In the past two decades, a slide from democracy toward autocracy has been a consistent global theme.
Countries in most regions of the world have witnessed a systematic dismantling of democratic institutions such as free and fair elections; the violation of individual rights; or the peaceful transfer of power. Democratic backsliding has prompted a reconsideration of the long-held view that, particularly in wealthy countries, democracy, once attained, is secure, according to Rachel Beatty Riedl, the Peggy J. Koenig '78 director of the Center on Global Democracy in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, and a professor in the Brooks School and in the Department of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences.
In a special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, "Democratic Backsliding: How It Happens and How It Can Be Countered," a Cornell-led research group examined the three major pathways to democratic backsliding: legislative capture; executive power grabs; and plebiscitary override, a process by which executives diminish the checks on their power via referenda or constitutional amendments.
Their paper, "Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries," published March 21, illustrates how backsliding occurs, using 15 country-specific case studies. The report offers examples of what can be learned from them and how, in some cases, ordinary people countered authoritarianism and successfully resisted.
"Political scientists are very focused on democratic backsliding right now as an empirical phenomenon," said corresponding author Riedl.
"There were two empirical 'rules' we had in democracy studies: that advanced industrial democracies do not break down, and that democracies that have existed for at least 50 years do not break down," Riedl said. As autocratization grips developed longstanding democracies, she said, those theories have crumbled.
In a study that came out of a USAID project to aid in their understanding of how to support other democracies around the world, Riedl said they examined the pathways in which backsliding occurs, using case studies ranging from Turkey to Venezuela. The global study of these pathways provides clear examples of the risks currently posed to the U.S. system of government, she said.
Legislative capture is the most legalistic and legitimating of the pathways, Riedl said, because it allows the legislators to make the laws that legitimize the democratic backsliding. It uses the ruling party's majority control in a thus-quiescent legislature to limit rights and the rule of law.
"In passing laws that fit the leader's agenda, they are never breaking the law," Riedl said. Consequently, legislators, the media and the public may not even be united in the idea that legislative capture is happening.
Most autocrats would prefer to go this route because it is efficient and poses little risk to the leader, Riedl said. An executive power grab, which often happens in places where the legislative option is not robust enough, entails shifting legislative, judicial or civil service bureaucratic powers into the executive office. This may look like shuttering agencies created and funded by Congress, or appointing judges who will closely follow a president's orders. The paper points to actions by Kais Saied in Tunisia and Vladimir Putin in Russia that have limited opposition and concentrated each leader's power.
The third pathway is useful when a legislature has enough power to block a president's agenda, Riedl said.
"A populist leader will use that populist appeal to go back to the population and say, 'We need to vote on this referendum to give me more power and to change the constitution,'" she said, adding that it is often a national mobilizing strategy to get rid of existing constraints like term limits and constitutional limits on executive power.
Another primary goal of the paper was to identify the strategies of resistance that are turning the tide and deepening democracy in some countries.
"Resisting backsliding is hard," said Kenneth M. Roberts, the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government. "Since backsliding is an incremental process carried out by elected leaders, there is always uncertainty about the nature of the threat. Opposition actors do not always recognize that backsliding is underway until it's too late, and they often disagree about how to respond."
Early action is critical, they found, with a defense of democracy requiring a collective effort with divisions of labor.
"Successful resistance relies on heterogeneous coalitions," Riedl said, adding that business leaders, lawyers, universities and other entities play a part, and that partisanship and factionalism must be deemphasized. "We need to protect systems that allow us to have those differences, that allow us to unite above and beyond our differences. It's not an electoral issue - we need to talk about democracy beyond elections."
The paper also suggests that mass protests expressing public discontent can be effective and that sustained, broad-based peaceful protests with a specific demand can pressure governments to change course.
"We often think that courts or legislatures can be a check, but what our research shows is that those checks are not neutral," Riedl said. "They are moved by citizen mobilization. Citizen pressures can create institutional checks that protect and strengthen democratic practice."
The research was originally funded by USAID Opening Democratic Spaces project.
