Perversity, futility, complicity: Should democrats participate in autocratic elections?

Electoral authoritarianism is receiving increasing attention from political scientists, yet it has been mostly ignored by political philosophers. This paper aims to fill some of this gap by considering whether it is morally permissibly for democrats to participate in autocratic elections as candidates or voters. Autocratic elections allow meaningful multiparty competition but are systematically unfair and partly unfree, and therefore, arguably, normatively illegitimate. The paper considers three objections to participation in autocratic elections. These objections hold, respectively, that participation has bad consequences for democratization, that it is normatively futile, and that it is morally wrong in itself. The paper argues that the objections are not decisive, and that participation is usually morally permissible and even preferable over alternative forms of challenge. However, the objections establish that the normative superiority of electoral challenge over the alternatives is only a matter of degree, and that participants often dirty their hands.