This paper explores the role of opposition parties within the context of global democratic erosion, with a focus on Turkey. It investigates the multifaceted role of opposition actors in the process ...of autocratisation, challenging conventional portrayals of them as mere victims or resilient forces. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), spanning the critical period of 2002–2022 under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), this research uncovers how opposition strategies have evolved in response to changing political dynamics. The paper introduces two new concepts, rigid opposition and flexible opposition, to elucidate the adaptive nature of opposition strategies in the face of autocratisation. It underscores the transition of the CHP from a rigid stance, characterised by identity-based polarisation, to a more flexible approach, involving strategic alliances and inclusive discourse. This transformation is not a binary success–failure paradigm but rather a complex adaptation with inherent risks. While flexibility is crucial to limit autocratisation, its potential pitfalls carry the risks of contributing to autocratisation and the dilution of party identity.
Although term limit violation is a widely examined form of autocratisation in sub-Saharan Africa, this research focuses on the relatively understudied but increasingly frequent cases in which term ...limits prove resilient. We distinguish two forms of term limit resilience, namely, compliance and enforcement, and we offer the first regional-level study of its determinants using qualitative comparative analysis. We find democracy – that is, the factor that is often considered the strongest predictor of term limit resilience – to be decisive when term limits are threatened or likely to be threatened. However, other mechanisms resulting from the interplay of factors that can be present in both democratic and non-democratic regimes stand out for their explanatory power – most notably, path dependence, regime legacies and opposition. Conversely, factors such as the international promotion of democracy and military autonomy appear to play a secondary role, at least from a comparative viewpoint.
In this introduction into the special issue on state capture and security sector governance, we argue that state capture is a relevant concept that helps us understand the current autocratisation and ...the rise of hybrid regimes. We argue that the extraction of public resources via party patronage, privatization of public administration, judiciary, security institutions, and media are vital for influencing political competition. In the second part of the article, we argue that the concept of state capture brings added value to the understanding of security governance and transformations. We show why the parts or whole of security and justice institutions are the inevitable targets of state capture and what it means to understand the success of security sector reform (SSR). Finally, we examine a range of possible positions of the security sector within the captors and what it means for both the literature on state capture and civil-military relations.
Democracy has come under pressure worldwide, with growing concern over an apparent reverse wave of democratic backsliding at the global level. Bridging conceptual approaches and empirical research, ...this article investigates patterns of democratic backsliding in third-wave democracies. It applies a range of innovative sequence analysis techniques to the Varieties of Democracy dataset to provide a dynamic perspective on the evolution of different types of democratic safeguards against executive expansion. The resulting typology differentiates stable trajectories from different patterns of backsliding and sheds light on the diversity of backsliding processes that diverge in their shape, depth, and timing in respect to initial democratic transition. The findings contribute to broader debates on the nature of democratic backsliding and have important implications both for our theoretical understanding of the phenomenon and the practical responses devised to counter backsliding trends.
This article analyses the conditions under which international democracy support contributes to protecting presidential term limits. As autocratisation has become an unwelcome global trend, ...researchers turned to the study of the toolboxes of would-be autocrats, including their attempts to circumvent term limits. Through a paired comparison of failed attempts in Malawi (2002) and Senegal (2012), we find that external democracy support can assist domestic actors and institutions in deflecting challenges to term limits. We offer a novel qualitative analysis that posits that international democracy support can only be effective if sustained by popular democratic attitudes and behaviours of actors in the recipient state. On the one hand, a mix of conditioning relations with the incumbent government while capacitating pro-democratic opposition is a successful strategy in aid-dependent political regimes with a minimum democratic quality. On the other, societal attitudes factor into decision-making at domestic and international levels. Our results suggest that popular pro-democratic attitudes encouraged international democracy support during critical junctures in the two countries, ie when incumbents attempted to circumvent term limitation. Donor investments had positive results when donors had directed resources towards building up civil society organisations long before any attempts at circumventing term limits were made.
Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021.2000855 .
In recent years, weaker and consolidated democracies alike were in many instances caught by a wave of autocratisation. However, given the protractedness in the time of the phenomenon of democratic ...erosion, it is not unlikely that the process overlaps with multiple electoral cycles. This gives to those parties committed to liberal democracy a window to organise themselves and challenge the incumbent at the ballots. The present study investigates whether the political division between incumbent parties and organised pro-democratic opposition in Poland, Hungary, Bolivia and Turkey coincides with a political cleavage that fits Baiern and Maier’s three-dimensional conceptualisation of the term. Through a quantitative approach, it emerges that indeed authoritarian and liberal values (Normative dimension) substantially account for the divergence in political support (Organisational dimension) by the different educated groups (Social dimension) in all the countries under observation. These findings not only support the existence of an educational cleavage outside of Western and Northern Europe, but also highlights its centrality in the ongoing fight for democracy. Furthermore, Hungary appears as a peculiar case, since democratic commitment accounts more than the authoritarian-liberal scale in explaining the support (or lack of it) for the incumbent party by the Hungarian educational groups.
The evidence generated and used in development cooperation has changed remarkably over the last decades. When it comes to the field of democracy support, these developments have been less ...significant. Routinised, evidence-based programming is far from a reality here. Compared to other fields, the goals of the interventions and assumed theories of change remain underspecified. Under these circumstances, evaluating and learning is difficult, and as a result, evidence gaps remain large and the translation of evidence into action often unsuccessful. This is particularly dramatic at a time when this field is regaining attention amid global autocratisation trends. In this article, we analyse the specific barriers and challenges democracy support faces to generate and use evidence. Furthermore, we identify evidence gaps and propose impact-oriented accompanying research as an evaluation approach that can make a significant contribution towards advancing the evidence agenda in this field.
In 2012, 20 years after the end of the 16-year war between Renamo and the Frelimo-led government, Mozambique witnessed the resumption of armed confrontations between the two former belligerents. The ...renewed hostilities ended in 2019 when Renamo and the government signed the Maputo Accord for Peace and Reconciliation, hailed as a ‘global exemplar’ of liberal conflict resolution. Nevertheless, the peace process occurred in the context of increasing autocratisation in the country. Accordingly, this article examines the implications of authoritarian politics for an ostensibly liberal peacebuilding process. It argues that while the ruling elites resist attempts at building liberal peace, authoritarian conflict management has been complicated by state incapacity and the resistance of liberal actors. Therefore, the article concludes that attempts at rebuilding peace in a context of entrenched tensions between liberalisation and autocratisation in Mozambique delivered a precarious peace.
All ECE countries have covered the same historical trajectory of ‘the third-generation autocracy’, but Hungary has been reaching its ‘perfection’, since the two-thirds, constitutional supermajority ...in the Hungarian case has allowed for the Orbán regime to complete this ‘reverse wave’ in all fields of society and turning it into a zombie democracy. The conceptual frame of this paper is that the decline of democracy and the turn to autocratisation can be presented in ECE in the three big stages of the Easy Dream, Chaotic Democracy and Neoliberal Autocracy in the three corresponding decades. The paper concentrates on the third stage in its three shorter periods taking 3–4 years as the DeDemocratisation, Autocratisation and DeEuropeanisation. The Hungarian case has been presented in this paper in a comparative ECE view as its worst-case scenario that also sheds light on the parallel developments in the fellow ECE countries.
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