Democratic backsliding
Democratic backsliding is a form of autocratization, a process of regime change toward authoritarianism in which the exercise of political power becomes less limited and more arbitrary and repressive. Democratic backsliding specifically assumes a starting point of a democratic system. The process typically restricts the space for public contest and political participation in the process of government selection. Democratic backsliding involves the weakening of democratic institutions, such as the peaceful transition of power or free and fair elections, or the violation of individual rights that underpin democracies, especially freedom of expression. Democratic backsliding is the opposite of democratization.
Democratic backsliding is a gradual process, composed of instances of decline. It is not sudden nor dramatic, and typically follows legal processes to weaken democratic institutions. The categorizes these events of erosion into precursors, symptoms, acts of resistance to backsliding, and destabilizing events.
Proposed causes of democratic backsliding include economic inequality, rampant culture wars, culturally conservative reactions to societal changes, populist or personalist politics, and external influence from great power politics. Economic inequality is strongly associated with democratic backsliding in the 21st century, even in wealthy democracies. During crises, backsliding can occur when leaders impose autocratic rules during states of emergency that are either disproportionate to the severity of the crisis or remain in place after the situation has improved.
During the Cold War, democratic backsliding occurred most frequently through coups. Since the end of the Cold War, democratic backsliding has occurred more frequently through the election of personalist leaders or parties who subsequently dismantle democratic institutions. During the third wave of democratization in the late twentieth century, many new, weakly institutionalized democracies were established; these regimes have been most vulnerable to democratic backsliding. The third wave of autocratization has been ongoing since 2010 after the Great Recession, when the number of liberal democracies was at an all-time high. More than half of all autocratization episodes over 1900–2023 have a U-turn shape in which the autocratization is closely followed by and linked to subsequent democratization.
Manifestations
Democratic backsliding occurs when essential components of democracy are threatened. Examples of democratic backsliding include:- Free and fair elections are degraded;
- Liberal rights of freedom of speech, press and association decline, impairing the ability of the political opposition to challenge the government, hold it to account, and propose alternatives to the current regime;
- The rule of law is weakened, such as when the independence of the judiciary is threatened, or when civil service tenure protections are weakened or eliminated.
- An over-emphasis on national security as response to acts of terrorism or perceived antagonists.
Forms
Promissory coups
In a promissory coup, an incumbent elected government is deposed in a coup d'état by coup leaders who claim to defend democracy and promise to hold elections to restore democracy. In these situations, coup-makers emphasize the temporary and necessary nature of their intervention to ensure democracy in the future. This is unlike the more open-ended coups that occurred during the Cold War. Political scientist Nancy Bermeo says that "The share of successful coups that falls into the promissory category has risen significantly, from 35 percent before 1990 to 85 percent afterward." Examining 12 promissory coups in democratic states between 1990 and 2012, Bermeo found that "Few promissory coups were followed quickly by competitive elections, and fewer still paved the way for improved democracies."Executive aggrandizement
In political science, executive aggrandizement refers to the expansion of the leader's power beyond the "checks and balances" provided by the legislature and the judiciary, or by interfering with the independence of the public service. Even a legitimately elected leader can undermine democracy or cause a democratic backlash by using government resources to weaken his political opposition.This process contains a series of institutional changes by elected executives, impairing the ability of the political opposition to challenge the government and hold it to account. The most important feature of executive aggrandizement is that the institutional changes are made through legal channels, making it seem as if the elected official has a democratic mandate. Some examples of executive aggrandizement are the decline of media freedom and the weakening of the rule of law, such as when judicial autonomy is threatened.
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 102-14439, Rede Adolf Hitlers zum Ermächtigungsgesetz.jpg|thumb|Hitler gives a speech to the Reichstag in support of the Enabling Act. The collapse of the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany is perhaps the most infamous example of democratic backsliding. |260x260px
Over time, there has been a decline in active coups and self-coups and an increase in executive aggrandizement. Political scientist Nancy Bermeo notes that executive aggrandizement occurs over time, through institutional changes legitimized through legal means, such as new constituent assemblies, referendums, or "existing courts or legislatures... in cases where supporters of the executive gain majority control of such bodies." Bermeo notes that these methods mean that the aggrandizement of the executive "can be framed as having resulted from a democratic mandate." Populist rhetoric, which frames the executive as the sole legitimate representative of the people, has been shown to increase public support for executive aggrandizing actions. Executive aggrandizement is characterized by the presence of distress in axes of democracy, including institutional or horizontal accountability; and executive or discursive accountability.
