Since the end of the Cold War, there has been an increase in authoritarian regime to conduct competitive elections. Many scholar has analyzed the effects of elections on the survival of authoritarian regimes empirically. However, it is still unclear how elections affect political phenomena and lead regime changes.

In this paper, we focus on popular uprising, which is an important mechanism that leads to regime changes, and examine how elections under authoritarian regimes influence on onsets of uprisings. Our result shows, while popular uprisings is promoted in election years, the more experienced elections with high free and fair, the more uprisings are restrained. This result is consistent with the previous study that examined that elections destabilize authoritarian regimes in the short term, but stabilizes them in the long run. This paper contributes to further findings about the function of elections under authoritarian regimes by focusing on the threat from external actors such as mass uprisings.

This paper analyzes the relationship between political regimes and undernourishment. This study reports, using Time-Series-Cross-Section (TSCS) data, that democracy has a positive effect on undernourishment in Sub-Saharan African countries between 1991 and 2014. The previous work has tackled human development problems for a long time. Only a few studies, however, have tried to explain empirically why some countries suffer from undernourishment and others do not. This article theorizes that democratic countries have a lower undernourishment rate than authoritarian countries especially in poor countries like those in Sub-Saharan Africa, and tests the theory with statistical analysis. The result shows that the positive effect of democracy is statistically supported although the previous literature pointed out that democracy in poor countries is not functional. The case study on Malawi also reveals a causal mechanism on how democracy reduces undernourishment mainly through agricultural reforms.