PART I. Introduction and theoretical framework
Introductory note to Part I: why a theoretical framework matters for this kind of analysis
Before moving to the comparison of Milošević, Putin, and Vučić, it is necessary to establish a clear theoretical framework. Without it, the analysis could easily slide into journalistic listing of similarities or into a hasty equation of political actors who operate in different historical, international, and institutional environments. This is why the first part has a double function. First, it explains why this topic belongs to the broader field of election forensics, even though it is not focused on statistical anomalies in electoral results. Second, it establishes the concepts through which concrete patterns of rule and political rhetoric can later be interpreted. In that sense, the theoretical section is not an accessory to the analysis, but a necessary precondition for it. Only once authoritarian, semi-authoritarian, hybrid, and competitive-authoritarian regimes are clarified can one more precisely understand why media dominance, the delegitimization of the opposition, the political use of external threats, and institutional asymmetry are relevant for understanding electoral processes. From this follows the core claim of the article: elections cannot be understood only through results, but also through the political environment in which those results are produced.
1. Why this topic belongs to election forensics
Election forensics is often imagined as a post-election discipline. At its center are numbers: turnout, vote distributions, polling-station-level deviations, unusual data patterns, and disproportions that may indicate manipulation or organized pressure. This approach is indispensable and remains one of the most important tools for identifying suspicious electoral patterns. Yet it is not sufficient. Electoral integrity depends not only on what happens on election day or during counting. It also depends on the conditions under which political actors enter the campaign, who controls media visibility, how the public framework through which voters interpret politics is formed, and whether the opposition enters the arena as a legitimate alternative or as a pre-stigmatized threat. This is precisely why the analysis of political rhetoric, media space, and institutional power relations belongs within the broader field of election forensics. It helps us understand not only whether electoral results are suspicious, but also how free and fair the elections were in a substantive sense.
In this broader understanding, concepts such as free and fair elections, electoral integrity, and the level playing field become central. Elections may be procedurally held, with multiple parties, formally valid rules, and visible ballot competition, yet still fail to be equal. If the government controls or decisively shapes key channels of political communication, if it has access to state resources that reinforce incumbency advantage, and if the opposition enters the campaign burdened by constant delegitimization, then the electoral contest loses the character of open democratic competition. In such cases, numbers are important, but they are not the only source of insight. They acquire full meaning only when read together with the political and institutional context.
That is why the topic of this article is directly relevant to a blog on election forensics. The comparative analysis of Milošević, Putin, and Vučić is not primarily an attempt to determine whether their elections were “the same,” nor to assign identical regime labels in advance. Its goal is different: to show how certain types of political rhetoric, models of rule, and forms of institutional control create an electoral terrain that may already be deeply asymmetrical before any suspicious statistical pattern appears. In that sense, election forensics begins before vote counting. It begins when the political environment in which voters make decisions is analyzed.
2. Authoritarian regimes: limited pluralism and the primacy of executive power
The classic theoretical starting point for this kind of analysis lies in the work of Juan Linz. Linz matters not only because he provides a definition of authoritarianism, but because he shows that authoritarian orders do not have to look identical to totalitarian systems. Authoritarian regimes do not necessarily abolish all social pluralism, nor do they always mobilize society to the maximum. On the contrary, they often function through limited pluralism, selective tolerance, and broad executive discretion. In them there is enough institutional life to preserve an appearance of normality, but not enough real autonomy for political competition to be equal. This means that authoritarianism is defined not only by the absence of elections, but by the way power is organized: how the boundaries of acceptable politics are determined, how institutions are controlled, and how the relationship among leader, state, and society is structured.
Within such a framework, the ruling side enjoys several key advantages. The first is a monopoly over the interpretation of political reality. The regime appears not merely as one actor among others, but as the arbiter that decides what is responsible, patriotic, legitimate, and dangerous. The second is institutional imbalance. Even when formally separate institutions exist, the executive retains the capacity to direct, sideline, or bypass them. The third is the symbolic personalization of power. The authoritarian leader appears not merely as an office-holder, but as the guarantor of order, stability, and the state itself. Once these three dimensions are combined, the opposition enters a political space that is not neutral, but already structured against it. In that sense, authoritarianism is not only a matter of the intensity of repression. It is also a matter of how the political field itself is shaped.
