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. 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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

References

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politics democracy authoritarianism global affairs institutions

Frequently Asked Questions

What is democratic backsliding?

Democratic backsliding refers to the gradual, incremental erosion of democratic institutions, norms, and practices by actors — typically elected leaders — who operate within a nominally democratic framework rather than overthrowing it outright. The term captures a pattern distinct from classic authoritarianism, where the military or a revolutionary movement seizes power in a visible rupture. In democratic backsliding, each individual step may be technically legal or at least ambiguous; the cumulative effect over years or decades is a system that retains the formal trappings of democracy (regular elections, a legislature, a constitution) while gutting the substance (independent courts, free press, genuine electoral competition, protection of minority rights). Scholars use the related term 'autocratization' to describe this process, distinguishing it from 'democratic breakdown,' which implies a cleaner collapse. Democratic backsliding typically involves three interconnected mechanisms: executive aggrandizement (the concentration of power in the hands of the elected executive at the expense of other branches and institutions), partisan capture of institutions (packing courts, regulatory agencies, electoral commissions, and the civil service with loyalists), and the undermining of information environments (buying, pressuring, or legally harassing independent media and civil society organizations). The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, which tracks democracy across more than 200 countries using hundreds of indicators, identified a global democratic recession beginning around 2010 that has continued through the early 2020s, with more countries moving toward autocracy each year than toward democracy.

How does democratic backsliding differ from a coup?

The defining difference between democratic backsliding and a military coup is that backsliding operates through democratic procedures and electoral legitimacy rather than against them. In a coup, the existing government is forcibly removed by soldiers, who then suspend the constitution, dissolve the legislature, and rule by decree. The illegality is immediate and unambiguous. Democratic backsliding looks entirely different. The leader who initiates it typically wins a genuine election, often by substantial margins. They then use their legitimate electoral mandate to gradually expand executive power, using the tools of democracy against its institutional foundations. Courts are packed with loyalists through legal appointment processes. Legislatures are sidelined through emergency decrees, procedural manipulation, or constitutional amendments passed by supermajorities the governing party achieves through electoral system changes. Media organizations are pressured through regulatory means, advertising withdrawal, or bought outright by oligarchs aligned with the government. Civil society groups are restricted through laws governing foreign funding, registration requirements, or tax investigations. Each step tends to be individually defensible as a legitimate exercise of democratic authority. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way coined the term 'competitive authoritarianism' in 2002 to describe regimes that hold genuine elections but systematically tilt the playing field so far that the ruling party cannot realistically lose. In their 2010 book of the same name, they showed that this form of governance had become increasingly common in the post-Cold War world, particularly in former Soviet states and Latin America. The difficulty of identifying backsliding as it happens — rather than only in retrospect — is one of the central challenges for democratic activists and external observers.

What are the warning signs of democratic decline?

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their 2018 book How Democracies Die, propose a diagnostic checklist for identifying would-be authoritarians drawn from twentieth-century case studies across Latin America, Europe, and Asia. They identify four key behavioral indicators. The first is a rejection of, or weak commitment to, democratic rules of the game — questioning the legitimacy of elections, suggesting that losing results might be fraudulent, or indicating willingness to suspend constitutional norms in an emergency. The second is the denial of the legitimacy of political opponents — characterizing rivals not as political adversaries to be defeated at the ballot box but as criminals, traitors, foreign agents, or existential threats to the nation that must be destroyed rather than simply out-voted. The third is the toleration or encouragement of political violence — using violent rhetoric against opponents, encouraging supporters to intimidate rivals, or refusing to unambiguously condemn political violence when it occurs. The fourth is the readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media, minorities, and civil society organizations. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that democratic decay has historically been gatekept by mainstream political parties, who refused to nominate or form coalitions with candidates exhibiting these traits. When those gatekeeping functions break down — when established parties are too weak, too polarized, or too opportunistic to exclude authoritarian populists from power — the conditions for backsliding are set. Beyond these behavioral indicators, institutional warning signs include: systematic changes to electoral rules that favor the incumbent, attacks on the independence of the judiciary, restrictions on press freedom, criminalization of dissent or opposition, and the use of emergency powers beyond the emergency that justified them.

What are the main cases of backsliding today?

