Democratic Backsliding Research Articles

Sanctioning democratic backsliding in the European Union: transnational salience, negative intergovernmental spillover, and policy change

ABSTRACT In 2021, the European Union (EU) started to use material sanctions to punish democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland. This policy change presents a puzzle for the existing literatures on international responses to backsliding. We theorise two distinctive processes that can account for why EU policy changed from inaction to enforcement. First, once the issue of backsliding in a member state has attained public salience across the other member states, their mainstream parties face domestic electoral incentives to support sanctions against illiberal governments abroad. Second, once backsliding governments also disrupt intergovernmental policy cooperation and threaten common policies at the EU level, even those actors who had been reluctant to defend EU values become more inclined to use sanctions. We demonstrate the plausibility of our explanation with evidence, first, of the increasing public and electoral salience of backsliding in other EU member states, and second, of the occurrence of a negative intergovernmental spillover through increasing attacks by backsliding member state governments against common policies.

The U.S. Supreme Court and democratic backsliding

AbstractThis paper assesses the performance of the Supreme Court as democratic guardrail during five prior periods of democratic crisis in the United States. It finds that most such periods witnessed efforts by the governing regime to entrench themselves in power, and that the Court has rarely provided an effective check on such democratic abuses. Rather than serving as a reliable democratic guardrail, the Court has regularly exercised what Dixon and Landau call “weak‐form abusive judicial review”; that is, it has declined to check attacks on democracy emerging from other centers of power. On one occasion, the Court has undermined democracy even more directly via “strong‐form abusive judicial review”; that is, the Court itself attacked key democratic guardrails. This historical record provides a helpful baseline for evaluating the Court's performance during the Trump era, when it has taken actions that both protect and undermine democratic health. Conflicting signs indicate that the Court is playing a more democracy‐protective role than most of its predecessors in some respects, but a more democracy‐undermining role in others. As such, it is too soon to say with confidence whether the contemporary Court will be remembered, on balance, for resolving or exacerbating a system‐threatening constitutional crisis.

State Pride and the Quality of Democracy in the American States

Abstract We evaluate whether feelings of state pride in the USA are linked to the quality of democracy in one’s state. Using two original surveys, we find no relationship between an objective measure of the quality of state democracy and feelings of state pride. In contrast, we find a consistent positive relationship between subjective evaluations and state pride such that citizens with more positive evaluations of the quality of democracy in their state report higher levels of state pride. Interestingly, feelings of state pride are not linked to the objective measure of democracy even when citizens are informed of where their state ranks in a survey experiment. However, subsample analyses reveal that there is a relationship between the objective measure and state pride among Democrats and political “losers” (citizens living in states where the government is controlled by the opposite party). We conclude by discussing implications for citizenship and state pride in an era of democratic erosion.

Foreign policy consequences of democratic backsliding: the case of the Comfort Women Agreement in 2015

Recent studies have documented the profound effects that democratic backsliding generates on various realms of governance. However, foreign policies remain an exception in this trend despite the notable emergence of non-traditional foreign policy positions backsliding governments around the world took in recent years. To address this gap, this paper examines South Korea’s policy toward Japan during its recent period of democratic backsliding, focusing on the making of the Comfort Women Agreement in 2015. The case study reveals that the Park Geun-hye government (2012-2017) pursued a policy position that defied social and institutional constraints. The paper suggests that this case represents how democratic backsliding can destabilize foreign policies.

Re-evaluating the East-West divide in the European Union

ABSTRACT This introduction argues that the East-West divide in Europe continues to be politically salient since the fall of the Berlin Wall and two decades since the accession of most East Central European (ECE) countries to the European Union. We re-evaluate the nature of the East-West divide in the EU, consider its sources, and examine the interplay between political variation and cross-border economic inequalities. The fundamental question posed here is whether such divisions are persistent, intractable, or transitional. We note that earlier scholarship on the East-West divide emphasised economic divergence as a primary explanatory factor. As relevant as the economy still is, our contribution is to argue that the divide also needs to be assessed against the broader political backdrop of democratic backsliding and new geopolitical developments. Although we find that the East-West divide is still highly salient, the articles here specify how fluid categories are and how variation has emerged – both between and within countries in the ECE region. Finally, the very perception of an East-West divide is politically consequential. If unaddressed, East-West divisions and tensions will impede future reforms of the EU’s internal governance processes and limit its power on the global stage.