This becomes clear across different spheres of public life. In the economy, authoritarian regimes often claim that only they can guarantee stability and protect society from crisis. In foreign policy, they present themselves as the last barrier against external domination or threat. In the media, tolerated pluralism survives only so long as it does not challenge the basic regime framework. In education and science, autonomy may be acknowledged rhetorically but narrowed once it begins to produce systematic criticism. In elections, procedures may survive, while equality collapses through unequal access to resources, media, and institutions. For that reason, authoritarian rule should be understood not only as a system of bans, but as a system of deeply unequal distribution of political power.
3. Electoral authoritarianism and competitive authoritarianism
One of the most important theoretical advances in the understanding of contemporary nondemocratic regimes came from Andreas Schedler and from Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way. Schedler (2002, 2006) shows that many regimes no longer abolish elections, but preserve them as a mechanism of legitimation. They do not need to crudely falsify every electoral procedure or entirely eliminate the opposition from political life. It is enough to place the electoral process under conditions that enable the government to win without accepting the full uncertainty that is the essence of democracy. Hence the idea of electoral authoritarianism: an order in which elections exist, but not as equal competition; rather, as a controlled instrument for confirming power.
Levitsky and Way (2002) refine this pattern through the concept of competitive authoritarianism. In such regimes, formal democratic institutions are not abolished. The opposition can participate, elections are held, and they may even have real political consequences. However, the playing field is not level. State resources, media, the judiciary, security bodies, and regulators are so heavily tilted toward the government that the ruling side enjoys a systemic advantage. This concept is especially useful for analyzing regimes that do not resemble classical dictatorships, but in which the equality of political competition is progressively undermined. In such cases, election forensics must broaden its focus: beyond the analysis of results, it must also examine the structure of the conditions under which those results were produced.
It is important to note that in competitive-authoritarian regimes the opposition is not necessarily irrelevant. On the contrary, it may be strong enough to constitute a genuine challenge. That is precisely why the government must deploy a wide range of instruments: media dominance, discursive delegitimization, selective law enforcement, privileged access to public resources, and the constant public hyper-presence of the leader. In other words, such regimes are not based solely on outright prohibition, but on an accumulation of asymmetries that gradually change the nature of political competition. This is why they are especially important for the analysis of electoral systems in which formal procedures survive while their democratic substance weakens.
4. Hybrid and semi-authoritarian regimes: between pluralism and control
The concepts of hybrid and semi-authoritarian rule were developed precisely to capture orders that fit neither the model of full democracy nor that of open dictatorship. Such systems retain multiparty politics, electoral procedures, formal institutions, and some degree of social pluralism, yet simultaneously constrain the ability of that pluralism to produce real alternation in power. This is analytically important because it shows that authoritarian logic does not always manifest itself through outright bans. It can also be realized through partial tolerance, institutional capture, and control over key resources of political competition. Freedom House classifies Serbia precisely for this reason as a transitional or hybrid regime, with the added emphasis that it is an autocratizing hybrid in which key institutions are increasingly used to entrench regime advantage.
Such regimes often function through what at first glance appears to be merely technical or procedural governance. Regulators are not formally abolished, but they act selectively. Media are not all banned, but they are placed in economically and politically unequal positions. The opposition is not necessarily outlawed, but it is systematically denied equal conditions. This is also where the political significance of hybridity lies: the system preserves enough formal democracy to avoid the label of an open dictatorship, while simultaneously generating enough asymmetry to limit the possibility of real political alternation. Such orders are especially important for election forensics because their democratic deficit often appears not in one spectacular violation of the rules, but in stable and cumulative inequality.
This is also where Nancy Bermeo (2020) concept of democratic backsliding becomes relevant. Democracy does not necessarily collapse overnight. It often erodes from within: through executive aggrandizement, the weakening of oversight institutions, the marginalization of autonomous voices, and the reconfiguration of public space. This process is particularly dangerous because many individual changes may appear technical or isolated, yet cumulatively alter the nature of the regime. For that reason, when analyzing contemporary systems it is not enough to observe whether elections and opposition formally exist; one must also examine how broad the real political space available to them actually is.