Legislative authoritarianism
Legislative authoritarianism is the use of elected legislatures to consolidate power and undermine democratic accountability while upholding formal democratic processes. Governments pursuing democratic backsliding increasingly depend on legislatures to enact laws that limit opposition participation, erode oversight institutions, or solidify the power of ruling parties in the political system rather than avoiding parliaments. The swift enactment of complicated laws, restrictions on parliamentary debate, diminished authority for minority parties, and the reorganization of legislative committees to support ruling coalitions are some examples of these tactics.Because legislative authoritarianism operates through legally sanctioned procedures and maintains the external appearance of democratic governance, scholars point out that it is particularly challenging to identify. But over time, these actions may weaken legislative checks on executive power and diminish parliaments' ability to function as autonomous forums for political debate. Rather than sudden regime change, this type of erosion is most frequently seen in instances of democratic backsliding.
Incremental election subversion
This form of democratic backsliding entails the subversion of free and fair elections by, for example, blocking media access, disqualifying opposition candidates and voter suppression. This form of backsliding typically takes place before Election Day and now tends to be done in a slower and more incremental way that the changes may even seem not urgent to counter, making it tougher for watchdogs like the media to find and broadcast the cumulative threat of all the mostly small, but significant misconducts. While the accumulation of power is more likely to start with this slower linear progression, it can accelerate once voter power seems too divided or weakened to repair all the damage done to institutions.Causes and characteristics
The V-Party Dataset demonstrated a greater statistical significance of autocratization for victorious parties with very high populism, high anti-pluralism, lack of commitment to the democratic process, and incitement or acceptance of political violence.Populism
of the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Sydney argues that the two "twin forces" pose the largest threat to Western liberal democracies: "sporadic and random terrorist attacks on domestic soil, which damage feelings of security, and the rise of populist-authoritarian forces, which feed parasitically upon these fears." Norris defines populism as "a governing style with three defining features":- A rhetorical emphasis on the idea that "legitimate political authority is based on popular sovereignty and majority rule";
- Disapproval of, and challenges to the legitimacy of, established holders of "political, cultural, and economic power";
- Leadership by "maverick outsiders" who claim "to speak for the vox populi and to serve ordinary people."
In 2017, Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser wrote:
Populism does not have the same effect in each stage of the democratization process. In fact, we suggest that populism tends to play a positive role in the promotion of electoral or minimal democracy, but a negative role when it comes to fostering the development of a full-fledged liberal democratic regime. Consequently, while populism tends to favor the democratization of authoritarian regimes, it is prone to diminish the quality of liberal democracies. Populism supports popular sovereignty, but it is inclined to oppose any limitations on majority rule, such as judicial independence and minority rights. Populism-in-power has led to processes of de-democratization and, in some extreme cases, even to the breakdown of the democratic regime.
A 2018 analysis by political scientists Yascha Mounk and Jordan Kyle links populism to democratic backsliding, showing that since 1990, "13 right-wing populist governments have been elected; of these, five brought about significant democratic backsliding. Over the same time period, 15 left-wing populist governments were elected; of these, the same number, five, brought about significant democratic backsliding."
A December 2018 report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change concluded that populist rule, whether left- or right-wing, leads to a significant risk of democratic backsliding. The authors examine the effect of populism on three major aspects of democracy: the quality of democracy in general, checks and balances on executive power, and citizens' right to politically participate in a meaningful way. They conclude that populist governments are four times more likely to cause harm to democratic institutions than non-populist governments. Also, more than half of populist leaders have amended or rewritten the countries' constitution, frequently in a way that eroded checks and balances on executive power. Lastly, populists attack individual rights such as freedom of the press, civil liberties, and political rights.
