Voting in a Hybrid Regime: Explaining the 2018 Bangladeshi Election

Ali Riaz

Jun 2019 · Springer

About this eBook

This Pivot explores the mechanism of election manipulation in ostensibly democratic but essentially authoritarian systems called the hybrid regime, using the 2018 parliamentary elections in Bangladesh as an example. The 2018 election has delivered an unprecedented victory to the incumbent Bangladesh Awami League. Elections pose serious dilemmas for the leaders of hybrid regimes. While contested elections bolster their claims of democracy and augment their legitimacy, they can also threaten the status quo. Faced with the challenge, the incumbents tend to hold stage-managed elections. This book offers incisive examination of Bangladesh’s political environment, rigorous scrutiny of the roles of state institutions including the law enforcing agencies, and meticulous analysis of election results. It also fills in a gap in the extant hybrid regime literature which seldom explores the strategies of engineered elections.

About the author

Ali Riaz is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Illinois State University, USA. He also holds the Thomas E Eimermann Professorship. Riaz previously worked as a Broadcast Journalist at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London and served as a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at Washington D.C. His publications include Bangladesh: A Political History since Independence (2016).