Competitive Authoritarianism: Why Originalism Is the Only Answer

You have probably heard the term competitive authoritarianism tossed around in political science circles. It labels regimes that hold elections, allow opposition parties, and maintain the formal trappings of democracy, but where the deck is systematically stacked so the ruling party never really loses. Think of Hungary under Viktor Orbán, Russia under Putin in its earlier years, or Venezuela under Maduro. The game is rigged, but the players still pretend to play.

Most serious commentary treats this as a crisis of democracy, a failure of electoral accountability, a breakdown of norms, a warning that the United States could slide down the same slope. The solution they propose is always more democracy: more transparency, more participation, more guardrails like independent commissions and stronger civil society. I think that analysis is dangerously wrong. Not because competitive authoritarianism isnt real it is but because the diagnosis misses the root cause. Competitive authoritarianism is not a failure of democracy. It is the natural outcome of abandoning constitutional government. The Founders built a republic for a reason, and we have spent the last century systematically dismantling it. If we want to preserve liberty, we do not need to save democracy. We need to restore the rule of law.

What Competitive Authoritarianism Actually Is

Let me give you the short version from Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, who coined the term in their 2010 book Competitive Authoritarianism. In their framework, these regimes occupy a gray zone between democracy and dictatorship. Elections are regular and competitive the opposition can campaign and sometimes win local races. Courts exist. The press may be nominally free. But the playing field is tilted through selective enforcement of tax laws against political opponents, control of major media outlets through ownership or regulation, abuse of state resources for the incumbents campaign, co-opting or intimidating the judiciary, and rewriting electoral rules at the last minute to favor the ruling party. The result is that the incumbent never loses, or if he does, he refuses to accept the result and uses state power to stay.

The standard prescription from democracy advocates is to strengthen democratic institutions. But here is the uncomfortable truth: those institutions only work when everyone agrees to play by fixed rules. The moment one side controls the rule-making apparatus, the game is over. That is precisely what the American Founders designed the Constitution to prevent.

Madisons Architecture Against Faction

James Madison understood the problem of competitive authoritarianism two hundred years before it had a name. He called it faction, a majority or a powerful minority united by a common interest that could trample the rights of others. In Federalist No. 10, he wrote that the first object of government is to protect the ability of citizens to pursue their interests, but the second is to control the effects of faction. His solution was not to make democracy purer. It was to diffuse power so that no single faction could seize control of the whole. That is why the Constitution includes separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, enumerated powers, and an independent judiciary.

Under this architecture, competitive authoritarianism is nearly impossible. Why? Because to tilt the playing field, you would need to control the presidency, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and most state governments all at the same time and have the power to rewrite the rules of the game on the fly. The Constitution makes that extraordinarily difficult. The separation of powers creates so many veto points that no single faction can dominate without broad and sustained consensus. That was the point. Madison did not trust popular majorities to respect minority rights. He trusted a structure that forced compromise and protected liberty.

The Living Constitution Killed the Guardrails

So what changed? Why are we now worried about competitive authoritarianism in the United States? Because we abandoned Madisons architecture. Not formally the Constitution is still in effect but in practice, we have replaced it with a system of unlimited government that the Founders explicitly rejected. The progressive movement of the early twentieth century argued that the Constitution was too rigid, too slow, too obstructionist. They wanted a government that could act quickly to solve social and economic problems. So they reinterpreted the Constitution out of existence, not through amendment, but through judicial activism, administrative delegation, and executive overreach.

Consider the administrative state. Congress today delegates vast lawmaking authority to executive branch agencies. Those agencies issue regulations that have the force of law. They adjudicate disputes through administrative law judges who are not independent. They enforce penalties without jury trials. And under the Chevron doctrine, courts defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. Friedrich Hayek warned about this in The Road to Serfdom: when government officials have discretionary power to make and enforce rules as they see fit, you have destroyed the rule of law. The law becomes whatever the administrator wants it to be. And that is the perfect foundation for competitive authoritarianism, because the party that controls the bureaucracy controls the law, elections or no elections.

