7 - Failed Cases

Summary

Each year I read Gene Sharp[s' book] and try to apply the techniques.… If we didn't have a sense of humor our situation would be tragic.

Isa Gambar

The regime that planned an “elegant” victory has been exposed as nothing other than a fraud. The mask of legitimacy has slipped off.

Alexander Milinkevich

When we [the Armenian diaspora] came to Armenia after the collapse of communism in order to help build a prosperous democracy, we did not expect to find such a “Soviet” country.

Alex Sadar

In the preceding four chapters, we analyzed cases in which efforts to use elections to unseat authoritarian rulers succeeded. In this chapter we examine elections in which opposition parties and NGOs sought to use elections to depose authoritarian leaders but failed. We selected these “failed cases,” which occurred in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Belarus from 2003 to 2008, for analysis because they introduce variation in electoral outcomes while holding constant some important influences on electoral results. In particular, like the elections that led to turnover, these five elections took place in mixed regimes located in the postcommunist region. Moreover, despite the failure to replace authoritarian leaders with the opposition, all of these elections featured, like our successful cases, a united opposition. Finally, as in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, significant public protests broke out in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus in response to electoral fraud.