In a 2018 journal article on democratic backsliding, scholars Licia Cianetti, James Dawson, and Seán Hanley argued that the emergence of populist movements in Central and Eastern Europe, such as Andrej Babiš's ANO in the Czech Republic, are "a potentially ambiguous phenomenon, articulating genuine societal demands for political reform and pushing issues of good governance centre stage, but further loosening the weak checks and balances that characterise post-communist democracy and embedding private interests at the core of the state."
In a 2019 paper, presented to the International Society of Political Psychologists, Shawn Rosenberg argues that right-wing populism is exposing a vulnerability in democratic structures and that "democracy is likely to devour itself."
Around the world, citizens are voting away the democracies they claim to cherish. Scholars present evidence that this behaviour is driven in part by the belief that their opponents will undermine democracy first. In experimental studies, they revealed to partisans that their opponents are more committed to democratic norms than they think. As a result, the partisans became more committed to upholding democratic norms themselves and less willing to vote for candidates who break these norms. These findings suggest that aspiring autocrats may instigate democratic backsliding by accusing their opponents of subverting democracy and that we can foster democratic stability by informing partisans about the other side's commitment to democracy.
The term "populism" has been criticized as a misleading term for phenomena such as nativism and intentional promotion of authoritarianism by political elites.
Economic inequality and social discontent
Many political economy scholars, such as Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, have investigated the effect of income inequality on the democratic breakdown. Studies of democratic collapse show that economic inequality is significantly higher in countries that eventually move towards a more authoritarian model. Hungary is an example of a country where a large group of unemployed, low-educated people were dissatisfied with the high levels of inequality, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. Viktor Orbán used this dissatisfaction of a relatively large segment of the population to his advantage, winning popular support by using national-populist rhetoric. Recent research on Latin America shows that institutional reforms, often introduced during crises, sometimes worsen democratic backsliding. Reforms intended to strengthen presidential powers or address public discontent can fragment political landscapes, leaving democracies vulnerable to instability and populist pressures.Personalism
A 2019 study found that personalism had an adverse impact on democracy in Latin America: "presidents who dominate their own weakly organized parties are more likely to seek to concentrate power, undermine horizontal accountability, and trample the rule of law than presidents who preside over parties that have an independent leadership and an institutionalized bureaucracy."The same thing is also true in the middle east, its most prevalent example being seemingly Turkey and consolidation of power in the hands of the president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who has been in power since 2003.COVID-19
Many national governments worldwide delayed, postponed or canceled a variety of democratic elections at both national and subnational governmental levels, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic opening gaps in the action of democracy.According to the V-Dem Institute, only 39% of all countries have committed no or only minor violations of democratic standards in response to COVID-19. According to Ingo Keilitz, both authoritarian leaders and surveillance capitalists used the pandemic to "make massive shifts and reprogramming of our sensibilities about privacy and civil liberties that may not be reversible". Keilitz saw this as a threat to judicial independence.
Great power politics
Great power transitions have contributed to democratic backsliding and the spread of authoritarianism in two ways: "First, the sudden rise of autocratic Great Powers led to waves of autocracy driven by conquest but also by self-interest and even admiration, as in the fascist wave of the 1930s or the post-1945 communist wave. Second, the sudden rise of democratic hegemons led to waves of democratization, but these waves inevitably overextended and collapsed, leading to failed consolidation and rollback."Authoritarian values
Global variation in democracy is primarily explained by variance between popular adherence to authoritarian values vs. emancipative values, which explains around 70 percent of the variation of democracy between countries every year since 1960. Emancipative values, as measured by the World Values Survey, have been consistently rising over time in response to increasing economic prosperity.A 2020 study, which used World Values Survey data, found that cultural conservatism was the ideological group most open to authoritarian governance within Western democracies. Within English-speaking Western democracies, "protection-based" attitudes combining cultural conservatism and leftist economic attitudes were the strongest predictor of support for authoritarian modes of governance.
Professor Jessica Stern and the political psychologist Karen Stenner write that international research finds that "perceptions of sociocultural threat" are more important in explaining how democracies turn authoritarian compared to economic inequality. Stern and Stenner say about a third of the population in Western countries is predisposed to favor homogeneity, obedience, and strong leaders over diversity and freedom. In their view, authoritarianism is only loosely correlated with conservatism, which may defend a liberal democracy as the status quo.
