The Anatomy of Democratic Backsliding

Stephan Haggard, Robert Kaufman

Journal of Democracy, Volume 32, Number 4, October 2021, pp. 27-41

(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2021.0050

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/815935

[ Access provided at 8 Mar 2023 20:38 GMT from USP-Universidade de São Paulo ]
 THE ANATOMY OF
DEMOCRATIC ACKSLIDING
Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman

Stephan Haggard is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor of

Korea-Pacific Studies and director of the Korea-Pacific Program in
the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of Cali-
fornia, San Diego. Robert Kaufman is distinguished professor of po-
litical science at Rutgers University. They are the coauthors, most
recently, of Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary
World (2021), on which this essay is based.

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 ac-
celerated.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 govern-
ments. We analyze backsliding in terms of three interrelated causal fac-
tors. 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 ex-
ecutive and then whether they manage to gain the legislature’s support
for or acquiescence to the concentration of their authority. Ironically,

Journal of Democracy Volume 32, Number 4 October 2021

© 2021 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
28 Journal of Democracy

Table—Backsliding 1974–2019, Cases and Codings

Country Coding Episode Start Date
Bolivia Erosion from electoral democracy 2007
Brazil Erosion from liberal democracy 2016
Dominican Rep. Erosion from electoral democracy 2014
Ecuador Erosion from electoral democracy 2009
Greece Erosion from liberal democracy 2017
Hungary Erosion from liberal democracy 2011
Erosion from electoral democracy 2005
Nicaragua
Reversion to authoritarianism 2008
Erosion from electoral democracy 2010
North Macedonia
Reversion to authoritarianism 2012
Poland Erosion from liberal democracy 2016

Reversion to authoritarianism
Russia 2000
from electoral democracy

Erosion from electoral democracy 2013

Serbia
Reversion to authoritarianism 2017
Erosion from electoral democracy 2010
Turkey
Reversion to authoritarianism 2014
Erosion from electoral democracy 2010
Ukraine
Reversion to authoritarianism 2014
United States Erosion from liberal democracy 2016
Erosion from electoral democracy 1998
Venezuela
Reversion to authoritarianism 2006

Reversion to authoritarianism
Zambia 2016
from electoral democracy
Note: All but four of these episodes were still ongoing in 2019. The Dominican Republic’s
ended in 2018, Ecuador’s in 2017, North Macedonia’s in 2016, and Ukraine’s in 2018.

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
Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman 29

eight consecutive years of free and fair elections, as measured by a score

of 0.5 or higher on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) electoral de-
mocracy index. Second, we defined episodes of backsliding as all years
characterized by a statistically significant decline in the V-Dem liberal
democracy index from the country’s peak score. The liberal democracy
index is appropriate for this purpose because it captures broader features
of democracy, including commitment to the rule of law and horizontal
checks. Finally, we compared our list with alternative codings—includ-
ing those from Freedom House, Polity, and the Economist Intelligence
Unit—and eliminated cases that were not coded as having experienced
democratic regress in at least two of these other datasets. We thus sought
out cases on which there was some consensus that democracy had al-
ready eroded or was deteriorating. Other methods would have yielded a
somewhat different set of cases, and updating the dataset through 2020
would probably bring new instances such as the Philippines or India.
Our list, however, contains well-known cases that are surprisingly var-
ied with respect to level of development and region.
The Table lists our sample countries and identifies when backsliding
episodes began and from what starting point, that is, electoral or liberal
democracy.3 Episodes coded as “erosion” saw the quality of democracy
decline, but the system broadly maintained, whereas episodes labeled
as “reversion” ended in outright reversion to authoritarian rule. Liberal
democracy in the United States and Brazil, for example, clearly suffered
erosion during the presidencies of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, re-
spectively, but institutions of horizontal accountability have so far placed
at least some brakes on the slide. Greece under the Syriza party was an
ambiguous example of backsliding, but was certainly never authoritar-
ian. As the Table shows, however, a number of backsliding cases have
gone beyond erosion. In some of these—for example, Nicaragua, Russia,
Serbia, and Zambia—democratic institutions were fragile to begin with.
But reversions also occurred in countries such as Venezuela and Turkey
(and, if we were coding it today, Hungary), where democratic institutions
were once considered relatively robust or on the road to consolidation.
In our analysis, we look at how the sixteen cases were affected by
each of the three causal factors: polarization, the capture of executive
and legislative institutions, and the incremental subversion of democrat-
ic institutions. We take a multimethod empirical approach, comparing
backsliding cases with relevant benchmarks4 and considering indicators
of the causal factors, such as change in polarization over time. Yet the
bulk of evidence comes from detailed case-study observations.

