Scott Mainwaring is Eugene and Helen Conley Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and the coeditor (with Tarek Masoud) of Democracy in Hard Places (2022).
A change in the shape of partisan competition, and the traditional parties’ ability to adapt to it, has led to the decline of once-pervasive clientelism.
In some countries, democratic competition is undermined less by electoral fraud or repression than by a skewed playing field—unequal access to state institutions, resources, and the media.
