The Electoral Model without Elections?: The Arab Uprisings of 2011 and the Color Revolutions in Comparative Perspective

How well does the "electoral model" for mobilizing opposition travel? And what happens when the model is emulated without an election to serve as a focal point? This article examines the political mobilization that led to the fall of non-democratic leaders in the so-called "electoralmodel"countries (Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia. Croatia, Serbia, Ukraine, George, and Kyrgyzstan) and compares them to the 2010 and 2011 popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Through a structured comparison of these ten cases, this article shows that the model can be adopted in non-electoral settings but with differing effects. In cases where mass mobilization occurs without elections, or where elections were not actually the factor that led to leadership turnover, there is a positive correlation with continued elevated popular mobilization, successors lack legitimacy, polarization among political actors is increased, and the democratic process is less institutionalized.