Political scientist Christian Welzel argues that the third wave of democratization overshot the demand for democracy in some countries. Therefore, Welzel sees the current autocratization trend as regression to the mean, but expects that it too will reverse in response to long-term changes in values.
Polarization, misinformation, incrementalism, and multi-factor explanations
The 2019 Annual Democracy Report of the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg identified three challenges confronting global democracy: "Government manipulation of media, civil society, rule of law, and elections"; rising "toxic polarization", including "the division of society into distrustful, antagonistic camps"; diminishing "respect for opponents, factual reasoning, and engagement with society" among political elites; and increasing use of hate speech by political leaders; and foreign disinformation campaigns, primarily digital, and mostly affecting Taiwan, the United States, and former Soviet bloc nations such as Latvia.According to Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman, four characteristics have typically provided the conditions for democratic backsliding : political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power. Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman highlight three key causes of backsliding: "the pernicious effects of polarization; realignments of party systems that enable elected autocrats to gain legislative power; and the incremental nature of derogations, which divides oppositions and keeps them off balance." A 2022 study linked polarization to support for undemocratic politicians.
Effects of judicial independence
A 2011 study examined the effects of judicial independence in preventing democratic backsliding. The study, which analyzed 163 nations from 1960 to 2000, concluded that established independent judiciaries are successful at preventing democracies from drifting to authoritarianism, but that states with newly formed courts "are positively associated with regime collapses in both democracies and non-democracies".Psychological impact
Research into the psychological effects of democratic backsliding has highlighted the complex relationship between political events and individual well-being. A 2020 multi-method investigation into the "Trump Depression" phenomenon following the 2016 United States election revealed a disconnect between perceived and actual psychopathology. While liberal citizens reported significantly higher levels of depression when asked directly about the election, big-data analyses of Google searches, Twitter discourse, and antidepressant consumption showed no corresponding aggregate increase in clinical depression indicators. The authors suggested that reports of "political depression" might reflect a "concept creep" where negative emotions are reframed as mental illness, or serve a value-expressive function to signal group identity.Later research conducted during the early months of the second Trump presidency in 2025 examined well-being during a period explicitly characterized by democratic backsliding and sweeping executive actions. The study found that Republicans reported higher life satisfaction and happiness than Democrats, a gap that widened as Republicans' well-being increased over time. Crucially, higher well-being was positively associated with support for the administration's actions, while opposition to these actions was correlated with lower well-being. The findings indicated that while alignment with a backsliding government can offer psychological comfort through "person-environment fit," resisting democratic erosion imposes psychological costs, though opponents may eventually adapt and rebound in well-being.
Prevalence and trends
A study by the V-Dem Democracy indices by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, which contains more than eighteen million data points relevant to democracy, measuring 350 highly specific indicators across 174 countries as of the end of 2016, found that the number of democracies in the world modestly declined from 100 in 2011 to 97 in 2017; some countries moved toward democracy, while other countries moved away from democracy. V-Dem's 2019 Annual Democracy Report found that the trend of autocratization continued, while "24 countries are now severely affected by what is established as a 'third wave of autocratization including "populous countries such as Brazil, Bangladesh and the United States, as well as several Eastern European countries". The report found that an increasing proportion of the world population lived in countries undergoing autocratization. The report found that while the majority of countries were democracies, the number of liberal democracies declined to 39 by 2018. The research group Freedom House, in reports in 2017 and 2019, identified democratic backsliding in a variety of regions across the world. Freedom House's 2019 Freedom in the World report, titled Democracy in Retreat, showed freedom of expression declining each year over the preceding 13 years, with sharper drops since 2012.Scholarly work in the 2010s detailed democratic backsliding, in various forms and to various extents, in Hungary and Poland, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Brazil, Venezuela, and India. The scholarly recognition of the concept of democratic backsliding reflects a reversal from older views, which held "that democracy, once attained in a fairly wealthy state, would become a permanent fixture." This older view came to be realized as erroneous beginning in the mid-2000s, as multiple scholars acknowledged that some seemingly-stable democracies have recently faced a decline in the quality of their democracy. Huq and Ginsburg identified in an academic paper "37 instances in 25 different countries in the postwar period in which democratic quality declined significantly ", including countries that were "seemingly stable, reasonably wealthy" democracies. The V-Dem Democracy Report identified for the year 2023 23 cases of stand-alone autocratization and 19 cases of bell-turn autocratization.
