Thomas Carothers is the Harvey V. Fineberg Chair and director of
the Democracy,
Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie
Endowment for
International Peace. His most recent book is Democracies
Divided: The Global
Challenge of Political Polarization (2019,
coedited with Andrew
O’Donohue). Brendan Hartnett is a James C.
Gaither Junior
Fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance
Program.
Cases of democratic
backsliding have been multiplying across the
globe in recent
years, triggering a restless search among Western policymakers
and aid providers
for causal explanations. One of the most common
ideas to have
emerged in this policy community is that the blame
lies in democracies’
failure to deliver: When democracies do not provide
their citizens with
adequate socioeconomic benefits, the thinking goes,
many of those
citizens will lose faith in democracy and embrace antidemocratic
political figures
who, once elected, will undercut democratic
norms and
institutions. From this idea follows the policy conclusion that
to stop democratic
backsliding concerned policymakers and aid providers
must help new or
struggling democracies do better at delivering the
goods to their
citizens, such as jobs, higher wages, food security, or access
to education.
Writing in Foreign Affairs last year, Samantha Power,
administrator of the
U.S. Agency for International Development, argued
that “to . . .
swing the pendulum of history back toward democratic rule,
we must break down
the wall that separates democratic advocacy from
economic development
work and demonstrate that democracies can deliver
for their people.”1
It seems almost
inarguable that governments of any political character
that provide strong
socioeconomic results for their citizens will, on
average, be more
stable and long lasting than those that do not. Yet it is
much less clear that
a failure to deliver on the part of democracies is a
major cause of the
wave of democratic erosion that has washed across
multiple regions in
the past twenty years. There are some cases where
it seems to be at
least partly true. In Tunisia, for example, accumulated
popular frustration
with the socioeconomic performance of every government
that ruled the
country after its transition to elected, civilian rule
in 2011 clearly
factored in President Kais Saied’s decision to carry out
a self-coup in 2021,
overturning the country’s democratic experiment.
Yet there are also
cases where the “democracy-not-delivering” argument
seems much less
true, if at all: Poland, for example, enjoyed an enviable
economic record in
the years prior to the onset of its democratic
backsliding in 2015.
Clearly, an empirically well-informed picture is
needed to probe the
complexities lurking within this intuitively appealing
but sweeping idea.
To develop such a
picture, we examined twelve countries that experienced
democratic
backsliding during the past twenty years from a
starting point of
either electoral democracy or liberal democracy: Bangladesh,
Brazil, El Salvador,
Hungary, India, Mexico, Nicaragua, the
Philippines, Poland,
Tunisia, Turkey, and the United States. This group,
drawn from the
approximately 25 to 40 countries (depending on the specific
measures used) that
are usually identified as having experienced
backsliding in the
time period, includes some of the most internationally
prominent cases of
backsliding—Brazil, Hungary, India, Turkey,
and the United
States—while also being representationally diverse
along multiple
dimensions, including population size, level of wealth,
and geographic
location.2 The countries in this group are also diverse in
terms of their level
of democracy prior to the onset of backsliding: Some
were relatively
well-consolidated democracies, such as Poland and the
United States;
others were much less so, including Bangladesh, Nicaragua,
and Turkey. The
backsliding trajectories of these countries also
vary: Democratic
erosion has been severe in some, such as Bangladesh
and Hungary, and
mild in others, including the United States; likewise,
backsliding is
ongoing in some, for example, El Salvador and India, but
appears to have been
reversed (at least for now) in others, including
Brazil and Poland.
For each country, we
analyze a range of socioeconomic and political
developments to
answer three key questions: First, was the election
of the leader who
ended up engaging in backsliding clearly linked to a
failure of democracy
to deliver? Second, did that leader campaign on an
antidemocratic
platform? And third, when the backsliding unfolded, did
citizens embrace it?