Polarization
Building on a growing literature, we conceive political polariza-
tion as a process through which political elites and publics become
30 Journal of Democracy

increasingly divided over public policy and ideology. In extreme cir-

cumstances, cross-cutting cleavages become submerged by a single,
reinforcing cleavage that pits “us” against “them” on a range of is-
sues. Partisan attachments become based less on issue positions than
on underlying identities.5 And political adversaries become not only
competitors but enemies or even traitors.
Although we trace the underlying sources and extent of polarization
in the case studies, four V-Dem indicators allowed an initial assess-
ment of the level and path of polarization: a general estimate of social
polarization; the use of hate speech by political parties; the strength of
antisystem social movements; and whether political elites respect coun-
terarguments.
Based on these measures, almost all the backsliding cases had sig-
nificant histories of polarization or recent periods when it spiked sig-
nificantly. We assessed levels of polarization in the ten years before the
onset of backsliding through the first two years (t-10 to t+2) against the
regional benchmarks mentioned above. Eleven countries (Brazil, Ecua-
dor, Hungary, North Macedonia, Poland, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine, the
United States, Venezuela, and Zambia) scored higher than their regional
peers on all four indicators, while Bolivia, Greece, and Russia scored
higher on three (Russia lacked data on the social-polarization measure).
Only the Dominican Republic showed no unusual polarization on any
of the four measures; not coincidentally, that country’s backsliding epi-
sode, as measured by the decline in the V-Dem liberal democracy index,
was comparatively limited and brief.6
Polarization also rose in twelve of the sixteen countries between t-10
and t+2. All four indicators increased in Brazil, Greece, Hungary, North
Macedonia, the United States, and Zambia. Three of the four measures
rose in Bolivia, Turkey, and Ukraine, while two of the three indicators
for which data were available in Venezuela increased. Apart from Nica-
ragua and the Dominican Republic, which saw only one indicator rise,
polarization increased in settings where it was already relatively high.
Evidence of polarization rising during the backsliding episode—stoked
by political leaders—was more mixed, with roughly half the cases see-
ing such increases. Where there were no increases, already high polar-
ization may have been approaching its limits.
What were the sources of polarization? The underlying social and
political bases of polarization were diverse and are difficult to disen-
tangle. Anxieties spurred by economic crises and structural changes in-
duced by economic reforms, greater openness to trade, and skills-biased
technological change mattered in a number of otherwise disparate cases
including Greece, Russia, the United States, and Venezuela. Racial,
ethnic, and regional differences were also drivers in cases as diverse
as Bolivia, Ukraine, and Zambia, as were deeper ideological divides
between cosmopolitan and nationalist worldviews. Finally, autocratic
Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman 31

