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Liberal democracy is in crisis and an increasing number of countries are at risk of sliding back to authoritarianism, according to several scholars. This paper aims to analyse the possible risks that contemporary democratic regimes face. Most importantly, is the crisis of liberal democracy a temporary malaise, or does it represent the first stage of an outright process of regime change towards autocracy? To address this question, we re-examine the ongoing illiberal trend in light of the processes of autocratization that have occurred in several world regions since the beginning of the 21st century. The research highlights a "goodµ and a "badµ news. On one hand, the backsliding of liberal democracy towards defective forms of democracy does represent a worrisome sign, given that defective democracies are fragile regimes and thus likely candidates to suffer democratic breakdown and to be replaced by some form of autocracy. On the other hand, several cases show that, similarly to democratization, autocratization can fail, or be reversed.

Starting from the origins of the Liberal tradition of political thought, this article traces the roots of the link between trade & democracy. They are to be found in the idea of "economic commerce" from the writings of Montesquieu & Olson's political economy work on the nexus between regime representativeness & fiscal policy choices to the most recent empirical literature on the "democratic difference." The assumption that, for causes of both fiscal optimization & policy constraints exerted by a protectionist legislative branch on the executive, democracies are more prone to engage in free trade than nondemocracies. This study proves that domestic political regimes have an impact on the level of bilateral trade among great powers, while also endowing with robust empirical evidence the proposition according to which pairs of democratic states tend to trade more with each other than do mixed pairs (eg, pairs composed of a democracy & an autocracy). Further, this research stands as the first empirical test of the relevance of the difference for trade made by democracy after the end of the Cold War & the democratization of Russia. 2 Tables, 1 Appendix, 48 References. Adapted from the source document.