Writing for Brookings, Georgetown’s Steven Heydemann notes that Arab authortiarian regimes are upgrading their survivability toolkit with implications for democracy promotion approaches.

“Authoritarian upgrading” are governance strategies of self-protection that go beyond coercion. They can be the unintended consequences of democratization efforts, and they offer windows on how democracy promoters might respond creatively.

Arab regimes are converging around policies that are explicitly designed to stabilize and preserve authoritarian rule in the context of ongoing demands for political change. At the same time, authoritarian upgrading holds out clues to the kinds of democratic changes it is reasonable to expect in the Arab world…

Two openings hold out particular promise:

First, adapting U.S. democracy promotion policies to exploit more effectively the openings that upgrading itself produces;

Second, taking steps to weaken the coalitions on which upgrading depends.

Does holding relatively clean elections in the context of Morocco’s pho-PR system constitute an authortiarian upgrade? TDP’s Mandelbaum wrote last month about how low district magnitudes encourage party fragmentation and militate against effective legislative oversight.

Does Russia’s recent round of electoral “reforms” constitute an authoritarian upgrade outside the Arab world?

On the other hand, is Abbas’ unilateral decision to eliminate the nominal tier an authoritarian downgrade?

From the paper:

Electoral reforms in Arab countries have less to do with democratization than with making elections safe for authoritarianism. Regime management of electoral arenas reflects the double-edged logic of authoritarian upgrading. Reforms permit increased levels of political contestation—and in this sense they cannot be dismissed as meaningless. Yet they also ensure that elections remain tightly managed and operate as substantially uneven playing fields that distort electoral outcomes to the benefit of regimes. As recent elections in Yemen and Egypt showed, regimes combine tolerance for higher levels of electoral competition, including participation by Islamists willing to play within state-defined limits, with tactics designed to ensure that ruling parties continue to dominate electoral outcomes.