Our findings raise substantial doubt about the utility
of the
democracy-not-delivering thesis as a broad causal explanation of
the recent wave of
democratic backsliding. That thesis has some explanatory
power in certain
cases, but little in others. Even where the thesis
does apply, it
involves considerable empirical complexity and requires
nuanced
interpretation. Our findings reinforce on a global basis a crucial
insight drawn from
the important study by Larry Bartels of democratic
26 Journal of
Democracy
trends in
Europe—that democracies “erode from the top” rather than at
the behest of their
citizens.3 Policymakers and aid providers seeking to
stem democratic
erosion globally should direct their energies and resources
accordingly and
prioritize bolstering institutions and norms that
can constrain
predatory powerholders.
Performance
Realities
To examine whether
poor socioeconomic performance precedes the
election of leaders
who engage in backsliding, we looked at three core
economic
indicators—inequality, poverty, and growth—in the five years
prior to each of the
pivotal elections in question.4 The idea that anger
over rising
inequality drives citizens to embrace illiberal politicians is
perhaps the most
common form of the democracy-not-delivering thesis.
Indeed, some
prominent Western observers concerned about rising inequality
around the world
point to it as a major cause of democracy’s
global travails.5
Yet, although rising levels of domestic inequality undoubtedly
pose many problems
for democracies (and other types of political
systems), the link
to backsliding is not apparent.
In eight of the
twelve cases under study, inequality was trending
downward in the five
years before the elections that brought to power
leaders who ended up
moving against democracy, averaging an almost
7 percent drop in
the country’s Gini coefficient. In the four countries
where that was not
the case—Brazil, India, Tunisia, and the United
States—inequality
was roughly stable in the relevant period. A fallback
argument for the
democracy-not-delivering thesis might be that what is
crucial is not the
direction of inequality but the overall level. But here,
too, the hypothesis
falls short: In most cases, inequality in the backsliding
countries was not
higher than average when compared with their regional
peers. With respect
to poverty rates, the picture is similar: In five
years before
backsliding began, poverty levels decreased in nine of the
twelve
countries—substantially in some cases, such as India and Poland.
What about economic
growth? Has the election of antidemocratic
leaders typically
been preceded by decreasing or low growth rates? In
most of the cases,
growth was relatively stable for at least five years
prior to the onset
of backsliding. And in some—Bangladesh, India, the
Philippines, Poland,
and Turkey—growth was not just stable but relatively
high in regional and
global terms. In the years leading up to their
backsliding, these
countries were widely considered developmental
stars rather than
laggards. Three of the cases did see a major economic
downturn prior to
the pivotal election—Brazil, Hungary, and Tunisia.
In Brazil and
Hungary, the downturn began several years before the
election; in
Tunisia, the covid-19 pandemic led to a sharp recession the
year before Saied’s
self-coup, adding a harsh edge to the long-mounting
anger among
Tunisians about the country’s poor economic performance
in the decade after
the democratic revolution. The United States, meanwhile,
experienced an
economic slowdown in 2016, the year of its pivotal
election, but that
was after relatively strong growth (at least compared
to democratic peers
in Europe) from 2010 to 2015.
Although the
democracy-not-delivering thesis usually focuses on
these core elements
of socioeconomic performance, what about other
elements of
governance performance? Two appear to have played an
important role in
shaping the outcomes of the pivotal elections in some
of the twelve cases:
corruption and crime. In Brazil, the vast Operaç~ao
Lava Jato (Operation
Car Wash) corruption scandal involving the Brazilian
Workers’ Party and
other mainstream Brazilian political actors
in the mid-2010s was
a major driver of many citizens’ alienation from
the country’s
traditional political elite and their turn to Jair Bolsonaro
in the 2018
election.6 Perceptions of significant levels of corruption
also contributed to
the losses by incumbent parties in India in 2014 and
Mexico in 2018.7
With respect to crime, El Salvador’s extended period
of extremely high
levels of violent crime played a central role in citizens
giving up on the two
mainstream political parties and embracing Nayib
Bukele in the 2019
election (although it is worth noting that the country
had actually seen a
significant decrease in homicides in the three
years prior to
Bukele’s election).8 In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte
centered his
successful presidential campaign around his claim that the
country’s crime
situation was out of control and that he would fix it.
Yet even with this
widening of the lens, the search for what led to the
election of these
various leaders requires looking beyond performance
shortcomings that
fit easily into the democracy-not-delivering framework.
