Independent electoral commissions can and do play an important role in protecting and promoting the “minimum core” of electoral democracy around the globe – including by postponing or setting aside elections that cannot or have not been conducted freely and fairly, excluding candidates and parties unwilling to comply with constitutional requirements, discounting tainted or fraudulent votes, and recounting electoral tallies. But there are dark sides to these broad-ranging powers. When electoral commissions are coerced or captured by authoritarian actors, these same powers can be used to undermine the fairness and competitiveness of the electoral playing-field, rather than protecting it. Any discussion of the promise of independent electoral commissions as democratic institutions, therefore, must be counter-balanced by attention to the capacity for this very discourse to be “abusively borrowed” in a way that undermines democracy.

To explain countries’ varying participation in the Belt and Road Initiative, this chapter begins with a discussion of recipient country characteristics that impact the demand for Chinese spending, including the political regime, clientelism, and the public-private orientation of the corporate sector. It then discusses the supply-side factors that influence Chinese foreign spending, including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), state-owned entities (e.g., SOEs), and private firms. Finally, it evaluates the compatibility of these demand and supply characteristics. The key prediction is that electoral autocracies will display the strongest compatibility with Chinese foreign construction spending. This is amplified when the leaders of these regimes have a weak or insecure hold on power. Electoral autocracies are also predicted to be the most avid adopters of Chinese standards stemming from their eagerness for Chinese infrastructure spending.

This chapter establishes the empirical facts regarding political regimes and the prevalence of clientelism and the public-private orientation of the corporate sector. It begins by showing that electoral autocracies constitute around half of all developing countries during the 2010s, the most of any regime type. They are especially prevalent in Africa and Asia. The theory posits that clientelism plays an important role in driving Chinese foreign infrastructure spending. Several widely used proxies for clientelism establish that it is most prevalent in electoral autocracies. The theory also posits state control of the corporate sector is important to attracting Chinese foreign spending. A variety of measures are used to establish that state ownership of the corporate sector is significantly higher in autocracies than in democracies, especially in industries related to infrastructure. Overall, this chapter provides robust evidence about the characteristics of political regimes posited to influence Chinese infrastructure spending.

We draw on V-Dem data to present global democratic trends since 1789 and revisit key descriptive questions on the global spread of democratic institutions. We provide a comprehensive, nuanced, and disaggregated assessment of democratic development through modern history. We first consider the spread of electoral democracy from 1789 until the present day. Over this period, the world has witnessed a massive spread of electoral democracy. However, the spread has been uneven; substantial upturns and downturns have tended to cluster in different time periods, and all along there have been noteworthy cross-region differences in levels of electoral democracy. Second, we take on a disaggregate perspective and look at trends in sub-components of electoral democracy, namely adult suffrage, elected officials, clean elections, freedom of association, and freedom of expression. Finally, we change our focus from electoral democracy to describe trends pertaining to “thicker” understandings of democracy, that is, ‘liberal democracy’, ‘deliberative democracy’, ‘participatory democracy’, and ‘egalitarian democracy’.