While the European Union (EU) professes a commitment to liberal democracy, in recent years it has allowed some member governments to backslide toward competitive authoritarianism. The EU has become ...trapped in an 'authoritarian equilibrium' underpinned by three factors. First, the EU's half-baked system of party politics and its ingrained reluctance to interfere in the domestic politics of its member states help shield national autocrats from EU intervention. Second, funding and investment from the EU helps sustain these regimes. Third, the free movement of persons in the EU facilitates the exit of dissatisfied citizens, which depletes the opposition and generates remittances, thereby helping these regimes endure. While more fully developed democratic federations have the capacity to eventually steer autocratic member states back toward democracy, the EU appears to be stuck in an autocracy trap.
Less than 30 years after Fukuyama and others declared liberal democracy's eternal dominance, a third wave of autocratization is manifest. Gradual declines of democratic regime attributes characterize ...contemporary autocratization. Yet, we lack the appropriate conceptual and empirical tools to diagnose and compare such elusive processes. Addressing that gap, this article provides the first comprehensive empirical overview of all autocratization episodes from 1900 to today based on data from the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem). We demonstrate that a third wave of autocratization is indeed unfolding. It mainly affects democracies with gradual setbacks under a legal façade. While this is a cause for concern, the historical perspective presented in this article shows that panic is not warranted: the current declines are relatively mild and the global share of democratic countries remains close to its all-time high. As it was premature to announce the "end of history" in 1992, it is premature to proclaim the "end of democracy" now.
Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002 Turkey has undergone double regime transitions. First, tutelary democracy ended; second, a competitive authoritarian regime has ...risen in its stead. We substantiate this assertion with specific and detailed evidence from 2015 election cycles, as well as from broader trends in Turkish politics. This evidence indeed confirms that elections are no longer fair; civil liberties are being systematically violated; and the playing field is highly skewed in favour of the ruling AKP. The June 2015 election results and their aftermath further confirm that Turkey has evolved into a competitive authoritarian regime.
Abstract This paper performs a backcasting wheel analysis of the issue of democratic backsliding. It identifies an interacting set of proximate causes of democratic backsliding, and then a set of ...complementary strategies for addressing the root causes of each of these. It takes an interdisciplinary systems‐based approach throughout. The paper is grounded in an extensive survey of several literatures in multiple disciplines. It shows how the backcasting wheel complements other methods employed in anticipation and future studies more generally.
We investigate the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis on the quality and survival of democracy in a country. We start from the idea that such crises entail a risk of democratic backsliding, as ...governments could exploit the state of emergency to concentrate power in their own hands and derogate to democratic rules beyond the realm and past the duration of the emergency. We reconsider this argument and contend that the pandemic’s backsliding effect, if any, depends on the prior quality and consolidation of democratic institutions, the robustness of the state of emergency regulation, and the government’s loyalty to democracy. We analyse Poland and Italy, which were both at risk of ‘pandemic backsliding’ even though for different reasons. While democracy in Italy has proved resilient, we find that backsliding in Poland resulted from a combination of malleable democratic institutions weakened by years of pre-pandemic executive aggrandizement and an authoritarian-leaning government willing to exploit the crisis.
We investigate the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis on the quality and survival of democracy in a country. We start from the idea that such crises entail a risk of democratic backsliding, as ...governments could exploit the state of emergency to concentrate power in their own hands and derogate to democratic rules beyond the realm and past the duration of the emergency. We reconsider this argument and contend that the pandemic’s backsliding effect, if any, depends on the prior quality and consolidation of democratic institutions, the robustness of the state of emergency regulation, and the government’s loyalty to democracy. We analyse Poland and Italy, which were both at risk of ‘pandemic backsliding’ even though for different reasons. While democracy in Italy has proved resilient, we find that backsliding in Poland resulted from a combination of malleable democratic institutions weakened by years of pre-pandemic executive aggrandizement and an authoritarian-leaning government willing to exploit the crisis.
Ethnopopulism is an elite strategy for winning votes and concentrating power - a common playbook for the erosion of liberal democracy that is empowered and justified by a companion playbook of ...ethnopopulist and majoritarian appeals. Ethnopopulism is flexible with the truth, and flexible in identifying friends and enemies of "the people". Ethnopopulist parties manipulate opposition to neo-liberal economic policies and racialize the immigrant threat. Democratic backsliding has unexpectedly taken hold in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, and the very factors that seemed to augur well for liberal democracy may have contained the seeds of its degradation at the hands of ethnopopulist leaders.
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