ILLUMINATING THE GRAY ZONE OF POLITICAL CHANGE: THE CASE OF
PERU’S FUJIMORI GOVERNMENT, 1990-2000
Cynthia McClintock
George Washington University
## email not listed ##
Paper presented at the American Political Science
Association meetings, Chicago, September 2-5, 2004
I. INTRODUCTION
In a set of articles entitled "Elections Without Democracy?" published in The
Journal of Democracy in April 2002, leading scholars advanced a new regime
classification: "electoral authoritarianism."
1
Andreas Schedler explained that, "While
democracy is 'a system in which parties lose elections', electoral authoritarianism is a
system in which opposition parties lose elections."
2
Elaborated Steven Levitsky and
Lucan A. Way: "[Although] formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the
principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority….Incumbents violate
these rules so often and to such an extent…that the regime fails to meet conventional
minimum standards for democracy."
3
However, the line between "electoral authoritarianism" and "partial democracy" is
blurry. Most scholars now agree that Peru's Fujimori government was an "electoral
authoritarian" regime; but, for many years, U.S. experts had classified the Fujimori
government as partially democratic or "democratic with an adjective."
4
The purpose of
this paper is to help draw the line between electoral authoritarianism and partial
democracy.
The paper supports the authors in the April 2002 Journal of Democracy issue in
their arguments that, in our regime classifications, analysts should carefully assess not
only electoral processes but also incumbents' record of respect or disrespect for
democracy and the rule of law. As Larry Diamond declares, "Regime classification
must, in part, assess the previous election, but it must also assess the intentions and
capabilities of ambiguously democratic ruling elites, something that is very hard to do."
5
Indeed, it is the argument of this chapter that the intentions and capabilities of
elites should be assessed not only with respect to their administrations, as Diamond
suggests, but also with respect to elections under their auspices. Using Peru's 2000
presidential election as a case study, the paper points out that, evaluating electoral
processes just as they happen, international observers may be unable to secure the
evidence necessary for judgment of the election. In the case of Peru's 2000 election, this
paper shows that, not taking into account Alberto Fujimori's record of disrespect for
democracy and the rule of law, international observers almost gave the election a passing
grade.
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