Lecture 3.1

Democratic Backsliding

Emmanuel Teitelbaum

What is Backsliding

Regime Types

• Democracies
  • Free and fair elections
  • Protection of civil liberties
• Hybrid regimes (illiberal, semi-authoritarian)
  • Elections, degree of fairness in question
  • More restricted civil liberties
• Authoritarian regimes
  • No elections, or rigged elections
  • No basic rights and liberties

Democratic (or Authoritarian) Backsliding

“[A] decline in the quality of democracy, when it occurs within democratic regimes, or in democratic qualities of governance in autocracies.”

Lust and Waldman

Regime Type Trends

Examples

Common Mechanisms

• Constitutional amendments to enhance executive authority
• Elimination of checks and balances, reduction of accountability
• Centralization of executive power through purges
• Intimidation of media and civil society
• Elimination of political competition
  • attacks on competitors
  • rigged elections

Methods of Backsliding (Bormeo)

• Old Way
  • Open-ended coups
  • Executive coups
  • Vote fraud
• New Way
  • Promissory coups
  • Executive aggrandizement
  • Strategic harassment and manipulation

Discussion

U.S. in Comparative Perspective

• Kaufman and Haggard reading
• How has backsliding occurred in middle-income countries?
• How similar is the U.S. to these countries?
• Is electoral authoritarianism possible in the U.S.?

Some Theories of Backsliding

Leadership

• State strength and autonomy (how leaders create it)
• Role of elites in negotiating transitions, dividing power

Culture

• Civic culture
• Social capital and education

Social structures

• Class (bourgeoisie, working class, etc.)
• Ethnic fragmentation
  • Relevance of economic and political exclusion

Political Institutions

• Presidential vs. parliamentary systems
• Consociationalism (for divided societies)
• Electoral institutions
  • PR vs SMD
  • If PR type of lists
  • Party fragmentation and instability (e.g. Indonesia)

International factors

• International orgs (foreign aid, election monitoring, etc.)
• Alliances (who are your friends?)

Political Economy of Backsliding

Wealth

• Exogenous Democratization
• Rising wealth makes backsliding less likely
• “No democracy was ever subverted in a country with a per capita income higher than Argentina in 1975: $6,055” (Przeworski)

Inequality

• “Redistributivist” theory
  • Democracy is more durable in egalitarian societies
• When the poor demand redistribution of elite’s wealth, elites react by “digging in their heels” because redistribution would be too drastic (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006)
• Demands for redistribution are less in societies with lower inequality and societies where assets of elites are mobile (Boix
• Competition from rising elites (Ansell and Samuels 2014)

Macroeconomic Performance

• Literature especially focused on growth and inflation (Kapstein and Converse)
  • High growth rates \(\rightarrow\) less risk of backsliding
  • High inflation increases risk
• Arguably more about regime stability than democracy
  • Applies equally well to authoritarian regimes
  • High performing autocracies likely to survive
  • “Performance legitimacy”, e.g. China

Natural resource wealth

• Undermines democracy
• Promotes authoritarianism
• Focus of next week’s discussion

Exercise

Group Exercise

• V-Dem Dashboard

• Pick a country to explore and an indicator

• Answer these questions first:

  • What is the level of democracy in your country?
  • How does it rank in relation to other countries in the same region?
  • What is the trend in democracy in your country?
  • Is the trend similar to the region as a whole?
  • Is its level of democracy predicted by modernization theory?

• Then think about these questions:

  • Is you country backsliding?
  • What are the mechanisms of backsliding in your country?
    • economic, social, institutional, etc.