Bolivia, a Hybrid Authoritarian Regime

On August 7, at UPSA in Santa Cruz, the «Tyranny Tracker» project was presented: a research tool from the Human Rights Foundation that analyzes and classifies the world's political regimes.

How the tracker classifies

The tracker assesses every country on three dimensions, which it calls pillars.

Electoral competition. Whether the governing authority prevents the opposition from competing on equal terms. It refers to national elections, for the executive and for the legislature.

Freedom of dissent. Whether the independent press, civil society organizations and those who criticize the government are repressed. The tracker uses "dissent" in a broad sense: it covers journalists and activists, and also artists, academics, lawyers and religious leaders.

Institutional accountability. Whether the courts, the legislature and regulatory bodies retain the capacity to check the government between one election and the next.

The procedure has two steps. First, regional researchers apply a list of 45 indicators. They are closed questions: did the governing authority disqualify an opposition candidate? did it shut down an independent outlet? did it reform the courts to reduce their independence? On that evidence they decide whether each pillar is largely present, weakened or absent. Second, a published table converts those three assessments into a regime type. If elections are weakened and the other two pillars are absent, the country comes out as fully authoritarian. If all three pillars are weakened, it comes out as hybrid. If all three are present, as a democracy.

Which pillar gives way first

The overall classification compresses three assessments into a single label. Open up those three and a pattern appears.¹

Electoral competition is the pillar that most countries still hold: 83. Institutional accountability is the one fewest keep: 62. And the case-by-case comparison points the same way. Of the 163 states with a pillar-level assessment, 26 have the institutional pillar rated worse than the electoral one, and only 2 the other way round. Courts and oversight bodies give way before the ballot box does.

This matches what the literature on democratic erosion documents. Today's authoritarianism does not usually begin by suspending elections. It begins by appointing friendly judges, capturing the electoral authority and hollowing out the powers of oversight bodies, while elections go on being held on schedule. Twelve countries that the tracker classifies as democracies already have that pillar weakened: Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Mongolia, Montenegro, Paraguay, Peru, Poland and Ukraine.

Bolivia, according to the tracker

The Tyranny Tracker classifies Bolivia as a country governed by a hybrid authoritarian regime, and it gets there along the path just described: the electoral pillar is still in the democratic range, and it is the other two — freedom of dissent and institutional accountability — that take it out of the category.

The country keeps multiparty elections and an active political competition, but it combines those elements with deep polarization and contested institutions. From 2006 politics was dominated by the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) and Evo Morales's project, a period that also saw a growing concentration of power in the executive and a weakening of the mechanisms of institutional control. The electoral crisis of 2019 deepened political distrust, while the 2020 election restored electoral competition without resolving the institutional tensions. The split of the MAS between the currents of Evo Morales and Luis Arce then reshaped the landscape. The election of Rodrigo Paz in 2025 marked the return of a president from outside the MAS after almost two decades. The court proceedings arising from the 2019 crisis, however, keep the dispute over institutional independence and the country's political balance open.

The region

Of the 25 states classified in the Americas, 19 are democracies. Of the remaining six, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are fully authoritarian, with all three pillars absent. Bolivia, El Salvador and Honduras are hybrids, and they got there by different routes.

Bolivia is the only one of the three whose electoral pillar is still in the democratic range. El Salvador has the institutional pillar outright absent, and Honduras carries a deterioration in electoral competition that Bolivia does not show.

What it measures, compared with other indices

There are several indices that measure the quality of political institutions. Varieties of Democracy, at the University of Gothenburg, works with thousands of experts per country and goes back to 1789. Freedom House has published its annual report since 1973. The Economist's index ranks countries on a scale from zero to ten. Polity has measured regime characteristics since 1800. All of them are useful and none is redundant.

What changes between them is the question each one is equipped to answer. Continuous indices with long series answer questions of trajectory well: how far a country moved, in which decade, compared with which other. The Tyranny Tracker answers questions of counting and of profile: how many cases there are of each type, how many people live under each one, which part of the political system fails first.

Two features of its own reinforce that vocation. The first is the unit of analysis: the tracker codes not only states, but de facto authorities. Libya appears three times, depending on who controls the territory. Yemen, three. Western Sahara, twice. Crimea, Tibet, the Uyghur Region, Somaliland and Transnistria have entries of their own. The question it answers is not what a country's regime is like, but which authority those people live under. The second is that it includes non-state actors allied with the government when they act as an extension of official repression.

Counting states and counting people

Among the 165 sovereign states classified, democracies are the largest group: 73, against 67 fully authoritarian regimes and 25 hybrids. Count inhabitants instead of states and the order is reversed.