5. Informational autocracies: propaganda, control, and the image of competence
Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman (2019) make a particularly useful contribution to this kind of analysis through the concept of informational autocracy. Their central argument is that many contemporary autocrats no longer rule primarily through constant, mass terror, but through information control, propaganda, censorship, and the production of an image of their own competence. Such regimes seek not only obedience, but belief that the ruling side is effective, reasonable, and irreplaceable. In this model, repression has not disappeared, but it is no longer always the only or even the principal mechanism through which power is maintained. Much more important becomes the management of perception.
That is precisely why media, advertising, political marketing, tabloids, digital platforms, and social networks become so important. The government does not necessarily need to ban every opponent. It is enough to present them as incompetent, foreign, dangerous, or irrelevant. It is also enough to present itself as the only serious force capable of delivering stability, security, and development. Political conflict is thereby shifted: instead of a dispute among legitimate alternatives, one gets a division between supposed order and supposed threat. In such a framework, control of the communication space becomes as important as control of formal institutions.
This concept is especially useful for understanding Milošević, Putin, and Vučić because it shows how different degrees of repression may be combined with similar strategies of perception management. Milošević’s model was shaped in a predominantly traditional media environment. Putin’s model combines repression with strongly centralized informational control. Vučić’s model operates in a formally more plural media environment, but still depends heavily on the constant production of the image of a responsible, rational, and state-building government as opposed to a supposedly chaotic, irresponsible, or foreign-linked opposition. In all three cases, political legitimation rests not only on coercion, but on organized shaping of political reality.
6. How such regimes manifest across policy domains
The theoretical framework becomes especially useful once it is translated into different spheres of public life. In the economy, authoritarian and hybrid regimes tend to monopolize the language of stability, presenting the government as the only force capable of delivering development, investment, wages, pensions, and social protection. In foreign policy, they often produce a narrative of the besieged state: foreign powers seek to weaken the country, neighbors work against it, and domestic critics serve as their helpers. In the security sphere, the military, police, and broader coercive apparatus become symbols of order, protection, and state seriousness, while the leader takes on the role of the personalized guardian of national survival. In the media, formal pluralism often survives, but under conditions in which key channels of political visibility are tilted in favor of the incumbent. In the digital sphere, new forms of surveillance, propaganda amplification, and coordinated attacks on critical voices emerge. In education and science, regimes often declaratively support modernization, but are less willing to tolerate the autonomy of institutions capable of generating long-term criticism.
What matters most for the electoral process is that all these domains are interlinked. Media dominance reinforces the government’s economic narrative. Security rhetoric reinforces the delegitimization of the opposition. External threat strengthens the incumbent’s symbolic monopoly over patriotism. Social policies solidify the image of the government as the guardian of everyday life. When all these elements are combined, one gets an electoral space that may preserve outward forms of pluralism while remaining deeply unequal. This is precisely why the theoretical framework of this first part is a necessary prelude to the comparative analysis in the second part. It allows concrete statements, narratives, and institutional patterns to be seen not as accidental, but as elements of a broader model of rule.
7. Why Milošević, Putin, and Vučić form a useful comparative frame
The comparison of Milošević, Putin, and Vučić is analytically useful precisely because it brings together three different contexts in which related regime repertoires can be observed. Milošević operated under conditions of state disintegration, war, sanctions, and deep economic and social crisis. Putin operated in a post-imperial great power with much greater coercive and media capacities, together with strong energy and security dimensions of legitimation. Vučić operates in a formally pluralist, more internationally open, and differently structured institutional environment, yet with strong personalization of power, media asymmetry, and seriously degraded equality of competition. The differences are therefore real and important. But it is precisely because of those differences that one can more clearly identify what the shared patterns are, and what belongs to the specificity of each case.
The greatest value of this comparison is not that it places all three cases under one identical label, but that it shows how personalization of power, narratives of external threat, delegitimization of the opposition, media dominance, and institutional asymmetry can function under different historical and technological conditions. Such a comparison also makes it possible, in the second part of the article, to examine more concretely how these patterns appear in the economy, foreign policy, the military, media, the digital sphere, social policy, education, and the treatment of the opposition. In that sense, the first part builds the analytical map, while the second part tests what that map looks like when applied to concrete political practice.