In Nicaragua, Daniel
Ortega managed to return to power in 2006
largely because the
two main parties on the other side of the political
aisle split their
vote, rendering Ortega’s 38 percent vote share enough to
win in the first
round.9 In Poland, a complex mix of factors—including
shrewdly targeted
campaign promises about new governmental benefits
and a somewhat vague
desire for change on the part of many voters—put
the populist Law and
Justice party over the line in 2015.10 In Turkey,
Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan’s effective pushing of certain hot-button pro-Islamist
issues helped him
and his Justice and Development Party (AKP)
to gain power in
2002 and remain in power in 2007.11 And in the United
States, it was not
primarily economic backlash from “left behind”
working-class
Americans facing financial hardship that drove Donald
Trump’s 2016
victory, but rather his skillful tapping of cultural animosities
and anxieties—about
immigrants, racial minorities, and China, for
example—as well as
other factors, such as the strong personal dislike of
Hillary Clinton
among certain voter groups in key swing states.12
Moreover, even when
governmental performance becomes a major
issue in a pivotal
election, perceptions rather than the realities of performance
tend to matter most.
As Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels
28 Journal of
Democracy
have shown, voters’
perceptions of governmental performance may be
only loosely tied to
the objective facts about governmental performance.
This sobering
reality about elections and democracy weakens the assertion
that the electoral
success of backsliding leaders can be traced to
specific performance
shortcomings of their incumbent opponents.13 Underlining
this reality,
charismatic electoral challengers in recent years
have often
demonstrated notable skill in negatively shaping citizen perceptions
about the
incumbent’s performance, a phenomenon perhaps fueled
by increasingly
fast-moving and manipulable media environments.
In the Philippines,
for example, the anticrime emphasis of Duterte’s
2016 campaign was a
successful demagogic tactic to stir up public
fears: “framing
the country’s minor drug problem as a major social one,
effectively
manufacturing a crisis.”14 Similarly, the 2016 Trump campaign’s
emphasis on the
dangers of immigration flows into the United
States amplified
voters’ fears that their status in society was under threat
and resonated
especially with non–college-educated whites, who overwhelmingly
backed Trump.15
In short, the
outcomes of the pivotal elections in the twelve cases
under study were
determined by a dense mix of social, cultural, political,
and economic
factors. A sense of grievance on the part of voters
was often present,
but their grievances ranged widely across different
domains and often
had little to do with governments’ poor socioeconomic
performance.
Moreover, contingent political factors, such as the
Nicaraguan
opposition splitting the vote in 2006, and subjective voter
perceptions often
counted significantly alongside more structural factors.
While democracy’s
failure to deliver the socioeconomic goods is
relevant to some
degree in some of the cases, according it a central explanatory
role for democratic
backsliding represents an imposition of an
overly simple idea
on a highly complex reality.
Embracing What?
The other main
component of the democracy-not-delivering thesis
is the proposition
that when citizens are disappointed with the socioeconomic
results of
democratic governance, they knowingly embrace
antidemocratic
alternatives—in effect voting against democracy out of
frustration with it.
Here, too, the record of the twelve cases under review
does not provide
strong support. Instead, it generally bolsters another
crucial finding of
Larry Bartels concerning the emergence of political
illiberalism in
Poland and Hungary: When Poles voted in Law and Justice
in 2015 and a
majority of Hungarian voters chose Fidesz and Viktor
Orbán in 2010, they
were voting for change but not consciously for illiberalism:
Only after the
elections did it become clear that the winners
were bent on
radically reshaping the political system, resulting in “illiberalism
by surprise.”
In the pivotal
elections under review here that brought to power leaders
who ended up
undercutting democracy, citizens were voting for
change, as citizens
in democracies often do in elections. But for the most
part they were not
voting for political
figures who were
openly promising
antidemocratic
action or threatening
to undo democracy.
In Turkey, for
example, Erdoğan
did not campaign
on a platform of
political illiberalism
or antidemocracy in
either 2002,
when he was first
elected prime minister,
or in 2007, when he
was reelected
for the first time.