leaders made appeals that exploited grievances and portrayed competi-

tors as “enemies of the people,” heightening divisions. With some ex-
ceptions—for example, in the Dominican Republic and Zambia, where
ethnic issues were central—most appeals
were either left- or right-populist. Right-
If autocrats succeed populist appeals typically rested on strong
in gaining executive cosmopolitan-nationalist divides.
office, they also gain Whatever its underlying source, polar-
access to significant ization is bad for democracy. First, where
opposing parties are polarized, government
organizational
is less likely to function efficiently and
resources that can be more likely to witness either stalemates
used to undermine or swings between policy extremes. As a
democratic rule. result, popular disaffection and distrust of
institutions tends to be higher. Second, in
polarized settings mainstream parties are
more likely either to be captured by extremist elements (as in the United
States, Hungary, the Dominican Republic, North Macedonia, Nicara-
gua, Poland, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine) or displaced by new populist
political movements arising from either the right or left (as in Bolivia,
Brazil, Ecuador, Greece, Turkey, Venezuela, and Zambia).
Finally, the recasting of politics into stark “us-versus-them” con-
tests is a common feature of populism—a majoritarian conception of
democratic rule that is ultimately illiberal. Populist movements convey
a vision of society that sets the (virtuous) people against the (corrupt)
elites, evoking Rousseau’s idea of a “general will” typically rooted in
the nation.7 When populist candidates and their voters view critics and
political opponents as existential threats rather than legitimate competi-
tors, it is but a short step for them to place greater value on winning
than on maintaining the constitutional order, including the integrity of
elections.8
Yet despite such majoritarian appeals, the rise to power of elected
autocrats is not always rooted in surges of support and broad electoral
majorities. Autocrats did come to power with absolute majorities of the
popular vote in five of our cases—Bolivia, the Dominican Republic,
Hungary, Russia, and Venezuela (all presidential systems except for
Hungary). And in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro fell just short of winning the
presidency in the first round (with 46 percent), but won the second with
55.1 percent. In the remaining eleven cases, however, autocrats initially
came to power without a majority of the popular vote. In Serbia, the
United States, and Zambia, would-be autocrats were elected with less
than 50 percent of the vote in knife-edge contests by deeply polarized
electorates. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega was elected with only 38 per-
cent of the popular vote; and in Ecuador, Rafael Correa won in the first
round with under 23 percent. In Greece, North Macedonia, Poland, Tur-
32 Journal of Democracy

key, and Ukraine—all parliamentary systems—the parties behind the

backsliding also secured only modest pluralities at the polls.
Yet despite these mixed electoral results, majoritarian claims were
fundamental to the campaigns of illiberal politicians as diverse as Hugo
Chávez in Venezuela, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Donald Trump in
the United States. Chávez’s leftist campaign and Orbán’s appeal from
the right had surprisingly similar themes, evoking a battle of “the peo-
ple” against corrupt economic or cosmopolitan elites and dishonest po-
litical establishments. Trump’s 2016 campaign trod a surprisingly simi-
lar path, targeting Washington, D.C., as a “swamp” and characterizing
his political opponents as tools of “coastal elites” and a “deep state.”

Weaker Legislatures, Weaker Democracies

If autocrats succeed in gaining executive office, they also gain access
to significant organizational resources that can be used to undermine
democratic rule. Along with control of the executive branch comes com-
mand of the bureaucracy, military, and security apparatus, as well as
endless opportunities to influence the media and the economy. In some
cases (such as Russia, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Hungary), networks of
state-owned enterprises and private-sector cronies became vehicles of
patronage and outright corruption.
Ultimately, however, the consolidation of autocratic control depends
not only on becoming president or prime minister, but on the coopera-
tion of the legislature through the support of acquiescent ruling parties
or coalitions. In the 2006 Journal of Democracy essay “Stronger Legisla-
tures, Stronger Democracies,” M. Steven Fish showed that the extent of
democratization in postcommunist countries was highly correlated with
an index of legislative strength that included oversight powers, freedom
from executive control, and authority in specific policy areas.9 Our find-
ings comport with Fish’s but in reverse: the weaker the legislature, the
more susceptible the system is to backsliding.
The degree of executive control over the legislature varied among
our cases. In Brazil and the United States, opposition parties retained at
least some legislative leverage, and presidents encountered significant
checks on their power. Bolsonaro lacked a ruling party and was forced to
govern with unstable coalitions, which constrained his ability to abuse
his constitutional powers. Trump’s Republican majority in the Senate,
meanwhile, helped to shield him from accountability and to appoint a
number of loyalists to judicial and executive positions. Yet Republicans
still pushed back against executive efforts to undermine investigations
into Russian election interference, and after Democrats regained control
of the House of Representatives in 2018, Trump was exposed to greater
oversight and ultimately impeachment. Most important, congressional
majorities, including some Republicans, adhered to longstanding con-
Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman 33