Is there an East–West divide on democracy in the European Union? Evidence from democratic backsliding and attitudes towards rule of law interventions

ABSTRACT Perceptions of an East–West divide in the European Union (EU) with regard to democracy have led to re-evaluations of EU eastern enlargement as a policy failure and militate against further enlargement. This article examines the accuracy of narratives of an intra-EU East–West divide on democracy, in which the western member states outperform the eastern members, and in which the former support, and the latter oppose, rule of law (RoL) interventions by the EU in member states engaged in democratic backsliding. The article considers two aspects of a potential democracy divide: the quality of democracy and attitudes towards RoL interventions. It draws on several quantitative indicators for a more comprehensive assessment of intra-EU democracy divides and uses set-theory to identify different in- and out-groups that demarcate such intra-EU divides. Although different indicators and different conceptions of set-membership reveal to varying extents East–West patterns, none fit with a clear regional divide. It is more fruitful to conceive of these differences as a continuum, with (currently) a small group of (western) member states at one end and a small group of (eastern) members at the other, and most member states in distinctive sub-groups in-between.

External democracy promotion in times of internal rule-of-law crisis: the EU and its neighbourhood

ABSTRACT This article seeks to unpack the implications of the deteriorating rule of law within the EU’s eastern members for the EU’s external democracy promotion. We examine the legitimacy of the EU’s support for democracy in the European neighbourhood in light of the internal EU rule-of-law crisis. Adopting a sociological perspective, we emphasize local perceptions of the EU by tracing the legitimation dynamics at play in neighbouring societies. We adopt a tripartite conception of external legitimacy based on appropriateness, utilitarian consensus, and empathy. Using representative public opinion surveys, we show that the democratic erosion in the eastern EU members has not (yet) negatively impacted the EU’s credibility in supporting democracy in the neighbourhood. The article contributes to the research on the legitimacy of EU foreign policy and the literature on the legitimacy of international organizations. It also contributes to the broader effort at provincializing International Relations and decentring EU foreign policy studies.

Moving toward the Median: Compulsory Voting and Political Polarization

Should turning out to vote in mass elections be voluntary or compulsory? Previous normative arguments for compulsory voting often rely on contested normative claims about the moral duty to vote or about the democratic legitimacy conveyed by high turnout. Our article strengthens the normative case for compulsory voting by arguing that it could improve democracy by reducing polarization, which existing work suggests can lead to democratic backsliding. Drawing on spatial models of electoral competition, we argue that, by reducing more extreme voters’ ability to threaten to abstain due to alienation, the introduction of compulsory voting can push party platforms toward the median voter’s preferences. This directly decreases party polarization, defined as the distance between party platforms. We examine potential normative and empirical objections to this argument and provide scope conditions under which compulsory voting is likely to decrease polarization.

Resisting backsliding: opposition strategies against the erosion of democracy

Resisting backsliding: opposition strategies against the erosion of democracy

The role of the state in shaping the internationalization of firms in the twenty-first century

The year 2020, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent crises, highlighted the significance of state intervention in shaping firm competitiveness. However, unprecedented government support for businesses has left us puzzled about the state’s role in firm internationalization, especially in emerging markets and the Global South, where government involvement has been accompanied by democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism. Our Special Issue moves the current debate forward by exploring how the state’s changing role affects firm internationalization. The objective of this editorial is twofold: stimulating theory development by scrutinizing state intervention in emerging markets in recent decades and introducing the Special Issue articles. Contributions investigate how governments support the internationalization of their domestic businesses by focusing on firms’ institutional embeddedness and the impact of institutions as both resources and constraints to their internationalization. By linking the discourse on state capitalism with business internationalization, our empirical studies advance research on political economy and the state’s role in innovative ways, reflecting on recent geopolitical developments. Our introductory article situates the Special Issue papers in the state capitalism and firm internationalization literatures and discusses their implications for future research.