He and his
party instead
positioned themselves
at the intersection
of the center-right
and Islamic
traditionalism, offering
a democratic
alternative to the mainstream
parties that had
long dominated
Turkish politics.17
In his first term
as prime minister,
Erdoğan initiated some democratic reforms, such as
lifting restrictions
on broadcasting and reporting in Kurdish, gaining
praise from Western
governments for his prodemocratic actions.18
In Bangladesh in
2008, when the people voted into power the Awami
League, a political
party that would go on to significantly curtail democracy
in the country, they
were not making a purposely antidemocratic
choice. The Awami
League’s record both in and out of power
was not
unblemished—for example, the party had at times encouraged
violence among its
supporters.19 Yet compared to its main rival, the Bangladesh
Nationalist Party
(BNP), the Awami League was arguably the
more prodemocratic
choice at the time given the BNP’s multiple prior
undemocratic
actions, such as ruling by executive ordinance and rigging
some by-elections in
the 1990s.20
Narendra Modi’s
historic victory in India’s 2014 elections was driven
mainly by his record
of economic success in his home state of Gujarat
and his reputation
as a no-nonsense, business-friendly leader who
would drive through
economic reforms and fight corruption.21 The many
disgruntled
Tunisians who voted for Kais Saied in 2019 likewise were
not opting for an
antidemocratic figure. Saied was a constitutional-law
scholar who had
helped to draft the country’s post–Arab Spring constitution,
and he promised
prodemocratic reforms, such as devolving power
to local governments
and incorporating direct elements of democracy,
including recall
elections. His opponent in the runoff, Nabil Karoui, appeared
as the greater risk
to democracy, having enjoyed close ties with
the country’s
former dictator, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali (1987–2011).22
Some of the leaders
elected in the case-study countries who later
In many backsliding
contexts, it would
be a
serious mistake to
say
that large shares of
voters
are going along
happily
and knowingly with
democratic
erosion—many
are being
bludgeoned,
bribed, or
manipulated via
illegitimate means
into
acquiescing.
30 Journal of
Democracy
drove democratic
erosion had acted undemocratically in their political
pasts. Yet their
campaigns were not rooted in that fact, and their
victories do not
appear to have been either. Mexico’s Andrés Manuel
López Obrador, for
example, refused to concede his loss in the 2012
presidential
election. But when he ran again in 2018, he did not base
his campaign on
attacking the institutions or norms of Mexican democracy.
It was oriented
instead around his promise to make Mexico a more
fully inclusive
country by achieving fundamental pro-poor economic
changes.23 In
Poland, Law and Justice’s commitment to democracy was
undoubtably
blemished going into the 2015 elections—party leader
Jaros³aw Kaczy´nski
had, after all, praised Orbán’s model of illiberal
governance and
expressed a desire to implement it in Poland. But the
party kept these
antidemocratic positions out of view in the 2015 campaign,
softening its image
to appeal to voters who were simply tired of
the “boring”
incumbent party.24
Prior to running for
president of El Salvador in 2019, Nayib Bukele
had engaged in some
illiberal actions in his capacity as mayor of San
Salvador, for
example, ordering cyberattacks on newspapers critical of
him. Yet in his 2019
presidential campaign, he positioned himself as
the choice to save
Salvadoran democracy—as a reformer in between
the country’s two
longstanding parties on the right and left, who would
return power to the
people through anticrime and anticorruption measures.
25 Daniel Ortega
entered Nicaragua’s 2006 election with a clear
antidemocratic past,
having presided over the authoritarian Sandinista
regime from 1979 to
1990. Yet in the intervening years he had participated
in the country’s
messy multipartism. For his 2006 bid, Ortega
did not position
himself against the country’s political establishment
but rather as a
candidate of “love, reconciliation, and forgiveness” who
would do more for
the country’s poor than his two center-right rivals.26
In only three of our
twelve case studies could it be said that the winner
of the pivotal
election in question ran on a campaign that specifically
promised systemic
antidemocratic actions—though not with the stated
intention of
undermining the entire democratic system: Duterte in the
Philippines and
Trump in the United States, both in 2016, and Brazil’s
Bolsonaro in 2018.
