Why do democratically elected leaders in developing countries adopt authoritarian practices? For the purposes of this article, authoritarian practices include activities such as; utilizing devices to bypass legislatures and/or restrict the ability of opposition parties to operate, restricting political and civil rights of the people and politicizing the judiciary in their countries. Understanding why elected leaders adopt such practices is a very important question which, thus far, has only received scant attention. Academically speaking, the bulk of the literature on democratization (for example Diamond et al., 1995, 1999; and Huntington, 1991) has been more concerned with whether democratization will be successful or collapse into another era of authoritarianism. In this perspective, identified in this article as the ‘Leadership Thesis, a successful transition to and functioning of democracy is largely the result of quality leadership, whereas the breakdown of democracy is a consequence of the absence of talented and visionary leaders. In another perspective, a growing portion of the literature on globalization see an inherent contradiction between the logic of the global economy and the operation of democracy at the national level . Although this literature provides a necessary critique of globalization, it generally lacks the specifics to explain why national leaders behave as they do.
