WHICH VARIABLES ARE CONSISTENTLY PRESENT IN ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACIES OF VENEZUELA AND EGYPT?
- A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACIES

Democracies that fail to uphold the liberal values that belong to liberal constitutional democracies are becoming increasingly more common around the world. Researchers and politicians dub them “illiberal democracies”; technically, democracies by virtue of having elections, but which are often unfair, less than free and less protective of their citizens’ rights.

To expand our knowledge of illiberal democracies, we decided to write our thesis starting from a comparative analysis of two illiberal democracies, Egypt and Venezuela. The reason why we chose these countries was that they belong to two different regions, which allowed us to find the similarities that would be characteristic of illiberal democracies in general, regardless of the region they belong to. Our theoretical framework is built on Fareed Zakaria's theory on illiberal  democracies, as he Is the scholar who first coined the term. In the theory section, we both explain the idea of democracy and the one of constitutional liberalism, concepts that are essential for the understanding of the thesis. Because these concepts are deeply embedded in Western ideologies, especially ideas stemming from the Enlightenment in Europe. We chose to include a philosophical section on Locke and Rousseau, to establish a common understanding of democracy, liberalism, and the political theory that is the foundation of most of the terms used in the thesis.

We then started the analysis, by collecting empirical data on the most recent presidential terms in both Venezuela and Egypt. During this process​ (Part 1 of Analysis), we decided to base our analysis on six variables, which we thought as being most relevant ones when determining illiberal democracies: Influence of Religious Elements, Fairness of Elections, Social Rights, Corruption, Civic Rights, Increased Centralization of Power. With a deductive approach, we looked at secondary sources (e.g. newspaper articles ,scholarly journals, and books) and evidence in the form of global indexes or think tanks (e.g. Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders, Transparency International) on Venezuela and Egypt, to find common patterns that Zakaria had not discussed, which could explain how illiberal democracies rose in those countries. In​ Part 2​, we then shifted to an inductive approach, as our aim was to generate a new model based on the data gathered from​Part 1. Here, we used the information gathered in Part 1 to generate a table with 17 questions that could be answered simply with “Liberal Effect”, “Illiberal Effect”, or in some cases “No Effect”. The purpose of the table is to quantify the level of (il)liberality of any democracy in the world, based on the analysis of the six variables mentioned above. Finally, we tested our (Il)liberality Table. In order to do so, we chose the two most recent presidency terms in Venezuela and Egypt, since our aim was to look at more contemporary events that Zakaria´s theory did not take into account. Having answered the questions, each presidency received an overall score, which determined how (il)liberal it was.

In the discussion section, we discussed the results from the overall scores, finding similarities and differences between each of the presidential terms. In future academic works, this table can be used as the start point of an analysis before delving into more in-depth work. Perhaps more interesting is the way the (Il)liberality Table can be used to chart the changes within the same country, based on presidential terms. Ideally, one would be able to work with a dozen (or more) sequential presidential terms from the same country and chart the changes within a country through the answers to the questions from the model, giving a detailed understanding on how and why a democratic country changes.