Brave Little Girls

When people picture a democracy failing, they picture something loud. They imagine tanks in the streets, a military coup, a dictator on a balcony announcing the end of something. What I spent this year learning is that it can be much quieter than that. The elections still happen. The opposition still exists. People still vote. That's the part that unsettled me.

Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way describe competitive authoritarianism as a system in which democratic institutions remain real enough that the opposition still has genuine opportunities to compete, but those opportunities are seriously unequal. Elections happen, opposition parties exist, and political competition is visible. The people in power simply hold advantages that make it far harder for anyone to actually challenge them. What makes the concept unsettling is the contradiction in its name. It is both competitive and authoritarian. Democracy hasn't disappeared. It has been weakened from the inside.

That contradiction is what my best friend and I chose to build our project around, through Avon High School's UNICEF and Amnesty program. We created a project named E.N.O.U.G.H., which stands for Educate Now On Understanding Genocide & Hate. The program brings together groups of students to create an exhibit on international issues, each group taking a different topic. Ours focused on competitive authoritarianism and where its patterns show up in national politics.

We chose Turkey and Russia because they made the concept less abstract. Turkey, in particular, was difficult for me to approach objectively. My family has a personal connection to the country, so I came into the research already holding an understanding of it that had nothing to do with textbooks. That familiarity could easily have become a substitute for analysis.

Instead, the research forced me to separate the two.

Looking at Turkey through this framework meant asking questions I had never really considered. If a country holds elections, what actually makes those elections democratic? How much does it matter that an opposition party can technically run if the environment surrounding it is heavily uneven? And at what point does an imbalance between a government and its opponents stop being an ordinary political advantage and become something else?

Researchers have pointed to unequal media access, the use of state resources, and restrictions affecting opposition politicians as factors that have made political competition in Turkey increasingly lopsided. At the same time, opposition parties continue to compete, and elections continue to matter, which is exactly what makes the country worth studying through this framework rather than a simpler one.

Russia gave us another angle on the same question. Comparing the two made it clear that authoritarianism is not an on-or-off switch. Political systems vary in levels of competition and degrees of institutional independence, and Russia's is considerably more restrictive than Turkey's, particularly regarding meaningful opposition. Putting the two cases side by side showed us something a definition alone couldn't: that systems can move away from democratic competition by different routes and at different speeds.

That also made the topic harder to keep at a safe distance.

When we started discussing how these patterns appear in national politics, I found myself thinking about the United States. I am not saying the United States has already become the countries we studied. The comparison is useful as a set of patterns, not as a label. But political polarization, declining trust in institutions, and a growing willingness to treat democratic norms as obstacles rather than safeguards are all worth paying attention to, even when none of them alone proves anything.

The part of the project I keep returning to wasn't the research. It was watching the room. Once we brought this into a space full of students and community members, competitive authoritarianism stopped being a term in a paper and became something people questioned, argued with, and connected to things they had already noticed.

Afterward, several people told us we were brave. Brave for choosing it. Brave for standing up there. What they said, more than once, was that we were brave little girls. We had spent months on regime classification, electoral integrity, and the machinery of how democracies come apart. Not a question about the argument. Not a challenge to the evidence. Brave little girls.

I don't think anyone meant anything by it. That might be the part worth noticing.

That was what Mr. Abrams kept pushing us toward: not just collecting evidence, but figuring out what it meant and then making it matter to someone else.

I started researching competitive authoritarianism because it seemed like an interesting topic for an international issues project. What I finished with was the understanding that authoritarianism doesn't have a fixed appearance. Countries can keep their elections, their opposition parties, their institutions, and the whole visible apparatus of political competition, while quietly changing what any of it means.

Which is why the changes between the obvious moments are the ones worth watching.

Sources

Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, "Elections Without Democracy: The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2002).

Berk Esen and Sebnem Gumuscu, "Rising competitive authoritarianism in Turkey," Third World Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 9 (2016), pp. 1581–1606. DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1135732