What Is Democratic Backsliding? How Elected Leaders Erode Democracy

On April 25, 2010, Viktor Orban's Fidesz party won the Hungarian parliamentary election with 52.7 percent of the popular vote. Under Hungary's mixed electoral system, that majority translated into 263 of 386 parliamentary seats - a two-thirds constitutional supermajority, the threshold for amending the constitution.

Orban had won a genuine election, with genuine popular support, in a genuine democracy. What happened over the next four years is the defining case study in how democracies die without appearing to die.

Fidesz replaced the constitution with a new Fundamental Law, taking effect on January 1, 2012. The constitutional court, which had previously struck down Fidesz legislation, had its jurisdiction curtailed and was packed with new loyalist members.

The electoral system was redesigned to give Fidesz a structural advantage in future elections - the number of parliamentary seats was reduced, districts were redrawn to concentrate opposition voters, and rules governing campaign finance and broadcast access were changed to disadvantage challengers.

Public media became state media. Private media came under the control of oligarchs aligned with Orban's government.

By 2014, Orban stood before a crowd in Baile Tusnad, Romania, and described what he was building: an "illiberal democracy," a system that rejected the liberal political tradition in favor of national and Christian values, strong central authority, and the deliberate subordination of civil society to the state.

He said this openly. He was not hiding. And the European Union, of which Hungary was a member, watched it happen step by step, each step technically within the letter of some rule or at least ambiguous enough to forestall decisive intervention.

The Hungarian case demonstrated something that political scientists had theorized but never seen so clearly at the center of a major international alliance: democracy could be dismantled by an elected leader using the tools of democracy, in the full view of international observers, faster than those observers could agree on what to do about it.

By the time Orban's critics assembled the political coalition to press for sanctions under Article 7 of the EU Treaty - the process to strip a member state of voting rights for breaching European values - the Hungarian government had already used years of diplomatic leverage, allied itself with Poland, and created a veto-proof blocking minority against any serious consequences.

The Hungarian case was not unique. By 2018, political scientists Levitsky and Ziblatt were documenting a global pattern.^[2] Hungary was a template, not an anomaly.

"Blatant dictatorship - in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule - has given way to subtler forms of authoritarianism. The electoral road to breakdown is, for this reason, genuinely dangerous." - Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (2018)

The Global Scale of Democratic Decline

The data on democratic backsliding is unambiguous on the trend direction, though scholars debate its severity.

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project at the University of Gothenburg, which tracks democracy across 202 countries using over 400 indicators coded by country experts, published findings in its 2023 report that 72 percent of the world's population now lives under autocratic rule - up from 48 percent a decade earlier.^[14]

The report identified 42 countries undergoing autocratization between 2013 and 2022.

Freedom House'sFreedom in the World 2023 report recorded the 17th consecutive year of global democratic decline.^[6] The share of countries rated "Free" fell from a peak of 46 percent in 2005 to 35 percent in 2023. Countries rated "Not Free" are home to roughly 38 percent of the world's population.

The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index tracks five categories of democratic performance across 167 countries.^[13] Its 2022 report found that only 24 countries were classified as "full democracies" - home to just 8 percent of the world's population - down from 26 in 2006.

(Source: Economist Intelligence Unit, Democracy Index 2022)

Key Definitions

Democratic backsliding is the incremental erosion of democratic institutions, norms, and practices by actors operating within a nominally democratic system, typically elected leaders using legal and procedural tools.

Autocratization is the broader scholarly term for any process by which a political system becomes less democratic over time, whether from a democratic starting point or from a hybrid regime.

Competitive authoritarianism describes regimes that hold genuine elections but systematically tilt the institutional playing field so heavily that ruling parties cannot realistically lose - a concept developed by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way.^[1]

Executive aggrandizement is the concentration of political power in the hands of the executive branch at the expense of courts, legislatures, civil society, and independent institutions.

Constitutional hardball is legal scholar Mark Tushnet's term for the use of technically legal procedural maneuvers to achieve partisan ends in ways that violate the spirit of democratic norms.^[7]

Mutual toleration is the informal democratic norm by which political actors accept opponents as legitimate participants in democratic competition rather than existential enemies to be destroyed.