The most extensively analyzed contemporary cases of democratic backsliding include Hungary, Turkey, India, Brazil, and to a more contested degree, the United States. Hungary under Viktor Orban (governing since 2010 with a parliamentary supermajority) is the paradigmatic European case. Within a decade of his return to power, Orban's government had rewritten the constitution, packed the constitutional court, redesigned the electoral system to entrench his party's advantages, installed loyalists throughout the civil service, and either purchased or effectively captured the majority of Hungarian media. He described the result himself as 'illiberal democracy.' Hungary retains regular elections, but independent observers document the playing field as severely tilted. Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan followed a similar trajectory, accelerating sharply after the failed 2016 coup attempt provided a pretext for mass purges of the military, judiciary, civil service, and universities. India under Narendra Modi since 2014 has seen measurable declines in press freedom (India dropped from 140th to 161st in the Reporters Without Borders index between 2014 and 2023), increased use of sedition laws and anti-terror legislation against journalists and activists, and concerns about the independence of the Election Commission and Central Bureau of Investigation. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) featured sustained rhetorical attacks on the judiciary and electoral system, cultivation of military loyalty, and ultimately a January 8, 2023 storming of government buildings by supporters disputing his electoral loss — a deliberate echo of January 6, 2021 in the United States. The United States case is debated among scholars, with some arguing that Trump's presidency (2017–2021) constituted genuine democratic erosion — the January 6 attack, the pressure on state election officials to change vote counts, the norm-breaking across multiple domains — while others argue American institutions showed sufficient resilience to prevent fundamental backsliding.

Why is democratic backsliding happening globally?

Scholars have proposed several interconnected explanations for the global democratic recession that began around 2010. Economic anxiety and rising inequality are widely cited: in many countries, democratic governments failed to deliver broadly shared prosperity after the 2008 financial crisis, generating distrust in mainstream parties and openness to populist alternatives promising more decisive leadership. The political scientist Yascha Mounk, in The People vs. Democracy (2018), documents that younger generations in many Western countries show less commitment to democracy as a value than their parents and grandparents — a cohort that did not experience fascism and communism as living threats. Ethnic and religious polarization has intensified in many societies, driven by immigration, demographic change, and the deliberate mobilization of identity politics by would-be strongmen. Political polarization — the sorting of societies into deeply antagonistic camps that view each other as existential threats — creates conditions that legal scholar Mark Tushnet called 'constitutional hardball': the use of technically legal procedural maneuvers to achieve partisan ends in ways that corrode norms of democratic reciprocity. Media fragmentation, especially the rise of social media algorithms that reward outrage and the collapse of local news, has degraded the shared information environment that democratic deliberation requires. International factors also play a role: the period since 2010 has seen a reduction in US democracy promotion, the rise of China as an alternative development model that does not require liberalism, and the active export of authoritarian governance techniques through networks like the Hungarian-funded think tanks that have spread Orban's model internationally.

What protects democracies from backsliding?

Research on democratic durability has identified several structural factors associated with resistance to backsliding. Wealthy democracies are more durable: no consolidated wealthy democracy has ever backslided back to authoritarianism — the economic and middle-class interests in stable property rights, rule of law, and the freedom to conduct business tend to constrain authoritarian capture. Strong civil society organizations — independent trade unions, business associations, religious institutions, professional associations, and civic groups — provide organizational capacity for collective resistance to executive overreach. Independent and high-quality journalism provides the information environment democratic accountability requires, and the presence of multiple competing media owners reduces vulnerability to capture. Cross-cutting social cleavages — where political divisions do not perfectly align with ethnic, religious, or regional divisions — reduce the intensity of polarization and make it harder for leaders to mobilize existential identity conflicts. Strong constitutions with dispersed veto points (bicameral legislatures, independent judiciaries, federalism, independent electoral commissions) create more opportunities to block authoritarian maneuvers. Levitsky and Ziblatt stress the role of elite gatekeeping: democratic norms are ultimately maintained by political actors choosing to observe them even when violation would be advantageous. They identify 'mutual toleration' (accepting opponents as legitimate actors) and 'institutional forbearance' (exercising restraint in using technically legal but norm-violating powers) as the key informal norms that sustain democracy. When elites defect from these norms — when they decide that the stakes of losing power are too high to accept electoral defeat — the institutional guardrails of democracy are vulnerable, because those guardrails ultimately depend on the willingness of actors to respect them.

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