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Article by Meghna Pamula Although democracy has greatly expanded globally over the past few decades, democratic backsliding has been a topic of concern over recent years. Democratic backsliding is the state-led debilitation or elimination of the institutions sustaining democracy. Democracy is made up of factors such as voting rights, freedom of the governed, and minority […]
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AbstractWe propose a theory of democratic backsliding where citizens' retrospective assessment of an incumbent politician depends on expectations that are endogenous to the incumbent's behaviour. We show that democratic backsliding can occur even when most citizens and most politicians intrinsically value democracy. By challenging norms of democracy, an incumbent can lower citizens' expectations; by not doubling down on this challenge, he can then beat this lowered standard. As a result, gradual backsliding can actually enhance an incumbent's popular support not despite but because of citizens' opposition to backsliding. This mechanism can only arise when citizens are uncertain enough about incumbents' preferences (e.g. owing to programmatically weak parties). Mass polarization, instead, can reduce the occurrence of backsliding while simultaneously increasing its severity.

AbstractThe twenty‐first century has been one of democratic backsliding. This has stimulated wide‐ranging scholarship on the causes of democratic erosion. Yet an overarching framework that identifies actors, behaviors, and decision processes has not been developed. I offer such a structure that includes elites (e.g., elected officials, the judiciary), societal actors (e.g., social movements, interest groups, media), and citizens. I discuss erosive threats stemming from each actor and the concomitant role of psychological mechanisms. The framework highlights the challenge of arriving at a holistic explanation of erosion within a given country during a finite period. It also accentuates why scholars should regularly consider the implications of their specific findings for democratic stability. I conclude by discussing various lessons and suggestions for how to study democratic backsliding.

The topic of the next elections to the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) of Ukraine unexpectedly surfaced in public discourse towards the end of spring this year. Julia Kyrychenko and Olha Ivasiuk's recent article on Verfassungsblog outlines major legal and practical obstacles to holding wartime elections in Ukraine. In their illuminating analysis, the authors make a strong case against wartime elections, a viewpoint largely shared by civil society. My argument is a bit different. I will argue that (1) wartime parliamentary elections are expressis verbis inconsistent with the Ukrainian Constitution, and (2) wartime elections would undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions and potentially lead to democratic backsliding.

How is it that Poland and Hungary, formerly regional leaders in democratic progress in east central Europe, have become widely cited cases of democratic backsliding? According to the political science literature on democratization, the path by which they exited communism should have favored stable democratic outcomes. This paper reexamines that literature and argues that it misses potential populist dangers inherent in the combination of accommodation and contention in the democratization process in both countries. The paper argues that changes in the structural conditions under which Polish and Hungarian democracy operated markedly improved the chances of success for populist actors in electoral competition, explaining the rise of PiS and FiDeSz. Particular attention is paid to the role of the global economic crisis of 2008 and the European refugee crisis of 2015.

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.

This article assesses two next-level questions in the study of democratic backsliding: democratic
resilience and political polarization. It first advances a set of methodological decision
points to improve clarity in contemporary debates surrounding democratic backsliding
measurement and the possibility of identifying moments of democratic recovery. It
then moves to a theoretical and empirical assessment of pathways by which democratic
backsliding takes place, under what conditions, which specific actors are involved, and
what opportunities exist for democratic recovery given sources of resilience and strategies
of resistance. The authors examine the role of political polarization in backsliding and
highlight the combined importance of political agency and institutional levers for regime
outcomes. The authors argue that regime outcomes are not predetermined by antecedent
conditions, and particularly not by the level of development.

AbstractThis article discusses the contribution of European political parties to democratic backsliding. It focuses on the European People's Party's efforts to protect the Hungarian government, and the European Conservatives and Reformists party's permissive acceptance of the Polish government's attacks on democracy and the rule of law, analysing these patterns of behaviour as a form of complicity in democratic backsliding. In a second step, the article examines the existing possibilities and normative justification for sanctioning European political parties that make a complicit contribution to democratic backsliding.

The Hungarian government's discriminatory actions against the Central European University constitute one of the most prominent conflicts between an academic institution and a government today. My contribution gives a detailed account of how the conflict has unfolded so far. Various frameworks of interpretation, including democratic backsliding, cultural war, and international politics are discussed. I place the story of the university in the context of the polarized cultural climate of Eastern Europe and draw attention to the power of universities in collaborating across borders in defense of academic freedom—and freedom in general.

AbstractDemocratic backsliding in Central and Eastern European countries is on the rise. Independent judiciaries, other institutions of liberal democracy, as well as civil liberties and media freedom are being undermined, coupled with the human rights and dignity of certain groups being curtailed or even violated. In these difficult political and legal circumstances, non-state actors, such as interest groups, face many challenges. The goal of this research is to explore how interest groups in Poland perceive their position, what tactics they use in order to influence public policies and decision-makers, and whether they search for networking strategies in order to strengthen their position vis-à-vis the government. By placing our research in the Polish context, we fill the gap in the current literature on the situation of interest groups that face democratic backsliding. We base our analyses on new survey data collected from Polish interest groups in 2017–2018, conducted within the Comparative Interest Group Survey.

AbstractWhat happens to public administration when populists are elected into government? This article argues that populists seek to realize an anti-pluralist reform agenda, thereby fuelling trends of democratic backsliding. Against this background, the article discusses potential goals and strategies of populist public administration policy and introduces examples of how populists sought to capture (Orbán in Hungary), dismantle (Fujimori in Peru), sabotage (Trump in the United States), and reform (Blocher in Switzerland) the state bureaucracy. In doing so, populists in government aim at structures, resources, personnel, norms, and accountability relationships. The examples suggest that populist public administration policies can have profound impact on policymaking and democracy, underlining the need for a broader research agenda on this issue area.