Institutional forbearance is the informal democratic norm by which political actors exercise restraint in deploying technically legal but norm-violating powers - not doing something simply because you have the formal authority to do it.

Pernicious polarization is political scientists Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer's term for the type of extreme political polarization - in which political competition becomes existential, opponents are treated as enemies, and winner-takes-all attitudes replace norms of accommodation - most strongly associated with democratic breakdown.

The Old Authoritarianism and the New

Understanding democratic backsliding requires understanding what it is not. Classical authoritarianism - the kind that dominated the twentieth century's mid-decades - was typically violent and visible. Military officers staged coups, suspended constitutions, dissolved parliaments, arrested opposition leaders, and ruled by decree.

The breakdown was sudden and the new regime clearly illegitimate. International responses were therefore relatively straightforward: the government that emerged from a coup was recognizable as a dictatorship.

Nancy Bermeo (2016), in a widely cited Journal of Democracy article on democratic backsliding, documented the shift quantitatively.^[9] Among all democratic breakdowns between 1939 and 1970, nearly two-thirds occurred through overt military coups.

Among democratic breakdowns between 1990 and 2015, only one-sixth occurred through coups; the majority involved the gradual erosion of democratic practices by elected incumbents.

The scholarship on democratic backsliding documents a different pattern that became increasingly dominant after the end of the Cold War.

Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way's Competitive Authoritarianism (2010) was the first major systematic study, examining regimes across Latin America, Africa, the former Soviet Union, and Asia that retained electoral competition but created conditions in which real alternation of power was essentially impossible.

Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's How Democracies Die (2018) then applied the same analytical lens to mature Western democracies, arguing that the mechanisms of slow erosion were beginning to manifest in places that had previously seemed immune.

The key insight is that elected authoritarians rarely announce their intentions. They use the language of democratic legitimacy - the will of the people, the mandate of elections, protecting the constitution - to justify moves that hollow out democratic substance.

Courts are not abolished; they are packed. Media is not censored by law; it is bought or starved of advertising revenue. Opposition parties are not banned; they are investigated, harassed, and disadvantaged by campaign finance rules.

Protests are not violently suppressed from the start; they are regulated, permitted only in inconvenient locations, and eventually restricted by vague public order laws.

How Backsliding Happens: The Three Mechanisms

Levitsky and Ziblatt identify three interconnected mechanisms through which democratic backsliding typically operates.

Executive Aggrandizement

The central mechanism is the progressive concentration of power in the executive's hands.

This includes the expansion of presidential or prime ministerial decree power, the use of emergency declarations to bypass legislative oversight, the appointment of loyalists to positions normally reserved for independent civil servants, and the gradual erosion of judicial independence through appointments, court-packing, or jurisdiction-stripping.

Executive aggrandizement does not require illegality. Indeed, it typically exploits the legal tools available to the executive while violating the informal norms that those tools were assumed not to be used for. In Hungary, Orban used his constitutional supermajority to write a new constitution.

That was technically legal - the supermajority is precisely the mechanism by which constitutions are amended.

But constitutional engineers typically assume that supermajorities are so hard to achieve that the constitution is safe; they did not anticipate a single party winning two-thirds of parliamentary seats through a first-past-the-post system with 52 percent of the popular vote.

Partisan Packing of Courts and Institutions

The second mechanism is the systematic placement of loyalists into institutions that were designed to be independent: constitutional courts, supreme courts, electoral commissions, anticorruption agencies, central banks, public broadcasters, and regulatory agencies.

These institutions are the ligaments of democratic accountability - they check executive power, enforce laws against the powerful, and certify that elections are free and fair. When they are populated with loyalists, they retain their formal authority but exercise it in the interest of the ruling party.

The packing of courts received global attention through the debate over the US Supreme Court following the 2016 and 2020 elections, but it is a pattern seen across cases.

In Poland, the Law and Justice (PiS) government's attempt to reshape the Constitutional Tribunal and Supreme Court led to a sustained constitutional crisis between 2015 and 2019.

In Turkey, the post-2016 coup purge removed more than 4,000 judges and prosecutors and replaced them with government appointees.

