Bangladesh: The Making of an Electoral Autocracy

In the past decade and a half, Bangladesh has witnessed serious erosion of democracy and transformation to what the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) described as “moderate autocracy”. Consecutive engineered elections, since 2014, demonstrate that the country’s democratic endeavor has lost its way, and the country is heading towards a closed autocracy. This chapter explores the sequence of the process of democratic backsliding and argues that the incumbent Bangladesh Awami League (BAL) has employed an institutional strategy of changing the rules of the game, capturing the referees of the state, and silencing the opposition. These were combined with ideational strategies to justify its various anti-democratic measures. This chapter discusses both the institutional and ideological strategies of the incumbent.