Illiberal Democracy - Terminological Controversy

Terminological Controversy

Other writers reject the concept of an illiberal democracy, saying it only "muddies the waters" on the basis that it if a country does not have opposition parties and an independent media, it is not democratic. Scholars such as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that terms like "illiberal democracy" are inappropriate for some of these states, because the term implies that these regimes are, at their heart, democracies that have gone wrong. Levitsky and Way argue that states such as Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic, Zimbabwe, and post-Soviet Russia, were never truly democratic and not developing toward democracy, but were rather tending toward authoritarian behaviour, despite having elections (which were sometimes sharply contested).

Thus, Levitsky and Way coined a new term to remove the positive connotation of democracy from these states and distinguish them from flawed or developing democracies: competitive authoritarianism.