Before being elected president, Duterte had ruled
Davao City with an
iron fist, ordering extrajudicial killings of suspected
criminals, drug
users, and communist rebels. Instead of downplaying
this on the campaign
trail, Duterte “shrugged off accusations of humanrights
abuses, promising to
implement his Davao model nationwide.”27
He also threatened
to disband, quiet, or ignore Congress, the courts,
and human-rights
activists if they got in his way, and he praised former
dictator Ferdinand
Marcos.
Donald Trump, at
2016 campaign rallies, led cheers calling for his
main opponent,
Hillary Clinton, to be “locked up” and said that he would
respect the results
of the election only if he won. Similarly, Bolsonaro,
who dismissed
accusations that he was a threat to Brazilian democracy
as “fake news”
despite being a well-known apologist for the country’s
1964–85 military
dictatorship, said during the 2018 campaign that he
would wipe his
political opponents “off the map.”28 Even in these cases,
however,
antidemocratic threats or promises were part of much larger
platforms that
candidates stood for or pledged to fulfill.
In short, the idea
that voters in these twelve countries were purposefully
choosing an
antidemocratic path in electing leaders who ended up
working against
democracy once in power does not hold up to empirical
scrutiny. In most of
the cases, voters were embracing the promise of
significant, even
disruptive change, whether in economic, social, or political
domains. Some of
their preferred candidates represented a risky
path, democratically
speaking, given past antidemocratic incidents or
records. But except
in a few cases, voters were not throwing their support
behind political
figures who were advocating an end to democracy
or openly
questioning the value of democracy per se. Most of the voters
in these pivotal
elections were not turning against democracy; in fact,
many appeared to be
trying to save democracy by giving it a pointed but
reform-oriented
reset.
Once Backsliding Is
Underway
Can it be argued
that, even if voters in these pivotal elections were
not knowingly voting
for the dismantling of democracy, once those
leaders gained power
and began to undercut democratic norms and institutions,
their supporters
embraced these moves? In other words, if
citizens in
backsliding countries are not choosing democratic erosion
before the fact, do
they become contented enablers once such deterioration
is underway?
Some of the
backsliding leaders in the case-study countries have enjoyed
notably high levels
of popularity while in office. López Obrador,
Bukele, Duterte, and
Modi stand out in this regard. López Obrador
enjoyed approval
ratings above 60 percent in the final months of his
single, six-year
presidential term, and his chosen successor, Claudia
Sheinbaum, easily
won Mexico’s June 2024 election. Bukele’s approval
ratings among
Salvadoran voters have stayed sky-high, at times topping
90 percent since he
became president in 2019, and he was reelected in
2024 with almost 85
percent of the vote. Duterte’s popularity remained
high throughout his
presidency as well, and his party swept the midterm
elections in 2019,
giving it control of both legislative houses. Modi and
his party expanded
their support during their first ten years in power.
These leaders have
sustained their popularity at least in part by giving
their supporters
what they want, whether it is hard-nosed anticrime policies
in El Salvador and
the Philippines, pro-poor economic policies in
Mexico, or pro-Hindu
social policies and vigorous nationalism in India.
32 Journal of
Democracy
In line with Matthew
Graham and Milan Svolik’s findings regarding the
United States—that
in a highly polarized context voters are unlikely to
turn against
undemocratic politicians when they generally agree with
their policies—many
people in these four countries appear to be willing
to overlook or
tolerate a backsliding leader’s antidemocratic moves.29
For example,
Filipino voters were “willing to put up with extrajudicial
killings, political
repression, and the gutting of liberal institutions because
they [saw] Duterte
as a strong leader. They question[ed] his methods
but not their
effectiveness.”30 In some cases, it is likely that supporters
of backsliders do
not just overlook the democracy factor but embrace
the illiberalism of
their leader—whether it takes the form of systematic
discrimination
against certain groups or attacks on the courts—because
they view it as
justified, sometimes as payback for perceived wrongs of
the past.
It is important to
be cautious, however, about attributing the popularity
of some backsliding
leaders to genuine voter satisfaction based on
promises delivered.
