17:45 - 20:00
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Daniel Gingerich
Discussant/s:
Sebastian Juhl
Meeting Room F

Daniel Gingerich, Jan Vogler
Self-Government Interrupted: Legacies of External Rule in Brazil and Poland

Marc S. Jacob
Citizens, Parties, Institutions: A Three-Stage Model of Democratic Backsliding

Gabriele Gratton, Barton Lee
Liberty, Security, and Accountability: The Rise and Fall of Illiberal Democracies

Viktoriia Semenova
Institutional Manipulation in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes: Effects on Candidate Behavior

Kristen Kao
Fragmented Sovereignty After Conflict: A Survey Experiment in Iraq
Institutional Manipulation in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes: Effects on Candidate Behavior
Viktoriia Semenova
University of Mannheim

Most of the literature on institutional manipulation in autocracies is devoted to examining the effects of election manipulations' consequences for regime survival and post-election protests and manipulations' effects on the voters' perceptions and attitudes. However, whether facing institutional manipulation influences candidate behavior is still under-investigated. I focus on a common form of institutional manipulation in electoral autocracies - candidate filtering - and investigate to what extent being restricted from running as a candidate in a race affects the decision to challenge the regime in the future. I argue that stronger challengers, who were refused registration as a result of manipulation, would be more likely to participate in the race in the future, in comparison to those who were not filtered and lost to a regime-affiliated candidate. I test the argument on the case of Russia, a prominent example of an electoral authoritarian regime, where candidate filtering has been in use since the early 2000s. I focus on over 25000 local executive and 315 regional legislative elections in 2004-2020.