The term semi-authoritarian is used to refer to a state

State (polity)

A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign and may enjoy a monopoly on the legal initiation of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union...

 or regime

Regime

The word regime refers to a set of conditions, most often of a political nature.-Politics:...

 that shares both democratic and authoritarian features. According to Marina Ottaway, such states are "ambiguous systems that combine rhetorical acceptance of liberal democracy

Liberal democracy

Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...

, the existence of some formal democratic institutions, and political liberties with essentially illiberal or even authoritarian traits."

A young and unstable democracy struggling toward improvement and consolidation is usually not classified as a semi-authoritarian country. Rather, the term "semi-authoritarian" is reserved for stable regimes that combine democratic and authoritarian elements. Most of them are dominant-party system

Dominant-party system

A dominant-party system, or one-party dominant system, is a system where there is "a category of parties/political organizations that have successively won election victories and whose future defeat cannot be envisaged or is unlikely for the foreseeable future." A wide range of parties have been...

s - that is, states where opposition parties are allowed and free elections are held, but where the opposition has no real chance of winning. Sometimes the dominant party maintains power through election fraud, while other times the elections themselves are fair, but the electoral campaigns preceding them are not.

The late 1980s and early 1990s have seen the demise of many different kinds of authoritarian governments: communist state

Communist state

A communist state is a state with a form of government characterized by single-party rule or dominant-party rule of a communist party and a professed allegiance to a Leninist or Marxist-Leninist communist ideology as the guiding principle of the state...

s in Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

, right-wing military dictatorship

Military dictatorship

A military dictatorship is a form of government where in the political power resides with the military. It is similar but not identical to a stratocracy, a state ruled directly by the military....

s in Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

, and various others in Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

. Often, the governments that replaced them declared their allegiance to democracy and implemented genuine democratic reforms in the beginning, but eventually turned into semi-authoritarian regimes.