Two countries explain much of the difference. India has 1,451 million inhabitants and is classified as a hybrid authoritarian regime: on its own it accounts for more than half of that category. China has 1,409 million and is classified as fully authoritarian. Between them they add up to 35% of the population covered, and neither contributes a single inhabitant to the democratic box. Behind them come the United States and Indonesia, and then Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, Russia and Ethiopia.

That yields the result most worth keeping: of every four people in the world, fewer than one lives under a government that is accountable, allows dissent and can lose an election.

Income and regime type

The relationship between income level and democracy is an old debate. Modernization theory, set out by Lipset in 1959, holds that economic growth produces the conditions that sustain democracy: a middle class, schooling, urban life. Przeworski and Limongi's review shifted the emphasis: income does not appear to produce new democracies, but it does sharply reduce the probability that an existing democracy will fall.

The share of democracies falls steadily as income falls: 80% in the high-income group, 50% in upper-middle, 17% in lower-middle and 4% in low income. The association is there.

Eight high-income countries are classified as fully authoritarian: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Brunei and Russia. In all eight, hydrocarbons finance a central part of the public budget. This connects with the rentier state hypothesis: when spending is paid for with royalties and not with taxes collected from citizens, the government depends on them less, and the income level stops being associated with political openness. The two high-income hybrids, Hungary and Singapore, answer to other reasons.

Economic institutions and political institutions

Databases are constituted as public goods, made available to researchers to answer humanity's big questions. One of the oldest in the social sciences is the one linking the way a society organizes its economy with the way it organizes its political power: the relationship between political institutions and economic institutions. A recent paper by Vincent Geloso and Alex Tabarrok returned to that question. The starting point is three classic positions, two of which predict the same thing.

Position	Who holds it	Correlation it predicts
Democracy undermines capitalism	Madison, Mill, Schumpeter; in formal terms Meltzer and Richard, Caplan; also Marx, who saw it as desirable	−
Capitalism undermines democracy	Reich, Kuttner, Piketty; in a moderate version Sen	−
They reinforce each other	Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Berger	+

The authors measure economic organization with the Fraser Institute's economic freedom index and democracy with V-Dem's liberal democracy index, and they find a positive correlation of 0.64. The figure points in the direction of the third position and not of the first two, which predict the opposite sign.

That exercise can be repeated with the Tyranny Tracker, which brings something different: a categorical measure of regime instead of a continuous one. We crossed its classification with the 2023 economic freedom score from POPULI's Economic Freedom Monitor. The two datasets overlap in 155 countries.

The gradient appears again, and at the top it is sharper than the income one: 87% democracies in the quartile with the most economic freedom, 56% in the next, 28% in the third and 15% in the last. Read the other way round, the average score is 7.12 among democracies, 6.50 among hybrids and 5.76 among fully authoritarian regimes. The rank correlation between economic freedom and the severity of the regime is −0.61 across those 155 countries, a value close to the one Geloso and Tabarrok obtain with a completely different measure of democracy.

The most telling part is at the extreme. Of the thirty countries with the most economic freedom in the world, twenty-eight are democracies. Take the freest third — 51 countries — and the exceptions are only seven, few enough to name one by one.

Four are small economies, very open to trade, with Singapore as the usual test case. The other three — Jordan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates — are monarchies where hydrocarbon rents finance a good part of the budget: exactly the rentier mechanism that appeared when looking at income. On these last ones, Geloso and Tabarrok recall that the Fraser index does not discount the fact that women's property rights are more restricted than men's, and that correcting that omission — as Rosemarie Fike proposed — pushes those countries well down the ranking.

The other extreme confirms the reading by symmetry. In the quartile with the least economic freedom there are only six democracies, and the most extreme case is Argentina, ranked 149th of 155. Venezuela closes the table at 155, as a fully authoritarian regime.

A single-moment cross-section does not prove causality. The point is more modest and firmer: economic freedom and political freedom coexist. Having a lot of one without the other is rare, identifiable and explainable case by case. There is no sign in the data that a society has to choose between organizing its economy through private decisions and organizing its power through competitive elections; what is observed is that the two travel together.

For Bolivia, the crossing locates the problem precisely. With 6.05 points it ranks 107th of 155, below Chile (22), Peru (45), Uruguay (48) and Paraguay (54), in the same lower-middle band where its political classification stopped being democratic.

That is where the second use of a database like this one appears: it will serve not only to assess the world's political reality from a descriptive point of view, but as an input for research that links that variable with others and allows us to understand ourselves a little better.

More instruments for our generation's questions

The Tyranny Tracker neither competes with the indices that already exist nor replaces them: it adds to them. Each one is equipped to answer a different class of question, and having several at once is what makes it possible to move from impression to data. Having more and better indicators — built with explicit rules, published openly and exposed to the scrutiny of anyone who wants to review them — is the practical condition for answering the questions that fall to our generation with something more than intuition.