Democratic Decline in the United States: What Can We Learn from Middle-Income Backsliding?

Abstract

We explore what can be learned from authoritarian backsliding in middle income countries about the threats to American democracy posed by the election of Donald Trump. We develop some causal hunches and an empirical baseline by considering the rise of elected autocrats in Venezuela, Turkey, and Hungary. Although American political institutions may forestall a reversion to electoral autocracy, we see some striking parallels in terms of democratic dysfunction, polarization, the nature of autocratic appeals, and the processes through which autocratic incumbents sought to exploit elected office. These processes could generate a diminished democratic system in which electoral competition survives, but within a political space that is narrowed by weakened horizontal checks on executive power and rule of law.

Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States

“… 1 See especially Carey et al (2019), Huq and Ginsburg (2018), Kaufman and Haggard (2019), Lieberman et al (2019), Miller, Szakonyi, and Morgenbesser (2017), and Przeworski (2019). …”

Closing the Arab Democratic Gap: A Re-Assessment of the Tunisian Democratic Transition

“…Democracy is one of the most debated concepts of comparative politics and the literature has long been plagued by debates of definition, with for instance Collier and Levitsky famously proposing the idea of "democracy with adjectives" to account for the increasing variety of democratic regimes (Collier and Levitsky, 1997), while Coppedge et al (2011) argued for disaggregation as a way to finetune measurement. Recent developments have made these questions particularly relevant as scholars now not only study what makes a regime democratic but also what can lead to the loss of this title, with increased emphasis on notions such as democratic backsliding (Waldner and Lust, 2018) or democratic decline (Kaufman and Haggard, 2019). Despite the variety of approaches, indexes, and other conceptualizations, most of these works share a core assumption: a country is democratic when it ticks a number of boxes and risks sliding back on the democratic scale when it no longer fits the description.…”

The Global State of Democracy 2019: Addressing the Ills, Reviving the Promise

“…Empirical studies of backsliding have used declines over time on composite indicators of democracy (Coppedge 2017;Mainwaring and Bizzarro 2019;Kaufman and Haggard 2019), but scholars differ regarding the size and time span required to qualify as backsliding. While the gradual character of the process suggests setting low threshold values as the most appropriate method, setting these thresholds too low would risk including minor declines that do not reflect institutional change and may result from imprecise measurement.…”