The Anatomy of Democratic Backsliding

Recent years have seen a growing number of countries around the world retreat from democracy. Unlike the emergence during the post-Soviet era of competitive authoritarian regimes in places that were never really democratic to begin with, this retreat is happening in countries that had crossed a democratic threshold. Leaders with autocratic tendencies are coming to power through democratic elections and attacking norms and institutions from within, typically with support from some portion of the electorate. Since Nancy Bermeo’s landmark essay on democratic back-sliding appeared in these pages in January 2016, the trend has only accelerated.¹ What can be done to stop it? Countering backsliding requires us to recognize its symptoms before it is too late and to equip allies of democracy with a framework for understanding the phenomenon so that they can formulate effective strategies for confronting it. Democratic backsliding is the incremental erosion of institutions, rules, and norms that results from the actions of duly elected governments. We analyze backsliding in terms of three interrelated causal factors. First, social and political polarization contributes to government dysfunction and lack of trust in institutions, and it increases the risk that incumbent parties will move toward extremes or that new antisystem parties will gain traction. Second, the effect of polarization on back-sliding will depend on whether would-be autocrats can capture the executive and then whether they manage to gain the legislature’s support for or acquiescence to the concentration of their authority. Ironically, legislatures play a key role in a process that we call the “collapse of the separation of powers,” which provides the political foundations for assaulting other features of the democratic system. Finally, democratic backsliding is incremental in nature, which provides tactical advantage to incumbents. The gradual subversion of democratic institutions allows incumbents to slowly accrete powers, making the process difficult to detect and counter until it is too late.

To better understand how the process works, we studied sixteen cases of backsliding (see the Table).² To select this sample, we considered the entire population of countries from the onset of the “third wave” of democratization in 1974 through 2019 and proceeded in three steps. First, we restricted our sample to countries that had achieved at least eight consecutive years of free...