The term "illiberal democracy" describes a governing system that hides its "nondemocratic practices behind formally democratic institutions and procedures".
Zakaria describes these systems as maintaining elections while undermining constitutional liberalism, including individual rights, judicial independence, and the rule of law."
Similarly, Turkey has been described as an illiberal democracy following constitutional changes in 2017 that granted sweeping executive powers to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, consolidating control over political institutions and limiting opposition."
[citation needed] The term illiberal democracy was then used and popularized by Fareed Zakaria in a regularly cited 1997 article in the journal Foreign Affairs.
Zakaria initially wrote his paper using the term illiberal democracy interchangeably with pseudo-autocracies but today they are used to describe countries that are potentially democratically backsliding as well.
Classical conservatives – such as the Christian Democrats in Europe or the Republican Party in the U.S. before Donald Trump – are/were fervent supporters of political rights and constitutionalism, while illiberalism challenges them.
She first says that elections help leaders resolve threats from elites and from the masses by appeasing those capable of usurping power with money and securing the cooperation of the general public with political concessions.
[18] Gandhi also claims that illiberal elections serve other useful purposes, such as providing autocrats with information about their citizens and establishing legitimacy both domestically and in the international community, and that these varied functions must be elucidated in future research.
Lisa Blaydes shows that under Mubarak's lengthy rule, elections provided a mechanism through which elites bought votes to support the government (through distributing needed goods and resources to the public) to acquire regime-enforced parliamentary immunity.
"[10]: xli A 2008 article by Rocha Menocal, Fritz and Rakner describes the emergence of illiberal democracies and discusses some of their shared characteristics.
The authors make the case that the "democratic optimism" in the 1990s—following the collapse of the Soviet Union—has led to the emergence of hybrid regimes holding illiberal values.
The previous cabinet of Robert Fico was accused of organised corruption and some politicians were directly or indirectly linked to the kidnapping of Vietnamese businessman Trịnh Xuân Thanh[31] and to the assassination of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée.
In the United States, the Republican Party has in recent years faced criticism that it is becoming increasingly illiberal under the leadership of Donald Trump, who was elected president in 2016 and 2024.
[41][42] Trump's populist style of governance has been considered by some to be a dangerous risk to the heart of liberal democracy, as well as indifference towards traditional democratic allies and praising other "strongman rulers" in the world like Putin.
Current populist leaders—especially within Western states—have the tendency to promote illiberal values, a notable example being the exclusion of immigrants and openly xenophobic statements.
[45] When discussing this matter, Berman through the example of Western states—United States and Europe—has attributed the cause of populist backlash to national government disregarding the interests of average citizens for business elites.
[46] Writers such as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way reject the concept of an illiberal democracy, saying it only "muddies the waters" on the basis that if a country does not have opposition parties and an independent media, it is not democratic.
Levitsky and Way say that states such as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under Slobodan Milošević, Zimbabwe and post-Soviet Russia were never truly democratic and not developing toward democracy, but were rather tending toward authoritarian behavior despite having elections, which were sometimes sharply contested.
[50][needs update] According to a study by George Washington University political scientist Michael K. Miller, multiparty autocratic elections predict significantly better outcomes on health, education, gender equality, and basic freedoms relative to non-electoral autocracy.