| Country | Backsliding since | Ruling group or person | |
 AlbaniaCentral and Eastern EuropeIn the 2010s, a scholarly consensus developed that the Central and Eastern Europe region was experiencing democratic backsliding, most prominently in Hungary and Poland, and the European Union failed to prevent democratic backsliding in some of its other member states. Rutgers University political scientist R. Daniel Kelemen argues that EU membership has enabled an "authoritarian equilibrium" and may even make it easier for authoritarian-minded leaders to erode democracy due to the EU's system of party politics, a reluctance to interfere in domestic political matters; appropriation of EU funds by backsliding regimes; and free movement for dissatisfied citizens, which allows citizens to leave backsliding regimes and deplete the opposition while strengthening the regimes. According to a 2020 poll by Dalia Research, only 38 percent of Polish citizens and 36 percent of Hungarian citizens believed that their countries were democratic, while the rest said that they would like their countries to be more democratic.United StatesAsiaDemocratic backsliding can be observed in some parts of Asia. According to Our World in Data, the region's average democracy score has fallen 0.45 points in the decade from 2014 to 2024; the world average fell 0.38 points in the same timeframe. The COVID-19 pandemic is often held to have contributed to these trends, as national leaders made use of the "securitization of social issues" to justify authoritarian practices and suspension of rights as sacrifices in the "war" against the pandemic; the most famous example of this is China's "Zero-COVID" policy.Various external factors are often credited with the democratic backsliding, and accompanying hardening of authoritarian regimes, in the region, including the rising influence of China and other authoritarian states, the decline of democracy promotion by the US and other actors, and the worldwide increase in misinformation and political polarization due to social media. Some scholars, however, consider domestic factors to be more significant causally. Regardless of causation, multiple forms of democratic backsliding can be observed to have taken place in East Asia from the mid-2010s to the present. Executive aggrandizement can be found in the Philippines, Indonesia, and South Korea, albeit in differing forms. Duterte's "war on drugs", which is a specific form of aggrandizement referred to as grievance-fueled illiberalism, resulted in an expansion of executive and police power. Rodrigo Duterte emphasized the threat of criminal drug activity and the failure of the establishment to punish those responsible, and was elected on promises to make sure drug criminals were punished; the resulting campaign has resulting in the deaths of over 12,000 Filipinos, at least 2,555 of which can be attributed to the Philippine National Police, and which some human rights organizations say could amount to crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, Joko Widodo expanded executive power and military influence in Indonesia to the point where he was compared with its infamous dictator Suharto. On December 3, 2024, South Korea's then-President Yoon declared martial law and attempted to disband its representative body in an instance of executive aggrandizement specifically referred to as opportunistic authoritarianism. 2024 [South Korean martial law crisis|Yoon's coup] was thwarted by the strength of South Korea's democratic institutions, and he is currently facing a criminal trial for charges of insurrection. The 2021 military coup in Myanmar is an example of "Entrenched-Interest Revanchism," in which an entrenched interest group displaced by a country's democratic transition use undemocratic means to reassert its claims. Myanmar experienced elite-driven democratization between 2011 and 2015, and held its first general elections in 2015, resulting in a victory for the National League for Democracy. The NLD won an even greater margin of victory over the military's proxy party in the 2020 elections, which prompted a 2021 coup that re-established military rule through a military junta. The military government has since engaged in an ethnic-cleansing campaign against the country's Rohingya minority. Hong Kong has also witnessed democratic backsliding in the last decade, although it has mostly been orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party. The most obvious instance of this is the Chinese government's repeated attempts to establish criteria for candidates to run in Hong Kong elections that favored those sympathetic to the CCP, an instance of strategic election manipulation. |