Populist attitudes and support for democracy among Latin American bureaucrats

Despite macro-level patterns that link populists in power with democratic backsliding, it is unclear how populist attitudes correlate with attitudes about democracy among individuals. Scholars have only recently turned their attention to this issue and produced inconclusive results. Using our unique survey of Latin American bureaucrats, we investigate how populism operates among bureaucrats, a set of actors with a crucial role in democratic governance. We analyze each of three dimensions of populism separately (anti-elitism, pro-people orientation and Manicheanism). Building on recent scholarship finding that populists are dissatisfied democrats, we examine the relationship between attitudes about each dimension of populism and satisfaction with and support for democracy. We extend current scholarship by deploying two measures of satisfaction with and four measures of support for democracy, including support for checks on the executive. We find that those scoring high on underlying dimensions of populism rate the quality of democracy lower but are not less satisfied with the system in their countries. We also find that those with pro-people attitudes consistently support democracy, including checks on the executive. Those with a Manichean outlook, in contrast, are less supportive of democracy and favor increased executive powers. These complexities suggest the need for more research on the concept of populism, as well as supporting the need for understanding how attitudes among important social groups, particularly institutional actors, may differ from the overall population.

Democratic Bricolage

Despite their dominance and control over police, courts, state institutions, media, and civil society, authoritarian governments face multifaceted internal and external contestation over their right to rule and the boundaries of autocratic control. Analysis of this opposition is wanting in the literature on democratic backsliding. Societal groups, institutions, and individuals regularly contest governments’ claim to legitimate rule, and they seek opportunities to raise their voices and be heard. These efforts, which we call democratic bricolage, are mostly uncoordinated, accidental, disconnected, and dependent on opportunities as these arise. But they undermine the government’s claims to authority and legitimacy. They maintain instead the moral claim to democracy, the right to be heard and consulted. We argue that democratic bricolage is the story of democratic resilience in an authoritarian context and an under-studied and little-noticed part of the story of autocratization.

Academics are more specific, and practitioners more sensitive, in forecasting interventions to strengthen democratic attitudes

Concern over democratic erosion has led to a proliferation of proposed interventions to strengthen democratic attitudes in the United States. Resource constraints, however, prevent implementing all proposed interventions. One approach to identify promising interventions entails leveraging domain experts, who have knowledge regarding a given field, to forecast the effectiveness of candidate interventions. We recruit experts who develop general knowledge about a social problem (academics), experts who directly intervene on the problem (practitioners), and nonexperts from the public to forecast the effectiveness of interventions to reduce partisan animosity, support for undemocratic practices, and support for partisan violence. Comparing 14,076 forecasts submitted by 1,181 forecasters against the results of a megaexperiment (n = 32,059) that tested 75 hypothesized effects of interventions, we find that both types of experts outperformed members of the public, though experts differed in how they were accurate. While academics' predictions were more specific (i.e., they identified a larger proportion of ineffective interventions and had fewer false-positive forecasts), practitioners' predictions were more sensitive (i.e., they identified a larger proportion of effective interventions and had fewer false-negative forecasts). Consistent with this, practitioners were better at predicting best-performing interventions, while academics were superior in predicting which interventions performed worst. Our paper highlights the importance of differentiating types of experts and types of accuracy. We conclude by discussing factors that affect whether sensitive or specific forecasters are preferable, such as the relative cost of false positives and negatives and the expected rate of intervention success.

Examining the effects of democratic backsliding on human rights conditions

What is the link between democratic backsliding and human rights? Existing literature has focused almost exclusively on the effect of increasing democratic features on improvements in human rights. In contrast, we know less regarding the impact of decreasing democracy (i.e., democratic backsliding) on a state’s human rights conditions. With the growing influence of antidemocratic movements in many democracies recently, it is imperative that we explore the relationship between democratic backsliding and human rights conditions. We suspect that democratic backsliding has a substantial negative impact on human rights conditions. We posit that countries experiencing a period of democratic backsliding will also experience human rights violations to a greater degree. Additionally, we maintain that the scale of the backsliding matters, wherein states experiencing more democratic backsliding also experience more substantial reductions in human rights conditions. In testing these assertions, we find strong empirical support using a range of data sources and model specifications.

