Today, electoral authoritarianism represents the most common form of political regime in the developing world - and the one we know least about. Filling in the lacuna, this new book presents cutting-edge research on the internal dynamics of electoral authoritarian regimes. Each concise, jargon-free chapter addresses a specific empirical puzzle on the basis of careful cross-national comparison. The result is a systematic, clearly structured study of the interaction between rulers and opposition parties in the central arena of struggle under electoral authoritarianism, the electoral battlefield.