On Democratic Backsliding
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ON DEMOCRATIC BACKSLIDING
Nancy Bermeo
Nancy Bermeo is the Nuffield Chair of Comparative Politics at Oxford
University and PHRS Senior Scholar at Princeton University. Her most re-
cent book (coedited with Deborah Yashar) is titled Parties, Movements and
Democracy in the Developing World (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Scholars have devoted huge amounts of attention to explaining why de-
mocracies break down, but systematic and explicitly comparative work
on precisely how they break down has been less common. Political sci-
entists have focused more often on economic and institutional correlates
than on choices and choosers, even though these may be more amenable
to direct influence and rapid intervention.
What kinds of concrete actions transform a regime from one type to
another? Which techniques of transformation are most common? Ana-
lyzing what has come to be known as democratic backsliding moves us
toward answers to these questions, for it forces us to focus on the actual
choices that change regimes.
The term democratic backsliding is frequently used but rarely analyzed.
This explains why a careful recent survey concluded we know very lit-
tle about it.1 Part of the problem is the term's extraordinary breadth. At
its most basic, it denotes the state-led debilitation or elimination of any of
the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy. Since the po-
litical institutions that sustain democracy are myriad (including all the in-
stitutions that enable people to formulate and signify preferences and then
have them weighed by their elected representatives), the term embraces
multiple processes. Since the state actors who might initiate backsliding
are themselves diverse (ranging from monarchs to presidents to military
men), the term embraces multiple agents. In sum, the concept has so many
referents that it needs immediate specification to have practical meaning.
Like an old steamer trunk, it is opaque and unwieldy but yields much that
proves useful when it is unpacked.
This essay unpacks the concept of democratic backsliding by explor-
Journal of Democracy Volume 27, Number ] January 2016
© 2016 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jnlodmcy27&div=4&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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On Democratic Backsliding
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