Democratic backsliding (meaning the state-led debilitation or elimination of the political institutions sustaining an existing democracy) has changed dramatically since the Cold War. Open-ended coups d’état, executive coups, and blatant election-day vote fraud are declining while promissory coups, executive aggrandizement and strategic electoral manipulation and harassment are increasing. Contemporary forms of backsliding are especially vexing because they are legitimated by the very institutions democracy promoters prioritize but, overall, backsliding today reflects democracy’s advance and not its retreat. The current mix of backsliding is more easily reversible than the past mix and successor dictatorships are shorter-lived and less authoritarian.

I examine the outcomes of 31 parliamentary elections in 26 OECD countries in the period just before, during, and after the Great Recession (from 2007 through early 2011). I attempt to account for the outcomes of these elections on the basis of three factors: (1) economic conditions, (2) the general ideology of the incumbent party or coalition, and (3) specific policy choices in response to the economic crisis. My analyses suggest that voters consistently punished incumbent governments for bad economic conditions, with little apparent regard for the ideology of the government or global economic conditions at the time of the election. I find no evidence of consistent ideological shifts in response to the crisis, either to the left or to the right, but some evidence of electoral responses to specific fiscal policy choices-most notably, a boost in incumbent governments' electoral support associated with spending on economic stimulus programs. These general patterns are illustrated with brief case studies of elections in Spain and Portugal, Germany, and the United States. In general, my results underline the significance of retrospective voting even in periods of severe economic and political stress.

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