stitutional procedures and certified the 2020 election of Joe Biden as

president, even in the face of the violent January 6 uprising.
It is worth noting that some newly elected presidents did not initially
control their legislatures. This was the case not only in Brazil but also in
Russia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.
Yet in all but Brazil, the president’s party
The path to pliant eventually gained a legislative majority
legislatures ultimately (and in some cases a supermajority) that
ran through the were pliant to the autocrat and became
platforms for de jure or de facto expan-
electoral battlefield,
sion of executive authority over govern-
where divisions within ment agencies, the judiciary, the electoral
the opposition played system, and civil society.
a crucial role. Some South American autocrats
gained control over the legislature via
frontal assaults. In Venezuela and Ecua-
dor, Chávez and Correa exploited political honeymoons to elect loyalist-
dominated constituent assemblies that then displaced sitting legislatures
in which the opposition maintained veto power. In Bolivia, where Evo
Morales also organized a constituent assembly, the opposition retained
veto power over the drafting of a new constitution and the capacity to
mobilize protests in the streets; in the final version of the constitution
ratified in 2009, Morales was forced to retreat temporarily from his bid
to eliminate term limits. But the legislature did incorporate changes in
the electoral law that helped the ruling Movement Toward Socialism
(MAS) party to convert simple electoral majorities into parliamentary
supermajorities in the 2009 and 2014 general elections.
In most of the backsliding countries, however, legislative control
was achieved through less dramatic, and sometimes surprising, political
routes. In Hungary and Turkey, legislative acquiescence was grounded
in the control that leaders exercised over their parties; this was also
largely true in the United States. But the path to pliant legislatures ulti-
mately ran through the electoral battlefield, where divisions within the
opposition played a crucial role. In Poland, for example, the ruling cen-
trist coalition led by Civic Platform splintered ahead of the 2015 par-
liamentary elections, allowing the conservative Law and Justice (PiS)
party to prevail. The combined vote share of the fractured centrist bloc
was 40.4 percent, compared with only 37.6 percent for PiS. Yet divi-
sions within the opposition allowed PiS to capture 51 percent of seats in
the lower chamber and 61 percent in the Senate.
Mismatches between the popular vote and seat shares played a major
role in a number of backsliding episodes. In the United States, Repub-
licans benefited from both the disproportionality of the Senate, where
sparsely populated rural states are vastly overrepresented, and increased
opportunities to gerrymander after winning control of state legislatures.
34 Journal of Democracy

In the 2016 congressional elections, Republicans captured almost 57

percent of the House seats with only 49.1 percent of the vote and re-
tained their Senate majority with only 42.2 percent of the popular vote.
In Hungary, Orbán’s Fidesz party captured 68 percent of the parliamen-
tary seats in the critical 2010 election with only 53 percent of the popular
vote. In some cases, the distortions are even bigger. In Turkey in 2002,
Recep Tayyip Erdo¢gan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) won an
outright supermajority of seats (66 percent)—significantly expanding
what the majority could do—with only 34 percent of the popular vote.
Ruling parties also converted plurality electoral votes into parliamen-
tary majorities in Serbia, Russia, North Macedonia, Poland, Venezuela,
and Zambia.
In our cases, gaining a legislative majority augmented the executive’s
power in at least three critical ways. First, it eliminated an important
source of oversight, making it easier for the executive to misuse the
bureaucracy and to deploy public resources—including prosecutors and
law enforcement—to target political enemies. Where horizontal checks
were weak, corruption flourished. This was true enough in Orbán’s Hun-
gary for one former politician and scholar to dub it a “post-communist
mafia state.”10 Crony capitalism has also been documented as an essen-
tial feature of backsliding in the disparate examples of Russia, Serbia,
Turkey, Ukraine, the United States, and Venezuela.
Second, legislatures both expanded and extended executive pow-
ers, including through constitutional amendments or the drafting of
new constitutions. Nine countries in our sample—Bolivia, the Domini-
can Republic, Ecuador, Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela,
and Zambia—saw fundamental constitutional change or amendments
that concentrated power in the executive. That power came in different
forms, both direct and indirect, ranging from increased executive dis-
cretion to greater authority in making judicial appointments to diluted
independence of the legislature.
Moreover, of our sixteen cases, governments in six (all presidential
systems) undertook constitutional revisions or legislative initiatives, or
effectively forced judicial rulings, that lifted term limits on the executive:
Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Russia, and Ven-
ezuela. The lifting of term limits allowed for exceptionally long reigns:
eleven years for Rafael Correa; thirteen for Evo Morales; fourteen for
Hugo Chávez; and, as of 2021, fourteen for Daniel Ortega and twenty-
one for Vladimir Putin. In Turkey, constitutional reforms went so far as
to shift the country from a parliamentary to a presidential system; not
coincidentally, Erdo¢gan has now been in office for almost twenty years.
Finally, and relatedly, compliant legislatures acquiesced in steps that
directly weakened or dismantled institutions of horizontal accountabil-
ity. With both the judiciary and the legislature itself as key targets, the
executive’s power soared. Indeed, a central irony of compliant legis-
Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman 35

