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Concept
Illiberal democracy
Summary
An illiberal democracy describes a governing system that hides its "nondemocratic practices behind formally democratic institutions and procedures". There is a lack of consensus among experts about the exact definition of illiberal democracy or whether it even exists.
The rulers of an illiberal democracy may ignore or bypass constitutional limits on their power. While liberal democracies protect individual rights and freedoms, illiberal democracies do not. Elections in an illiberal democracy are often manipulated or rigged, being used to legitimize and consolidate the incumbent rather than to choose the country's leaders and policies.
According to jurist András Sajó, illiberal democracy should be counted as a type of democracy because it is "democratic in a plebiscitarian sense", while political scientist Ulrich Wagrandl argues that "illiberal democracy is actually more true to democracy’s roots". Other theorists say that classifying illiberal democracy as democratic is overly sympathetic to the illiberal regimes and therefore prefer terms such as electoral authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism, or soft authoritarianism.
The term and concept of illiberal democracy derive from the 1995-book Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia by Daniel A. Bell, David Brown, Kanishka Jayasuriya, and David Martin Jones. Challenging Francis Fukuyamaʼs end-of-history thesis that political history was culminating in the global rule of capitalist liberal democracy, the book countered that Pacific Asia was not converging on liberal democracy but had instead taken an illiberal turn. Political philosopher Daniel A. Bell contributed a chapter on Confucianism as offering an alternative, illiberal approach to democracy.
The term illiberal democracy was then used and popularized by Fareed Zakaria in a regularly cited 1997 article in the journal Foreign Affairs. According to Zakaria, illiberal democracies are increasing around the world and are increasingly limiting the freedoms of the people they represent.
Official source
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