Most of these leaders manipulate public opinion in
various illegitimate
ways. The leaders of Bangladesh, Nicaragua, and
Turkey, for example,
have cracked down harshly on those who dissent
or criticize the
ruling party. The leaders of almost all twelve backsliders
employ substantial
control over the media to shape the information
space in their
favor. In the 2022 electoral campaign in Hungary, for
example, the main
opposition candidate for prime minister was given
just a few minutes
on the state-dominated television to make his case
to voters, in
contrast to months of wall-to-wall adulatory coverage of
Prime Minister Orbán
and his party.31 Likewise, before the 2023 elections
in Turkey, the state
channel TRT gave Erdoğan’s campaign 32
hours of coverage,
compared to just 32 minutes of coverage for his main
challenger.32
Backsliding leaders
also frequently use state resources to fund their
own parties’
political campaigns and to coopt important businesses and
other key groups,
while harassing opponents with regulatory retaliation,
tax inspections, and
other punitive measures. During Ortega’s first
decade in power, he
simultaneously maintained support from the poor
through patronage
and backing from the Nicaraguan business community
in exchange for
lucrative contracts.33 In many backsliding contexts,
it would be a
serious mistake to say that large shares of voters are going
along happily and
knowingly with democratic erosion—many are
being bludgeoned,
bribed, or manipulated via illegitimate means into
acquiescing.
In the United
States, Brazil, and Poland, backsliding leaders lost
enough popularity,
and faced strong enough institutions of countervailing
power, that they
ended up losing power in failed reelection attempts.
Their loss of
popularity had a mix of causes. In the case of Trump, for
example, the first
year of the covid pandemic hit his presidency hard,
both its negative
economic effects and the weaknesses it exposed in his
governance style.
Although the antidemocratic actions of Trump, Bolsonaro,
and Law and Justice
appear to have played some role in weakening
their popular
support, it is not a straightforward story.
In all three cases,
it appears that the leaders’ antidemocratic actions
did not much faze
core supporters, in line with Graham and Svolik’s
finding mentioned
above. Survey research ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential
election showed that
even before ballots were cast, there was a
strong desire among
Trump supporters for the incumbent to fight against
an electoral defeat.
The leading justification provided by those who supported
Trump’s effort to
undermine the results was not concern about
the integrity of the
election, but simply that they supported Trump and
disliked Biden.34
These supporters either did not perceive their antidemocratic
actions as that
harmful or were willing to accept them for other
policy gains.
At the same time,
polling data indicate that the antidemocratic actions
of Trump, Bolsonaro,
and Law and Justice did hurt them on the
periphery of their
supporter circles—among voters who initially gave
them a try but were
not necessarily firmly committed. Moreover, their
democratic
transgressions helped to mobilize their opponents and get
them to the polls in
even greater numbers. Law and Justice’s assaults
on Polish democracy,
for example, cost it support from among previous
backers and sparked
large-scale antigovernment protests in the
run-up to Poland’s
2023 elections, which produced an alternation of
power.35
Prioritizing
Constraint
The idea that a
failure of democracies to deliver is a major cause
of the recent wave
of democratic backsliding is intuitively appealing.
Many democracies are
struggling to provide secure, prosperous lives
for their citizens,
and many are struggling to maintain solid democratic
norms and
institutions. Yet the evidence for a causal link between these
two phenomena in
twelve prominent contemporary cases of democratic
backsliding is mixed
at best. In most of the cases, inequality and poverty
were heading
downward in the five years before the election that
brought a
backsliding leader to power, while growth was largely stable
or even high. Sharp
economic downturns did seriously damage the popularity
of incumbent
democratic governments in three of the cases (Brazil,
Hungary, and
Tunisia), and citizen anger over high levels of crime
and corruption was a
key factor in bringing an antidemocratic leader to
power in at least
Brazil and El Salvador.
Overall, however, it
was a wide range of factors, not just economic
and governance
grievances, that led voters in these countries to elect
leaders who ended up
eroding democracy. These factors include broader
34 Journal of
Democracy
sociocultural
anxieties, the impressive electoral and narrative skills of
some of the leaders
in question, specific features of electoral laws, the
new fluidity and
corruptibility of media environments in many democracies,
and the frequent
appeal to voters
almost everywhere of
change for
change’s sake.
