The outcome of the 2018 Russian presidential election was never in doubt. Vladimir Putin would win a fourth term as president, granting himself power until at least 2024. These results faced vociferous opposition, with observers reporting ballot stuffing and discrepancies in counting; with no clear opposition, and Putin coasted to victory, cementing the rule of the United Russia party that has persisted since 2000.
But the outcome of the 2020 Singaporean election, despite Singapore being far more democratic than Russia, was similarly never in question; when the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) claimed 83 out of the 93 seats in the country’s Parliament, it was viewed as overwhelming support for the opposition. The PAP’s long-time leader, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, acknowledged that the 10 seats won by the opposition represented a “clear desire” for a stronger opposition in a country where opposition parties have consistently only won a handful of seats, if any at all, in every election since Singapore’s independence.
A small but growing number of countries possess a powerful new combination of political traits, both predictable election results and democratic legitimacy. Across the world, “democracies” are hiding powerful authoritarian structures that allow parties to write the rules of the game they play, producing an inherent bias that only further undermines the nature of their democracy. These parties, the centralist parties, are poised to shift not just global politics, but how the global arena views democracy itself.
The PRI, the PAP, and the Rise of Centralism
Centralist parties—political parties that support a strong centrality of administrative power—correct for the flaws of overt authoritarianism by de-emphasizing the role of the individual. In doing so, they enable themselves to outlive any one leader, producing a more stable, if more indirect, authoritarian system. The effects, nonetheless, are the same: once they seize power, centralist parties have the stability necessary to engineer institutional frameworks to tilt the scales towards the incumbent.
The world’s first glimpse of such a centralist party was Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which to this day remains the longest continuously-ruling political party in history. For 71 years until their defeat in 2000, the PRI ruled Mexico as a one-party state, despite the presence of multi-party elections. The party was forged in transition: its own founder, the political titan Plutarco Elías Calles, never ran for president under its banner. The party even survived the reformist triumph of 2000 with the election of PAN candidate Vincente Fox, even retaking the presidency in 2012.
The success of what Mario Vargas Llosa dubbed “the perfect dictatorship” was built upon the institutional structure of the Mexican state. Six-year presidential terms allowed for remarkable stability with minimal turnover, while a term limit of one prevented any one individual from gaining too much power. Simple one-round plurality presidential elections meant that the spoiler effect would prevent an even remotely fractured opposition from gaining power.
For many decades, the PRI was one of a kind. As the saying goes, however, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and similar would-be authoritarians would see in the PRI a model that could be adapted to their own countries. If they were to cement their power, they would need to reshape the rules of the game, and guarantee their own victory moving forward, all while keeping their democratic elections at least relatively intact to maintain their legitimacy on the world’s stage.
While single-party states emerged in much of the world, centralist parties were much fewer and farther between. The second was likely the People’s Action Party of Singapore, originally led by Lee Kuan Yew. The PAP controlled every seat in the Parliament until 1984, and for the election of 1988, the PAP created thirteen Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs), which would each replace three individual electoral districts with a single block district, that would then elect a slate of three representatives. Crucially, however, voters selected the slate as a block; all of the representatives had to belong to the same party. This system empowered under-qualified individuals to win parliamentary seats on the PAP ticket at the expense of qualified opposition candidates. That year, the PAP won less than 64% of the vote, but won 80 out of the 81 seats in Parliament.
The Successor Centralists
Large parties that can claim power on their own are trying to ensure that they retain that power indefinitely. They need some degree of public support in order to succeed, but they have committed to lowering their own threshold for victory, decreasing their reliance on electoral success. These parties come from all points on the political spectrum, and have seen varying degrees of success in undermining their respective democracies. More and more parties, however, are following their lead.
In Japan, when the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost power after 38 continuous years in government in 1993, they were replaced by a fragile coalition of opposition parties. After three opposition governments collapsed in two and a half years, the LDP reclaimed power, and co-opted the electoral reform bill that had been a primary focus of the opposition cabinets. They increased the number of single-member districts in the new system, allowing them to extract stronger majorities than they had won from the population. In 2021, despite winning less than 35% of the popular vote, the LDP easily won a single-party majority in the House of Representatives.
A similar situation has arisen in Hungary, where this imbalance is a much newer development. When the 2010 parliamentary elections resulted in a two-thirds majority for the right-wing Fidesz (a supermajority they won with only 53% of the vote due to prior election manipulation by post-Communist negotiators), the party radically reformed the electoral system to ensure their victory in the next election. Their electoral reform decreased the total number of seats in the legislature, increased the proportion of constituency seats, and mandated pre-election registration for the first time. Sure enough, in 2014, Fidesz retained their two-thirds majority, this time winning it with only 44% of the vote.
And in Mongolia, the ruling duopoly of the Democratic Party and the Mongolian People’s Party (the successor to the Communist party that ruled Mongolia until the 1990s) has undertaken many electoral reforms in the past decade alone to disadvantage their opponents. In 2016, with less than two months until the election, the Mongolian Constitutional Court adopted an entirely first-past-the-post electoral system, after the former chief justice was ousted under an MPP-majority parliament. In the election that followed, the MPP won 85% of the seats in the legislature, despite winning just 45% of the vote.
There is very little that connects the Liberal Democratic Party to Fidesz, and even less that connects either to the MPP. However, all three parties are becoming less dependent on elections as means of gaining power; a two-thirds majority, or even a majority at all, is no longer necessary to seize near complete control of their country’s political institutions. These countries are still democratic, so each of these parties must still get at least some support, more than 40% in almost all cases. The issue lies in translating that support to political power, where centralist parties have been able to grant themselves levels of authority that are disconnected from the levels of support they enjoy.
The Future of Centralism
This trend, unfortunately, is becoming increasingly prevalent in democracies around the world; centralist parties are testing the waters of their electoral systems to see how much they can diminish their bases of support while still winning elections. The Republican Party’s REDMAP initiative notoriously enabled the GOP to seize a 33-seat majority in House of Representatives elections they lost by 1.4 million votes in 2012.
What unites the PRI and the GOP is not political ideology, but political desire. This desire for centralized power may come from institutional structures, polarization, or simple technocracy, but in each case, a party acts on its centralist urges when it views its own platform as more vital than full and open democracy. The systems they construct, however, are not always explicitly authoritarian, lending these “soft authoritarians” legitimacy on the global stage.
Democratic backsliding is hardly a new or invisible phenomenon, but it may, perhaps, be most dangerous in countries where democracy does not seem to be backsliding at all. Military overthrow presents less of a threat to democracy than it did in decades past. Instead, the most pressing threat to democracy may be those who realize that they don’t need to destroy it at all; they just need to change the rules of the game.