An Events-Based Approach to Understanding Democratic Erosion

ABSTRACTThis article introduces and demonstrates the utility of a new event dataset on democratic erosion around the world. Through case studies of Turkey and Brazil, we show that our Democratic Erosion Event Dataset (DEED) can help to resolve debates about the extent to which democracy is backsliding based on prominent cross-national indicators, focusing in particular on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) and Little and Meng (L&M) indices. V-Dem suggests that democracies are deteriorating worldwide; L&M argue that this may be an artifact of subjectivity and coder bias and that more “objective” indicators reveal little to no global democratic backsliding in recent years. Using DEED, we show that—at least in these cases—objective indices may underestimate the extent of democratic erosion whereas subjective indices may overestimate it. Our analyses illustrate the ways in which DEED can complement existing indices by illuminating the nature and dynamics of democratic erosion as it occurs on the ground.

Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding

During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et al. 2000). Little and Meng (L&M) (2023) reintroduce this debate, arguing that “objective” measures of democracy show little evidence of recent global democratic backsliding.1 By extension, they posit that time-varying expert bias drives the appearance of democratic retrenchment in measures that incorporate expert judgments. In this article, we engage with (1) broader debates on democracy measurement and democratic backsliding, and (2) L&M’s specific data and conclusions.

What We Do and Do Not Know about Democratic Backsliding

We are humbled by the quantity and quality of the commentaries on our article in this special issue. Our goal was not to answer definitively how global democracy has changed in recent years but rather to provoke a debate about how we collectively can improve the scholarship on this question. The range of viewpoints raised in this special issue have made important advances on this goal.

Measuring Backsliding with Observables: Observable-to-Subjective Score Mapping

ABSTRACTMultiple well-known democracy-rating projects—including Freedom House, Polity, and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)—have identified apparent global regression in recent years. These measures rely on partly subjective indicators, which—in principle—could suffer from rater bias. For instance, Little and Meng (2023) argue that shared beliefs driven by the current zeitgeist could lead to shared biases that produce the appearance of democratic backsliding in subjectively coded measures. To assess this argument and the strength of the evidence for global democratic backsliding, we propose an observable-to-subjective score mapping (OSM) methodology that uses only easily observable features of democracy to predict existing indices of democracy. Applying this methodology to three prominent democracy indices, we find evidence of backsliding—but beginning later and not as pronounced as suggested by some of the original indices. Our approach suggests that the Freedom House measure particularly does not track with the recent patterns in observable indicators and that there has been a stasis or—at most—a modest decline in the average level of democracy.

Introduction: Democratic backsliding in Southeast Asia

This introduction to the special issue highlights the key findings and implications of democratic backsliding in Southeast Asia. It begins with an overview of the region's democratic landscape using the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset and compares the patterns and modes of backsliding in six selected cases. Collectively, the articles suggest the importance of unpacking regime components and the growing attitudinal elite-mass gap in analyzing the quality of democracy. The liberalization effects of social media were found to be mixed. The theoretical and empirical findings offer a fertile ground for future comparative work beyond the region.

Psychological Biases and Democratic Anxiety: A Comment on Little and Meng (2023)

In their timely article, Andrew Little and Anne Meng make an important point. Despite widespread alarm over democratic backsliding, objective evidence suggests that the scale of the phenomenon is much more limited than many seem to think. Recent power holders around the world have not been entrenching themselves more effectively than in the past. Incumbents continue to lose elections about as often as they used to, and those who win have not been doing so by larger margins. Opposition parties are allowed to compete about as frequently today as 10 or 20 years ago. Moreover, there has been no increase in leaders’ ability to evade term limits.