latures is that they were frequently complicit in weakening their own

powers. But executive appointments to high-level positions in the civil
service and nominally independent agencies—from law enforcement to
the regulatory agencies overseeing the media and, most recently in Tur-
key, rotating central-bank governors—helped to erode checks on execu-
tive power.

Democratic Regress by Stealth

The final component of backsliding is the incremental nature of the
process, the “stealth” with which democratic institutions are attacked
and undermined.11 Illiberal executives who reach office through elec-
tions typically test normative limits through piecemeal initiatives to
weaken constraints, making each subsequent step easier to pursue. Trac-
ing the decline in V-Dem scores between the onset of a backsliding
episode and its lowest point provides one indication of the incremen-
talism of the process. In our book Backsliding: Democratic Regress in
the Contemporary World (2021), we examined the time it took for four
core features of democracy—judicial independence, press freedom, the
autonomy of electoral authorities, and civil society freedom—to reach
their lowest points. The time span was necessarily short for episodes that
began in 2016 or 2017 (Brazil, Greece, Poland, and the United States).
But in earlier backsliders such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Russia,
Turkey, and Venezuela, these indicators declined for a decade or more
before bottoming out.
Reversion to authoritarianism—at least as registered by V-Dem
data—also did not happen overnight. From the onset of the backslid-
ing episode, it took two years for North Macedonia to revert to au-
thoritarianism; three years for Nicaragua; four for Serbia, Turkey, and
Ukraine; and eight for Venezuela. Reversion coincided with the onset
of the backsliding episode only in Russia (2000), which arguably was
not democratic to begin with, and Zambia (2016)—though even in these
countries, the scope of political change was not fully evident until much
later. Russia’s V-Dem scores, for example, did not reach their nadir
until Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 after a four-year stint as
prime minister. Hungary’s status as a democracy was downgraded by
V-Dem and Freedom House only after the first decade of Orbán’s rule,
even though many observers believed that it had reverted to authoritari-
anism well before then.
The stealth features of backsliding in notable cases such as Hungary,
Venezuela, Turkey, and the United States have been documented ex-
tensively in these pages and elsewhere. But similar patterns are visible
in lesser-known cases that often manage to fly under the international
radar—at least for a time. In North Macedonia, for example, Nikola
Gruevski was first elected prime minister in 2006, and his party won
36 Journal of Democracy

majority control of parliament in 2008, riding a wave of Macedonian

ethnonationalism. By 2012, the country’s V-Dem electoral-democracy
score had dropped below 0.05, marking a regression to authoritarian-
ism. The backslide did not stop until 2016, when Gruevski was finally
forced from office by a combination of external pressure from Europe
and mounting opposition protest.
A brief overview of the case demonstrates how democracy was
eroded incrementally.12 In 2010, the government launched a massive
construction project called Skopje 2014 that served as a slush fund
for financing the leadership’s political objectives. The following year
marked the beginning of a concerted campaign to intimidate critics of
the government—including journalists, academics, NGOs, and even-
tually even the president of the Constitutional Court—with a lustra-
tion (“purification”) law that exposed them to charges of having col-
laborated with the secret service of the former communist Yugoslavia.
The government used not only the law itself but also lengthy pretrial
detentions to harass public figures, including a leading member of the
opposition and the owner of a major opposition press.
In 2012, the year that the country is coded as reverting to authori-
tarianism, the government rammed its budget through parliament by ex-
pelling the opposition, and then intensified its crackdown on political
opponents, civil society, and the press. In 2013, parliament passed me-
dia laws creating a regulatory body empowered to impose fines on and
revoke the licenses of news outlets, and the intelligence service placed
as many as a hundred journalists under surveillance. And in 2015, par-
liament established a new council empowered to initiate disciplinary
proceedings against sitting judges, a measure clearly designed to limit
judicial independence.
During the same period, the ruling party also changed its electoral
behavior, relying on extensive fraud to win the 2013 municipal elections
and, according to OSCE monitors, employing state resources, heavy me-
dia bias, voter intimidation, and suspect voter lists in the 2014 parlia-
mentary elections.
Clearly, the course of the backsliding process is not foreordained but
rather is contingent on how and when an autocrat improvises and ex-
ploits available openings. Most cases, however, including that of North
Macedonia, feature three key lines of attack: loosening horizontal con-
straints, limiting political and civil liberties, and undermining the elec-
toral system.
As noted above, autocrats enlist legislatures to weaken horizontal
checks on executive discretion, leading to a process that we call the
“collapse of the separation of powers.” With the collaboration of a cap-
tured legislature, curtailing the independence of the judiciary is a key
element of the backsliding process. Either verbal assaults on the judi-
ciary or actual meddling, particularly through control of appointments,
Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman 37

