Elections can be genuine while constitutional limits, minority protections, and the rule of law are absent, so the two are separable.
Zakaria's 1997 article. The point is analytic rather than partisan: elections and constitutional liberalism are separable goods, and exporting the first does not deliver the second.
In practice
- A country holds genuine elections with high turnout, and its courts, press and opposition parties operate at the government's discretion.
- A member-run association elects its committee freely and has no rule the committee cannot suspend, so the vote is real and the constraint is not.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works