Exercise 2: Why Competitive Authoritarian Regimes Keep Holding Real Elections — Possible Solution
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The chapter's own real, verified answer to Chapter 6's own open
question is that these regimes genuinely need elections for a specific
real purpose: legitimacy. Verified in the chapter, competitive
authoritarian regimes keep formal democratic institutions in place
because rulers actually use them as their own principal, real means of
claiming legitimate political authority - even against genuine
opposition - rather than as an empty formality they'd be equally happy
to discard.

Simply cancelling elections outright would remove that real source of
legitimacy entirely, both domestically (citizens generally expect some
form of a vote, even a compromised one) and internationally, since the
chapter's own real, verified note observes that these regimes
genuinely increased in number specifically in the post-Soviet era,
adapting to a world where openly rejecting elections carries a real,
higher international cost than merely tilting them. A regime that
cancels elections outright looks like an unambiguous dictatorship; a
regime that holds elections and wins them, however dishonestly, can
present itself as having a real democratic mandate.

This is why the specific real tactics the chapter lists - electoral
and judicial abuse, state resource misuse, civil liberties suppression
- matter so much: they let the regime keep the real, outward form and
legitimizing function of an election while still controlling its
actual outcome, achieving genuine political control without paying the
real reputational cost of abolishing the democratic process altogether.

ANSWER: Competitive authoritarian regimes hold real, if tilted,
elections because elections themselves are the regime's own principal
real source of legitimacy, both domestically and internationally -
cancelling them outright would remove that legitimizing function
entirely and mark the regime as an unambiguous dictatorship, whereas
tilting the vote through electoral abuse, resource misuse, and
civil-liberties suppression lets the regime keep real democratic cover
while still controlling the actual outcome.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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This identifies legitimacy specifically as the real reason elections
are worth keeping, and explains the concrete real cost (domestic and
international) of cancelling them outright, rather than only restating
that these regimes "want to seem democratic."