. Comparison streets and attempt to identify and explain the long-term effects of such “revolutions.” Specifically, we consider of Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and the cases of Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. Given the relatively small number of cases and the high Kyrgyzstan is instructive. degree of correlation between different domestic and in- ternational factors that shape outcomes, our goal is not to test general theories about the effects of electoral “revo- lutions” on democratization but rather to look in some detail at the causal mechanisms at work in each case and to see how fairly similar political “shocks” reverberate in different socioeconomic and political environments. Rather than focusing on why each of the revolutions has disappointed many observers (Haring and Cecire 2013), we examine differences in outcomes among them GRIGORE POP-ELECHES is associate professor of politics and public and to cast light on both the possibilities and the limitations international affairs at Princeton University. GRAEME ROBERTSON is associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina, that countries face when liberalization opportunities Chapel Hill. present themselves. We show, for example, how varia- Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 61, no. 4, July–August 2014, pp. 3–22. © 2014 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. Permissions: www.copyright.com ISSN 1075–8216 (print)/ISSN 1557–783X (online) DOI: 10.2753/PPC1075-8216610401 Pop-Eleches and Robertson After the Revolution 3 tions in postrevolutionary governance trajectories, such They all centered on protest against electoral fraud and as Georgia’s impressive progress against corruption or involved aggressive popular mobilization on the part Ukraine’s more competitive electoral process, can be ex- of the opposition in alliance with international forces. plained by the nature of governing coalitions, which in Their shared success meant that the “electoral model” turn are rooted in structural and contextual differences of transition became the default approach to opposition such as the importance of ethnic and regional cleavages organizing in the post-Soviet space (Bunce and Wolchik or the distribution of economic resources. However, we 2011; Karatnycky and Ackerman 2005). also show how structural factors can work in ways that It is now more than a decade since the color revolu- are difficult to predict based on existing theory. In par- tions began and none of the revolt leaders remains in ticular, we show that state autonomy, a factor often asso- office.I n Serbia, the 2012 elections marked the return of ciated with democratization, can sometimes represent an two parties associated with the Milošević regime—the obstacle to progress, whereas ethnic and regional cleav- Serbian Progressive Party (a splinter of the extreme na- ages—usually thought to make democratization more tionalist Serbian Radical Party) and the former main par- difficult—can act as a barrier to authoritarian consolida- ty of power, the Serbian Socialist Party. In Kyrgyzstan, tion. Thus, we argue that variation in outcomes across President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who had emerged as the the four cases confirms some of what we think we know preeminent leader from the 2005 Tulip Revolution, was about democratization but also challenges us to rethink himself overthrown as a result of street protests in 2010. the importance of context in influencing general rela- In Georgia, the revolutionary leadership is also gone, tionships between democratization and structure. with Mikheil Saakashvili being replaced by Giorgi Mar- gvelashvili in the October 2013 presidential elections. In Ukraine, the Orange Revolution ended with Viktor Yanu- Popular Protest and Democratization kovich’s victory in the 2010 presidential elections. Even When communism collapsed across Eastern Europe and though Yanukovich was overthrown in February 2014, the Soviet Union, hopes were sky-high that the “other the clear first-round defeat of Yulia Tymoshenko in new Europe” would soon take its rightful place in the com- presidential elections in May 2014 suggests that the Eu- munity of democratic nations. Moreover, with the end of roMaidan protests should not be interpreted as a revival the seventy-year communist detour in the former Russian of the Orange Revolution. As a result, it is a good time Empire, many believed that the Third Wave of democrati- to reflect on the medium-term political consequences of zation would quickly spread far beyond Europe and well the four color revolutions. into Eurasia. The high hopes of the early 1990s, however, The conclusions that we draw, it should be noted, are quickly ran into a complex reality in which the more based on analysis conducted before the EuroMaidan Western, richer, higher-capacity, and more homogeneous protests and revolution in Ukraine. These events are still states did indeed make a rather rapid transition to democ- unfolding as we write and lie beyond the scope of the racy, while most of the countries without such structural current analysis, though several features of our analy- advantages either had great difficulty in consolidating sis—poor performance in fighting corruption combined democracy or did not even embark on democratization. with relatively competitive politics and autonomous Nevertheless, just as the academic community ex- security forces—play a clear role in the revolutionary perienced disappointment with the results of the first events of 2014. post-Soviet decade, events on the ground seemed to With the passage of time since the color revolutions, give democratization a major push forward. Street analysts have become much more skeptical of their power protests brought to an end the horrors of the Milošević to bring meaningful democratic progress to the countries regime in Serbia in 2000; and self-described demo- in question. Kalandadze and Orenstein (2009) argue that cratic forces rapidly overthrew authoritarian leaders while Serbia and Ukraine have seen some improvement in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. These so-called in the extent of democracy, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan “color revolutions” were greeted with great excitement have been stagnant at best. Others have been even more (Aslund and McFaul 2006) and were seen as kick- skeptical. Henry Hale (2005) proposes that to interpret starting stalled democratization projects in the region. the color revolutions in terms of democratization is to Moreover, analysis of the protests suggested that they misunderstand the nature of the events. Rather than be- shared several common elements that suggested a mod- ing conflicts between democratic and autocratic forces, el for democratic advancement in the post-Soviet space. as both journalists and participants perceived these revo- 4 Problems of Post-Communism July/August 2014 lutions, the events actually consisted of collapsing and of certain important dimensions of democratic governance subsequently reforming patronage networks. The task as measured by the Nations in Transit (NIT) indicator facing the postrevolutionary leaders, then, had less to do series: (1) electoral process, which covers the quality of with building democracy than with reasserting control elections and electoral processes, including party develop- over clientelistic politics. In this context, expectations of ment and popular participation; (2) media independence, democratic improvements were misplaced. which gauges press freedom in terms of both legislation Nevertheless, as we show in the next section, the re- and actual outcomes; (3) judicial framework and inde-
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