Moniruzzaman, Md.
(2019)
Electoral legitimacy preventive representation and regularization of authoritarian democracy in Bangladesh.
In:
Elections: A Global Perspective.
IntechOpen Limited, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78985-026-0
Abstract
Despite variations in its forms, contents, and qualities, arguably regular election
is the only tool that upholds the “democratic” label of a government. Election works
as the only legitimizing factor and, over the past several decades, it has become a
popular means for authoritarian political leaders or dominant political parties in
young or transitional democracies to consolidate their powerbase. Hence, elections
have apparently lost their representative value and have, increasingly, been turned
into a democratic means to legitimize and institutionalize undemocratic regimes.
This has been the most obvious trend in Bangladesh electoral politics over the past
decade. Both national and local level elections are engineered in such ways through
manipulating electoral laws, the election commission, and the legal system that
effectively developed an intended mechanism of preventive representation. A field
of electoral competition emerged from such a mechanism where the opposition
parties are formally and informally prevented from entering competition in the first
place. Technically, this is shown as deliberate nonparticipation by the opposition parties
but, in effect, nonparticipation is deliberately orchestrated by the ruling party.
An eventual outcome is a government that is free from the parliamentary or legislative
opposition, which helps to regularize an authoritarian democracy in the country.
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