There's a lovely Spanish term of art, "democradura," used to characterize these sorts of illiberal democracies (which are not, contra the article, limited to an

There's a lovely Spanish term of art, "democradura," used to characterize these sorts of illiberal democracies (which are not, contra the article, limited to anti-Atlanticist regimes -- there are plenty of Western allies, and to some degree even Western states, that exhibit some or all of the features of illiberal democracies). It's a shame that the paper itself is paywalled, but I like the underlying insight that effective authoritarianism is essentially about controlling information, not behavior. What this has to say about states like our own is, unfortunately, an exercise left to the polemicist.