were clearly visible in twelve of the sixteen backsliding cases—that is,

all but Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Greece, and Serbia (and the
Serbian judiciary’s independence was relatively weak to begin with).
Courts are not the only targets. Aspiring autocrats deploy the power of
appointment and bureaucratic reorgani-
zation to undermine a range of institu-
Autocrats are masters tions that normally serve to limit execu-
of ambiguity and tive discretion and provide oversight,
obfuscation, if not including central banks, civil-service
outright disinformation. commissions, and specialized agencies
The wider public may designed to provide unbiased informa-
tion on the budget, climate change, and
not recognize that the
public health.
playing field has been Without these checks—particularly
decisively tilted until it from the judiciary—autocrats can more
is too late to mount a easily violate their opponents’ demo-
meaningful defense. cratic rights and liberties, especially
those regarding speech, media freedom,
assembly, and association. As in North
Macedonia, attacks on the media were an important and pervasive fea-
ture of all our backsliding cases. Often, verbal attacks on the veracity
of the news are enough to undermine the media’s credibility and dam-
age democracy without having to silence the press. But, as our cases
demonstrate, backsliding regimes can curtail press freedom in a host of
ways, from using regulatory tools and government media to intimidat-
ing and even assassinating journalists. All our cases—with the partial
exception of Greece—saw declines in press freedom as measured by
V-Dem scores, and we document the discrete policies that account for
those declines.
Attacks on rights, moreover, are not aimed exclusively at the media
or opposition; they are often used to rally support against scapegoats on
the other side of the us-versus-them divide. Minorities or marginalized
groups—ethnic, racial, or religious groups, women, and LGBTQ com-
munities—were singled out for opprobrium in Brazil, the Dominican
Republic, Hungary, North Macedonia, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Turkey,
and the United States. Targeted groups are often depicted as not being
legitimate members of the national community but nevertheless enjoy-
ing special benefits and protections while corrupting the fabric of soci-
ety. Not surprisingly, immigrants have been targets of far-right appeals
across a range of backsliding cases, from Hungary and Poland to the
United States and Greece.
Finally, democracy ultimately rests on the integrity of the electoral
system. But the ways in which electoral integrity can be undermined
are legion and have spawned an industry.13 Manipulation of electoral
authorities, for example, was a feature of virtually all sixteen of our
38 Journal of Democracy

cases and was pivotal in those that regressed to authoritarian rule. There
are also legal means on which empowered executives and pliant legisla-
tures can rely to keep their hold on power while eating away at voters’
faith in the system. These include redistricting and gerrymandering or
simply taking advantage of disproportionate electoral rules, thresholds,
and laws limiting voting rights and access. Should these tactics prove
inadequate, a backsliding regime might interfere with the independent
monitoring of elections or, in extreme circumstances, engage in outright
fraud.
Viewed separately, any one of these derogations does not necessarily
signal the collapse of a democratic regime; even in combination they
may stop short of a full reversion to autocracy. But the very incremen-
talism of the process is not simply descriptive; incrementalism has caus-
al effects, and in two ways. First, horizontal checks, rights and liberties,
and the electoral system are mutually constitutive features of democra-
cy. Therefore, an attack on any one of them poses a threat to the others.
The integrity of elections depends on horizontal checks and the robust
protection of rights. Rights, in turn, depend on independent judiciaries,
the rule of law, and the accountability provided by elections. Weaken-
ing any of these institutions or procedures reduces the constraints on
executive power and thus creates opportunities for an autocrat to grab
more. The “slippery slope” metaphor has a logic: One departure from
democratic rules and norms sets the stage for the next.
The incremental nature of the backsliding process also has adverse
effects through a second and unexplored social-psychological route.
Individuals anchor expectations in the status quo. The use of “salami-
slicing tactics,” or piecemeal attacks, can normalize abuses, disorient
oppositions, and encourage acquiescence. Autocrats are masters of am-
biguity and obfuscation, if not outright disinformation. As a result, even
if opposition groups are aware of what is happening, the wider public
may not recognize that the playing field has been decisively tilted until
it is too late to mount a meaningful defense.