Milton Friedman made the same point from an economic angle: concentrated power invites concentrated capture. When the federal government controls healthcare, education, energy, finance, and communications, the incentives for political actors to seize and hold that power are overwhelming. You cannot have economic freedom without political freedom, and you cannot have political freedom when one party can use the administrative state to reward allies and punish opponents.

The Scalia Insight: Textualism as a Shield

Justice Antonin Scalia spent his career arguing that the Constitution must be interpreted according to its original public meaning, not as a living document that evolves with the times. He understood that when judges read their own values into the text, they effectively become legislators. And when judges become legislators, the only check on their power is the political process, which is exactly what the Constitution was designed to limit. In his book A Matter of Interpretation, Scalia wrote that the Constitution is not a living organism; it is a legal document. It says something, and it means what it says. That may sound dry, but it is the only principled defense against competitive authoritarianism. Because if the Constitution can mean whatever the current majority wants it to mean, then there are no fixed rules. The game has no boundaries. And the party with the most power can rewrite the rules to keep itself in power forever.

Look at Hungary. Viktor Orbán did not abolish the constitution, he rewrote it. He used a supermajority in parliament to pass a new fundamental law that concentrated power in the executive, packed the constitutional court, and changed electoral districts to favor his party. All technically legal, but the result is a textbook case of competitive authoritarianism. Could that happen in the United States? It would be much harder if we adhered to originalism. Our Constitution is famously difficult to amend. It requires two-thirds of both houses and three-quarters of the states. That high bar is a feature, not a bug. It means that no single election or even a decade of control can fundamentally alter the structure of government. But if we treat the Constitution as a living document, if judges and presidents can effectively amend it by reinterpretation, then the bar is gone. All it takes is control of the executive branch and a sympathetic Supreme Court.

The Second Amendment Question

Let me give you a concrete example that rarely comes up in competitive authoritarianism debates: the Second Amendment. A disarmed population cannot resist a tyrannical government. That is not a fringe view. It is the Founders explicit rationale for the right to keep and bear arms. The Federalist Papers and the debates over ratification are full of references to the armed citizenry as the ultimate check on standing armies and federal overreach. Progressive legal scholars have spent decades arguing that the Second Amendment is a collective right, not an individual one, effectively writing it out of the Constitution through interpretation. If they succeed, one of the Founders key structural safeguards against authoritarianism disappears. Now, I am not suggesting that gun ownership alone prevents competitive authoritarianism. But it is telling that the regimes most threatened by their own people are the ones that restrict firearms most aggressively. The correlation is not accidental.

The Real Solution: Restore the Constitution

So what do we do about competitive authoritarianism? The standard answer is to strengthen democratic norms and democratic institutions. But norms are just habits. They break as soon as the other side refuses to follow them. And institutions that lack constitutional grounding can be captured or dismantled. The only durable solution is to restore the Constitution as written. That means ending the administrative states power to make law. Congress must legislate, actually legislate, rather than punt authority to unelected bureaucrats. The nondelegation doctrine should be revived. It means appointing judges committed to originalism and textualism, not just conservatives, but judges who will enforce the Constitutions limits regardless of the result. It means enforcing federalism. The federal government should return vast swaths of power to the states, where competition and local accountability keep government honest. It means defending the separation of powers. The president should not govern by executive order. Congress should not delegate away its authority. Courts should not legislate from the bench. And it means protecting the Second Amendment. An armed citizenry is the ultimate check on any government that forgets its place.

This is not a partisan agenda. There are plenty of Democrats who believe in limited government and constitutional originalism, though they are rarer than they should be. And there are plenty of Republicans who have abandoned these principles in favor of expanding executive power when their party holds the White House. The point is not left versus right. The point is constitutional government versus arbitrary rule.

Conclusion: A Government of Laws, Not of Men

Competitive authoritarianism is a real threat to liberty, both in the United States and abroad. But it is not caused by too little democracy. It is caused by too little constitutional restraint. When government has unlimited power, elections become rituals. The only thing that can save us is a return to the rule of law, fixed, knowable, and binding on everyone, including the government itself. John Adams put it best: a government of laws, and not of men. That is the American experiment. Competitive authoritarianism is just the latest name for what happens when we abandon it. We already have the cure. It was written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. We just have to start taking it seriously again.