Superwahljahr 2024: Rigged for the Autocrat: Why do Authoritarian Regimes Hold Elections?

More than 60 countries, reflecting half of the world’s population, are heading to the polls to vote in presidential, legislative, and local elections in 2024. However, many of these countries confront serious authoritarian threats that extend beyond the candidates on the ballot and will impact the values, processes, and institutions that are critical to democracies and the free world.

Authoritarian regimes engaging in electoral interference, such as China, Russia, and Iran, seek to win from electoral mayhem and democracies’ decline. If democracy does not prevail, the years to come will be influenced by authoritarian forces. China continues to expand its global economic dominance through the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) and tensions between Taiwan and China are at an all-time high. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rages on as the threat of nuclear war looms. Iran threatens regional instability through the funding of local proxies, militias, and terrorist groups in neighboring countries. More broadly, intimidation tactics, voter suppression, and the marginalization of certain groups violate democratic participation and inclusion. Democratic systems are under strain and there are a number of forces at play.

Join the American Council on Germany for the next event in the virtual series Superwahljahr 2024. This time, we’ll talk with regional experts Cathryn Grothe from Freedom House and Dr. Stefan Meister from the German Council on Foreign Relations about why authoritarian regimes even bother to hold elections at all.

Cathryn Grothe is a Research Analyst covering the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for Freedom House, where she contributes to Freedom in the World, Freedom on the Net, and Election Watch for the Digital Age. Her research focuses on technology, democracy, and human rights in the MENA region. Ms. Grothe’s writing has been published in various regional and international outlets.

Prior to joining Freedom House, Ms. Grothe worked at Women Deliver on issues related to humanitarian advocacy, gender-based violence, and refugee rights. She has extensive experience working with civil society organizations in Lebanon on gender equality programming.

She holds an M.A. in international relations from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in political science and public health from New York University.

Dr. Stefan Meister has been the head of the German Council on Foreign Relations’ Program on International Order and Democracy since August 2021. From 2019 until then, he worked as director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s South Caucasus Office.

From 2017 to 2019, Dr. Meister was head of the Robert Bosch Center for Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia at DGAP, where he had previously headed its program for Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. Before that, he was a senior policy fellow in the Wider Europe Team at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in Berlin and London. In the 2015/16 term, Dr. Meister was a visiting fellow at the Transatlantic Academy in Washington, DC, where he wrote on Russian disinformation and propaganda. He has served as an election observer for the OSCE in post-Soviet countries several times and worked on conflict transformation and institution-building in post-Soviet countries.

Dr. Meister is co-author of Geopolitics and Security: A New Strategy for the South Caucasus (KAS/DGAP/GIP, 2018), The Russia File (Brookings, 2018), Eastern Voices (Center for Transatlantic Relations/DGAP, 2017), and The Eastern Question (Brookings, 2016).

He studied international relations and East European history in Jena, Leipzig, and Nizhni Novgorod and holds a Ph.D. from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena with a thesis on the transformation of the Russian higher education and research system.