Backsliding in International Context

Since the mid-2000s, efforts to expand and sustain democracy in the
world have encountered strong headwinds. The backsliding cases that
we examined unfolded as a widespread “democratic recession” placed
liberal democracy on the defensive. Autocratic states, moreover, have
become more prominent players on the global stage; China and Russia,
the two most powerful autocracies, have become increasingly aggressive
in seeking out and strengthening authoritarian partners. Another unwel-
come development is the growth of authoritarian international institu-
tions, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Collective
Security Treaty Organization, and the Eurasian Economic Union. More-
Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman 39

over, backsliding itself has had diffusion effects: Chávez’s Venezuela

heavily influenced Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. Orbán’s Hungary
became a model for Poland. And Trump-style politics—for example, the
use of catchphrases such as “fake news”—quickly globalized.
Given these international challenges, how can the democracy-pro-
motion community help domestic political forces seeking to prevent
would-be autocrats from winning office in the first place or, failing that,
keep them from abusing their positions once in power? The anatomy of
backsliding that we sketched above can help in identifying appropriate
entry points and also suggests new areas of focus for democracy promo-
tion.
In confronting political polarization, it is important to acknowledge
the genuine anxieties and social grievances that give rise to polariza-
tion in the first place. Ultimately, if democracies are to remain viable,
both national leaders and the international community need to respond
in meaningful ways by building more inclusive polities.
The viral spread of disinformation through social media, however, is
clearly a critical contributor to this particular determinant of backslid-
ing. Containing the spread will require an all-hands-on-deck approach
by governments, social-media companies, and civil societies in target
countries. Strengthened cyberdefense should be coupled with increased
investment in the promotion of factual counternarratives based on the
principles that inspired the post-1945 creation of the Voice of America
and Radio Free Europe and increased cooperation among democracies
around such narratives. Perhaps most fundamentally, it is important to
extend and deepen the debate over how to disincentivize the destructive
tendencies of large social-media companies that profit from circulating
disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech.
What can democratic governments and activists do to deter autocratic
capture of legislatures—the second major component of the backsliding
process? Helping opposition parties to preserve institutional footholds,
within legislatures as well as in other institutions of horizontal account-
ability, remains an important strategic principle for guiding democracy
promotion. Beyond the still-essential task of electoral monitoring and
assistance, this should include finding ways to support opposition par-
ties more directly (where requested) through strategic advice, training
activists, and encouraging closer links to civil society.
It is important to acknowledge that attempts to aid political parties
have not always been successful.14 Partly for this reason, external financ-
ing for parties has declined since the 1980s, despite an overall expansion
in democracy assistance. As Sarah Bush argues, donors and NGOs have
favored programs that generate more easily measurable results, though
these, perversely, tend to be less challenging to incumbent governments.15
Given the importance of strong, competitive parties in preventing auto-
crats from capturing legislatures and other institutions of accountability,
40 Journal of Democracy