In addition, most of
the winners of
these pivotal
elections did not campaign
on promises of
dismantling democracy.
Some had
illiberalism in their
political pasts,
including Daniel Ortega
and Narendra Modi.
But even those
for whom that was
true focused their
electoral strategies
on other issues,
such pro-poor
economic policies in the
case of Ortega or
economic reform and
dynamism in the case
of Modi. Some
appeared to be the
more democratic choice compared to their main opponents,
as in Bangladesh in
2008 and Tunisia in 2019. The illiberalism
that emerged in the
twelve case-study countries was thus more illiberalism
after the fact than
illiberalism by promise. Most voters in these
countries could not
be said to have consciously turned away from democracy
in making the
choices they did at the ballot box.
What this suggests
is that pointing to poor socioeconomic performance
by democratic
governments and citizen anger about that performance
as the primary
drivers of democratic backsliding is a mistake.
The onus for
backsliding belongs on those leaders who gain power for a
wide range of
reasons, including in many cases by promising to renovate
democracy, but then
once in power relentlessly amass unconstrained
power by overriding
countervailing institutions and undercutting basic
democratic norms and
procedures. Backsliding in these cases is thus less
about a failure of
democracy to deliver than about a failure of democracy
to constrain—that
is, to curb the predatory political ambitions and
methods of certain
elected leaders.
This conclusion does
not absolve the outgoing democratic governments
in these and other
cases from their many shortcomings in terms
of how they have
governed and what they have delivered to citizens,
which have
unquestionably caused or aggravated countless hardships
and wrongs. Indeed,
such shortcomings have contributed to the resurgence
in recent years of
the old debate—dating back to the 1960s and
before—about
whether autocracies are better able than democracies to
deliver economic
benefits. But our findings point the primary finger of
blame for democratic
backsliding at the politicians and political parties
that have acted
antidemocratically and the weakness of democracy’s institutional
guardrails in these
countries.
analytic conclusion
points to an overarching policy conclusion.
The community of
public and private organizations working internationally
to slow or reverse
the tide of democratic backsliding should
emphasize bolstering
the independence and strength of those institutions
that serve as
guardrails against antidemocratic encroachments by political
figures determined
to steamroll countervailing institutions and gain
unchecked power. On
the side of public institutions, this may include
courts,
anticorruption bodies, electoral-management bodies, and those
parts of local
government that have preserved some autonomy from national
political control.
It may also include work with national parliaments,
if that can be done
in a way that augments the role of parliament
as a check on
executive power. On the nongovernmental side, this will
often mean support
for independent media and independent civic groups
that seek to hold
power accountable whether by protecting political and
civil rights,
increasing government accountability, or countering political
misinformation and
disinformation.
Focusing on
fortifying constraint is not the same as a generalized
strategy of
political institutional support—it needs to be carefully tailored
to reinforce
democratic guardrails and avoid soft-edged governance
programming that may
inadvertently help to strengthen an overweening
political power
structure. Such a strategy will ideally include a
mix of
well-coordinated elements of aid programming, diplomatic
interventions,
and economic carrots
and sticks. None of the various constituent
elements of such a
strategy are new for democracy supporters, but
they should be
joined together more purposely into integrated efforts to
buttress
prodemocratic constraints on power.
Prioritizing such an
approach does not mean international supporters
of democracy should
forsake ongoing or potential new efforts to help
new or struggling
democratic governments deliver better socioeconomic
results for their
citizens. Those efforts are worth doing in and of themselves
to contribute to a
better life for people across the democratic
world. And in some
cases, they may over time help to alleviate sociopolitical
pressures that could
encourage citizens to take risks with disruptive
and potentially
undemocratic alternatives. But such efforts should
be viewed as a
complement to, not a substitute for, a primary strategy
of strengthening
domestic sources and structures of prodemocratic constraint
and disincentivizing
politically predatory leaders from deepening
their antidemocratic
quests.
