Democratic backsliding

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.

[24] As emphasized by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, it is difficult to pinpoint a single specific moment at which a government is no longer democratic, given that this process of decline manifests "slowly, in barely visible steps".

"[16] 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.

[30] 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.

[29] 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.

[33] 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.

"[35] According to Norris, the reinforcement of the insecurities from the "twin forces" has led to more support for populist-authoritarian leaders, and this latter risk was especially pronounced in the United States during the presidency of Donald Trump.

For example, Norris argues that Trump benefited from the mistrust of "the establishment" and that he continuously sought to undermine faith in the legitimacy of the media and the independence of the courts.

Populism-in-power has led to processes of de-democratization (e.g., [Viktor] Orbán in Hungary or [Hugo] Chávez in Venezuela) and, in some extreme cases, even to the breakdown of the democratic regime (e.g., [Alberto] Fujimori in Peru).

"[37] 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.

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.

[24] 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.

"[38] 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.

Reforms intended to strengthen presidential powers or address public discontent can fragment political landscapes, leaving democracies vulnerable to instability and populist pressures.

[49] 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".

[52] 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.

[53] Professor Jessica Stern and the political psychologist Karen Stenner write that international research finds that "perceptions of sociocultural threat" (such as rising ethnic diversity, tolerance for LGBT people) are more important in explaining how democracies turn authoritarian compared to economic inequality (though they include economic threats such as globalization and the rising prosperity of other ethnic groups).

[55] According to Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman, four characteristics have typically provided the conditions for democratic backsliding (alone or in combination): Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power.

[56][57][58] 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.

[66] Scholarly work in the 2010s detailed democratic backsliding, in various forms and to various extents, in Hungary and Poland,[38] the Czech Republic,[68] Turkey,[69][70] Brazil, Venezuela,[71][72] and India.

[73] 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.