In India, concerns about the independence of the Supreme Court have grown, with the Chief Justice of India in 2018 calling a press conference to warn that democracy was in danger - an unprecedented act of institutional self-defense.

Undermining Information and Civil Society

The third mechanism operates on the ecosystem of information and organized civic life.

Democracies require an independent press that can investigate and report on government wrongdoing, civil society organizations that can mobilize citizens and provide alternative power centers, and academic institutions that can produce independent expertise.

Backsliding governments attack all three.

Media capture takes multiple forms: outright purchase by government-aligned oligarchs, the withdrawal of state advertising from critical outlets (many news organizations depend on government advertising), the use of tax investigations and regulatory actions against hostile media companies, defamation suits designed to drain legal resources, and physical harassment of journalists.

The V-Dem project tracks press freedom as one of its core democracy indicators and has documented significant declines in multiple backsliding countries.^[5]

Civil society organizations - NGOs, advocacy groups, international foundations, opposition-aligned charities - are targeted through foreign funding restrictions (often justified as protecting national sovereignty from foreign interference), onerous registration requirements, and investigations by loyalist prosecutors.

Hungary's "Stop Soros" law, which restricted NGOs receiving foreign funding, was a model that spread to multiple other countries.

"What we found globally is that backsliding almost always involves an attack on civil society. The government aims to destroy the organizational infrastructure of the opposition." - Anna Grzymala-Busse, Stanford University, quoted in Foreign Affairs (2021)

Case Studies

Hungary: The Orban Laboratory

Hungary remains the most extensively analyzed case because it happened within the European Union, in a country with living memory of communism and nearly two decades of democratic consolidation. The speed and thoroughness of the transformation was remarkable.

By 2018, Freedom House had reclassified Hungary from "Free" to "Partly Free" - the first EU member state to lose that status. The V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index for Hungary dropped from 0.85 in 2010 to below 0.6 by 2020, placing it below consolidated democracies and approaching competitive authoritarian regimes.

The structural features of the Orban system - gerrymandered districts, captured media, packed courts, restricted civil society - created a self-reinforcing cycle. Each election held under the new rules produced a Fidesz supermajority even without a popular vote majority, which was then used to further entrench the system.

The opposition became increasingly fragmented and disadvantaged, and the information environment became increasingly one-sided.

By 2022, when a unified opposition ran a single candidate against Orban for the first time, Fidesz still won a two-thirds parliamentary majority with only 54 percent of the popular vote - the electoral system had been designed to produce exactly this outcome.

The international election observers from the OSCE concluded that the 2022 election was "well-administered but took place in an overall context that did not provide a level playing field."^[15]

Turkey: Coup as Pretext

Turkey's trajectory under Erdogan's AKP party was gradual through the 2000s but accelerated dramatically after the July 2016 failed military coup attempt.

Within days of the coup's failure, the government had issued emergency decrees suspending tens of thousands of civil servants, academics, military officers, judges, and prosecutors - a purge far larger than the actual coup conspiracy.

The state of emergency lasted two years and was used to concentrate power in ways that a normally functioning Turkish parliament and judiciary might have constrained.

The 2017 constitutional referendum, approved by a narrow margin, abolished the parliamentary system and created a presidential republic with vastly expanded executive power.

Turkey under Erdogan illustrates a common pattern: a genuine shock - a coup attempt, a terrorist attack, an economic crisis - provides the pretext for emergency measures that outlast the emergency and are used to consolidate power.

By 2023, Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey 165th out of 180 countries in press freedom.^[8] Over 150 journalists had been imprisoned at various points since 2016, making Turkey one of the world's leading jailers of journalists. The V-Dem project classified Turkey as an "electoral autocracy" by 2018.

India: Democratic Backsliding in the World's Largest Democracy

India's democratic trajectory under Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is among the most consequential and contested cases in the world, simply because of the scale. India is a democracy of 1.4 billion people.

Its decline - which is reflected in measurable indicators across multiple monitoring organizations - matters more than that of any smaller country.

India's ranking in the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index fell from 140th in 2014 to 161st in 2023, reflecting documented harassment of journalists, use of sedition and anti-terrorism laws against critics, and a broader chilling effect on independent reporting.