however, it may be more constructive to reform rather than reduce the

flow of external assistance in this area. Indeed, assistance for party sys-
tems might be of greater value in some cases. Of course, autocrats often
still find ways to benefit from subtle changes in electoral rules, twisting
to their advantage “reforms” such as thresholds for entering the legis-
lature, rules for transforming votes into seats, and redistricting. Local
watchdog groups should be calling attention to such changes and their
implications, just as they do for changes to media laws or the judiciary.
Finally, if incrementalism is central to backsliding, the United States
and its allies need to think about developing early-warning systems.
Annual human-rights reports—whether from governments or leading
organizations such as Freedom House—provide rich detail but do not
necessarily spotlight the kinds of key institutional derogations that can
have longer-term effects. Human-rights organizations such as Amnesty
International have pioneered emergency-response campaigns to call out
violations of individual rights, as have organizations such as Reporters
Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists with respect to
attacks on journalistic freedoms. But the subtlety of individual antidemo-
cratic abuses can impede the ability to sound the alarm, both because the
signals are often faint and because the case is hard to make. For example,
Western governments and the EU were slow to forcefully acknowledge
the deterioration of Hungarian democracy, and the EU’s ability to call
out and sanction the country’s authoritarianism remains hamstrung today.
If early warnings are to be effective, the advanced industrial democ-
racies must also place a higher priority on defending democracy as a
key foreign-policy objective. And any initiative to establish a formal or
informal alliance of democracies must make the defense of democracy
itself a common priority. Washington and other democratic capitals will
need to attach significant weight to sustaining democratic institutions in
the face of stealth power grabs by incumbent leaders and deploy their
diplomatic influence accordingly and collectively. Fortunately, we now
have catalogues of best practices for embassies on the ground in back-
sliding countries. These include providing credible information, sup-
porting and even convening diverse political and civil society organi-
zations, using diplomatic appeals to identify problems, and providing
support (and sometimes protection) for activists who run afoul of back-
sliding governments.16
If these challenges were not enough, the United States faces one
perhaps more daunting: “physician, heal thyself.” In a globalized
world, news travels fast. The deterioration of U.S. democracy during
the last decade has eased the way for backsliding elsewhere. If the
United States wants to serve as a model, it must be worthy of emula-
tion. That goal requires restoring not only the country’s commitment
to democracy promotion globally but also to democracy within its own
borders.
Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman 41

NOTES
1. Nancy Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” Journal of Democracy 27 (January
2016): 5–19; Anna Lührmann and Staffan I. Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization
Is Here: What Is New About It?” Democratization 26 (October 2019): 1095–113; David
Waldner and Ellen Lust, “Unwelcome Change: Coming to Terms with Democratic Back-
sliding,” Annual Review of Politics 21 (May 2018): 93–113.

2. Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman, Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Con-
temporary World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) and the online appendix
at www.cambridge.org/backsliding.

3. Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg, and Staffan I. Lindberg, “Regimes of the

World (RoW): Opening New Avenues for the Comparative Study of Political Regimes,”
Politics and Governance 6 (March 2018): 60–77.

4. Latin American cases are compared to Latin American V-Dem regional averages;
EU averages are benchmarks for the United States, Greece, Turkey, and the postcommu-
nist countries; Zambia is compared with Mauritius, the African country with the longest
democratic record.

5. Jennifer McCoy, Tahmina Rahman, and Murat Somer, “Polarization and the Global
Crisis of Democracy: Common Patterns, Dynamics, and Pernicious Consequences for
Democratic Polities,” American Behavioral Scientist 62 (January 2018): 16–42.

6. See the Dominican Republic country narrative in the online appendix of Haggard
and Kaufman, Backsliding, 54–66.

7. Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

8. Matthew H. Graham and Milan W. Svolik, “Democracy in America? Partisanship,

Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States,” Ameri-
can Political Science Review 114 (May 2020): 392–409.

9. M. Steven Fish, “Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies,” Journal of Democ-

racy 17 (January 2006): 5–20.

10. Bálint Magyar, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary (New York:
CEU Press, 2016).

11. Ozan O. Varol, “Stealth Authoritarianism,” Iowa Law Review 100 (May 2015):
1673–1742.

12. See the North Macedonia country narrative in the online appendix of Haggard and
Kaufman, Backsliding, 115–29.

13. Pippa Norris, Strengthening Electoral Integrity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 2017).

14. Thomas Carothers, Confronting the Weakest Link: Aiding Political Parties in New
Democracies (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006).

15. Sarah Sunn Bush, The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promo-
tion Does Not Confront Dictators (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

16. Jeremy Kinsman and Kurt Bassuener, A Diplomat’s Handbook for Democracy De-
velopment Support, 3rd ed. (Waterloo, Ont.: Centre for International Governance Innovation,
2013).