What is democratic backsliding?

Abstract

Much recent political commentary suggests that a “backlash,” “revolt,” or “counter-revolution” is unfolding against lib- eral constitutional democracy (e.g., Eatwell &Goodwin, 2018; Galston, 2020; Mounk, 2018; Norris & Inglehart, 2019; Zielonka, 2018). As a generalizable observation about contemporary politics, this diagnosis is perhaps unduly alarmist (e.g., Przeworski, 2019). In some countries, however, sustained attacks ondemocratic institutions have indeed become commonplace. An emblematic example is the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s attempts to transform his country into an “illiberal democracy.” Attentive to the weakness of domestic opposition and supranational democ- racy monitoring, Orbán, and his Fidesz party have gradually dismantled Hungary’s post-1989 constitutional order. In its place has arisen a regime that is not outright dictatorial, yet less than democratic—something that may also be said about Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an and Poland after the electoral victory of Jarosław Kaczyński’s PiS-party in 2015. Scholars routinely reach for the analytical frame of democratic backsliding to describe such phenomena. But though the term is widely used across different disciplines, its precise meaning has rarely been made the subject of sustained reflection. As one leading comparative politics scholar notes, the notion of democratic backsliding is “frequently used but rarely analyzed” (Bermeo, 2016, p. 5) Reacting to this, my aim in this article is to clarify the meaning of democratic backsliding. The ambition, in particular, is to develop a more general account of democratic backsliding that can be applied across a range of different institutional contexts. I begin by running through existing attempts to conceptualize democratic backsliding, noting thatmuchof theexist- ing research either under- or overdetermines the concept. The second section deals with the fact that the notion of “backsliding” implies regression, which in turn raises complicated philosophical issues concerning the accurate identifi- cation of progressive and regressive social phenomena.The remainder of the paper is devoted todeveloping a theoret- ical account of democratic backsliding that neither under- nor overdetermines the concept, and that can satisfactorily explain democratic regressions. Taking its cues from work in the tradition of critical theory, the account comes with a broadly framed distinction between rights-suspending and rights-obstructing forms of democratic backsliding. I discuss and illustrate this distinction and offer some reflections on how backslidingmay usefully be analyzed using “immanent critique.”