No dia 16 de maio, Ian Batista (The Carter Center) será o orador convidado do Seminário do Grupo de Investigação SPARC Atitudes Sociais e Políticas: Resiliência e Mudança. Nesta sessão será debatido o artigo Compared Autocratization: Attacks on the Electoral Cycle (1990-2021).

The silent transition, without a coup d'état, from a democratic regime to an electoral autocracy implies considering that the elections in that country were distorted at some point. This paper presents the criteria adopted to empirically investigate the proposed phenomenon. It considers two paths toward electoral autocratization, democratic backsliding months before the election or electoral manipulation tactics during or after election day. The qualitative analysis of 35 cases of such transitions, identifying measures adopted by autocratizing leaders that affected the electoral cycle, composes the Compared Autocratization – Attacks on the Electoral Cycle (1990-2021) dataset and web application. Descriptive statistics on the categories of autocratization and the stages of the electoral cycle affected by the measures foster the discussion of patterns among the two groups.

Note from the author: This paper is a piece of my PhD dissertation from earlier this year. It describes the data collection of measures that harmed the electoral cycle in processes of autocratization, and then presents descriptive statistics. Hence, so far, this is still a very descriptive paper. I'm still trying to find the most interesting contribution to literature and the broad community. Any suggestions for research questions that could be explored using this data or framework would be highly appreciated. 

Ian Batista holds a PhD in Political Science from the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, with a visiting period at the University of Notre Dame (US). He is a Junior Fellow at the 2024 cohort of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since 2021, he has served as a Consultant in the role of Project Assistant at The Carter Center, producing research on electoral integrity and providing assistance to observation missions such as Brazil, Tunisia, and Venezuela. Democratic backsliding, electoral integrity, and autocratization strategies are among his research interests. 

O evento terá lugar pelas 14h30 na Sala 2 do ICS-ULisboa e online.