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We know that elections in established democracies are "meaningful", in the sense of representing opportunities to hire and fire incumbents. What about elections that take place in non-democracies? Typically, such elections are dismissed as empty and relatively harmless rituals. In this study, I show that, even under less than free conditions, elections have a meaningful chance of (1) firing the incumbent in office, and (2) of ushering in political liberalization. The difference between elections in democracies and non-democracies may be one of degree rather than of kind: elections tend to empower constituents vis-a-vis the incumbent anywhere, just more so in democracies. Given that more than 90 per cent of the countries in the world hold regular elections, the implications are potentially significant. A key message of the paper is that the efforts of the international community to spread the institutions of electoral accountability around the world are far from naive: recent events in Ukraine illustrate the consequences of the trend such efforts have helped set in motion. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]