The V-Dem project classified India as an "electoral autocracy" as of 2021 - a characterization the Indian government disputed.

Concerns about the independence of the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Enforcement Directorate (which has been used against opposition politicians), and the Election Commission have grown significantly since 2014.

The 2019 revocation of Kashmir's special status and the subsequent communications blackout and mass detention were widely criticized by human rights organizations.

The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which provided expedited citizenship to religious minorities from neighboring countries but explicitly excluded Muslims, raised constitutional questions about equal treatment that went to the heart of India's secular democratic constitution.

Milan Vaishnav's Carnegie Endowment research (2022) documented that the BJP's 2019 national election campaign relied heavily on Hindu nationalist themes, party-aligned media domination, and strategic use of government resources - patterns consistent with incumbency advantage used for competitive advantage rather than outright fraud, but corrosive to electoral fairness.

Brazil and the January 8 Echo

Jair Bolsonaro's presidency (2019-2022) followed a pattern recognizable from other backsliding cases: sustained attacks on the credibility of the electoral system, cultivation of military loyalty, demonization of political opponents, and rhetorical legitimization of political violence.

When Bolsonaro lost the October 2022 election to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, he did not concede. His supporters, encouraged by figures in his movement, stormed the Presidential Palace, Congress, and Supreme Court on January 8, 2023, in a direct echo of January 6, 2021 in the United States.

Unlike the US event, the Brazilian military did not support Bolsonaro's attempt to overturn the election, and democratic institutions held. The episode demonstrated both the potency of the backsliding playbook and the limits of that playbook when institutions and elites choose to defend democracy.

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes subsequently presided over the prosecution of hundreds of January 8 participants and launched legal proceedings against Bolsonaro himself for attempting a coup - the most aggressive institutional response to a backsliding attempt in recent democratic history, and one that raised its own rule-of-law questions about judicial overreach.

The United States: Autocratization in a Consolidated Democracy

The United States presents the most significant test case for whether long-established democracies are immune to backsliding.

Steven Levitsky argued in 2018 that the US showed multiple warning signs: extreme partisan polarization, breakdown of norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance, and the election of a president who explicitly questioned the legitimacy of electoral outcomes and democratic procedures.

The January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol - the first violent disruption of the peaceful transfer of presidential power in American history - was preceded by a sustained campaign by President Trump and allies to reverse the election result through pressure on state officials, the Justice Department, Vice President Pence, and ultimately the mob that breached the Capitol building.

The V-Dem project downgraded the United States on its liberal democracy index between 2016 and 2020, though it has not classified the US as an electoral autocracy. Freedom House maintained its "Free" rating while noting significant erosion in electoral integrity and civil liberties.

The episode demonstrated that even mature democracies with strong institutional legacies are vulnerable to the backsliding playbook when political elites are willing to deploy it.

Why Is Backsliding Happening Now?

The convergence of democratic erosion across so many countries in the same period suggests systemic rather than merely contingent causes. Several explanations have significant evidence.

Economic discontent following the 2008 financial crisis undermined trust in mainstream parties and technocratic governance across the democratic world.

Austerity programs in Europe, stagnant wages in the United States, and rising inequality more broadly created constituencies for populist leaders who promised decisive action against established elites.

Yascha Mounk documented in The People vs. Democracy (2018) that surveys show declining support for democracy as a value, particularly among younger generations in wealthy Western countries - a generation that did not form its political identity during the Cold War struggle against communism and fascism.

The abstract commitment to democratic norms appears more contingent than earlier generations assumed. Roughly 30 percent of US millennials said it was "essential" to live in a democracy, compared with about 72 percent of the interwar generation born in the 1930s.^[4]

The media transformation driven by social media has degraded the shared information environment that democratic deliberation requires.

Algorithmic amplification of outrage, the collapse of local journalism, and the rise of partisan media ecosystems have made it easier for political entrepreneurs to spread disinformation, demonize opponents, and mobilize intense emotions that override institutional loyalty.

Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk (2016) analyzed World Values Survey data across three decades and found a consistent pattern: citizens in established democracies were becoming less committed to democratic values, less likely to say civil rights are essential, and more open to military rule as an alternative - with the trend strongest among wealthy citizens under 35.^[3]

The paper, published in the Journal of Democracy, prompted significant academic debate but also substantial replication and extension by other researchers.

Thomas Piketty's work on inequality (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2013) provides structural economic context: growing income inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class produce social conditions - resentment of elites, identity politics displacing class politics, anxiety about status - that historically create vulnerability to authoritarian populism.^[12]

What Protects Democracy?

Research on democratic resilience points to several structural and cultural factors. Wealthy societies have more to lose from institutional breakdown and stronger middle classes with interests in rule of law. Federal systems with multiple veto points are harder to capture comprehensively.

Strong civil society organizations provide organizational capacity for resistance. Cross-cutting social cleavages reduce the intensity of polarization. Independent, high-quality journalism maintains the information environment accountability requires.

Milan Svolik's research (2019) on democratic backsliding found that partisan loyalty is the most powerful predictor of tolerance for undemocratic behavior: voters consistently tolerate anti-democratic actions by their preferred candidates if those candidates offer acceptable policy positions.^[10]

The implication is that democracy requires cross-cutting incentives - situations in which voters are willing to vote against a candidate from their preferred party because that candidate threatens democratic norms.

But Levitsky and Ziblatt stress that institutions ultimately depend on the informal norms of the political actors who operate within them.

When elites - the leaders of major parties, the senior officials of institutions, the editors of major news organizations - decide that their partisan interests override their commitment to democratic procedures, the formal rules provide less protection than they appear to.

The fate of democracy in any given country depends substantially on whether its political class retains the values of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance when those values become costly to hold.

Larry Diamond (2019) argues in Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency that external actors - particularly Russia and China - have actively promoted democratic backsliding by funding and supporting populist authoritarian movements, interfering in elections, and promoting the idea that liberal democracy is a failed system.^[11]

The external dimension of backsliding is understudied: domestic dynamics interact with international support networks that reward authoritarian consolidation.

The historical cases offer some grounds for cautious optimism. Milan Svolik's cross-national analysis found that democracies with proportional representation electoral systems, parliamentary rather than presidential structures, and higher economic development showed greater resilience to backsliding - systemic factors that are not easily changed but suggest the structural vulnerabilities are identifiable.

Several cases of apparent backsliding - South Korea in the 1990s, Peru under Fujimori's successors, Poland's partial correction after the 2023 elections - demonstrate that reversal is possible, though it typically requires sustained mobilization by civil society, committed democratic elites, and international pressure that maintains costs for authoritarian behavior.

Related Articles

For analysis of why democratic systems historically fail to consolidate, see why democracies fail. For the ideological foundations of liberal democracy and critiques of liberalism, see what is liberalism. For how populist political movements interact with democratic institutions, see what is populism.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2010). Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511781353
2. Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How Democracies Die. Crown.
3. Mounk, Y. (2018). The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. Harvard University Press.
4. Foa, R. S., & Mounk, Y. (2016). The democratic disconnect. Journal of Democracy, 27(3), 5-17.
5. Coppedge, M., et al. (2022). V-Dem Codebook v12. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. DOI: 10.23696/vdemds22
6. Freedom House. (2023). Freedom in the World 2023. View source
7. Tushnet, M. (2004). Constitutional hardball. John Marshall Law Review, 37(2), 523-553.
8. Reporters Without Borders. (2023). World Press Freedom Index 2023. View source
9. Bermeo, N. (2016). On democratic backsliding. Journal of Democracy, 27(1), 5-19. DOI: 10.1353/jod.2016.0012
10. Svolik, M. W. (2019). Polarization versus democracy. Journal of Democracy, 30(3), 20-32.
11. Diamond, L. (2019). Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency. Penguin Press.
12. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press.
13. Economist Intelligence Unit. (2022). Democracy Index 2022: The Frontlines of Democracy. Economist Group.
14. V-Dem Institute. (2023). Democracy Report 2023: Defiance in the Face of Autocratization. University of Gothenburg.
15. OSCE/ODIHR. (2022). Hungary: Parliamentary Elections - Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions. Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.