Parties, Civil Society, and the Deterrence of Democratic Defection

Abstract

The third wave of democratization has given way to a reverse wave of autocratization. A critical question is what can be done to prevent democratic breakdowns and make democracy endure. A large body of historical-narrative and small-N comparative scholarship has suggested that an active mobilized civil society and institutionalized political parties can be mobilized to protect democracy from authoritarian takeovers. We provide the first rigorous set of empirical analyses to test this argument using data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project for the period from 1900 to 2010. We find that both exert a robust, independent, and substantial effect on the survival of democracies. These findings have important policy implications for the international community.

Populism in Power and Democracy: Democratic Decay and Resilience in the Czech Republic (2013–2020)

“…Previous studies have shown how populism in power erodes horizontal accountability in Latin America (Ruth, 2018), and that diagonal accountability can prevent democratic erosion (Bernhard, 2020;Bernhard et al, 2015Bernhard et al, , 2020. The main findings of this article are that technocratic populism has illiberal tendencies expressed best in its efforts at executive aggrandizement (cf.…”

“…Public protest rejected the new social contract of passivity and demanded accountability (cf. Bernhard, 2020;Bernhard et al, 2015Bernhard et al, , 2020. Nevertheless, ANO remains the strongest party (cf.…”

“…However, it has failed to curb participation and civil society (cf. Bernhard, 2020;Bernhard et al, 2020).…”

“…It advances the literature on how technocratic populism undermines democratic accountability by: 1) distorting the system of checks and balances (horizontal accountability); 2) limiting electoral competition (vertical accountability); and 3) undermining media freedom, and constraining civil society (diagonal accountability; cf. Bernhard, Hicken, Reenock, & Lindberg, 2020).…”

What do we know about civil society and regime change thirty years after 1989?

“…While there is good reason to doubt that strong associational development is correlated in any way with democratic failure (Bernhard et al 2020;Cornell et al 2016), both Berman and Riley do point out that civil society actors can play an important role in the complex of conditions that can promote democratic regress (whether that is breakdown or backsliding). Substantively, Bermeo (2003) strongly counters this argument placing the blame for the polarisation of civil society on the encouragement of elites, and presents evidence for this from not only the usual suspects of interwar Western Europe and postwar South America, but also interwar East-Central Europe as well.…”