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Scholars have devoted huge amounts of attention to explaining why democracies break down, but systematic and explicitly comparative work on precisely how they break down has been less common. Political scientists 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? Analyzing 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 little" 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 political institutions that sustain democracy are myriad (including all the institutions 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- ing six of its major varieties. It illustrates that forms have varied in frequency over time; that some of the most blatant forms of backsliding are now less common; and that more vexing forms of backsliding are becoming more common. Ironically, we now face forms of democratic backsliding that are legitimated through the very institutions that democracy promoters have prioritized. Overall, trends in backsliding reflect democracy's slow progress and not its demise.
A close historical look at the varieties of backsliding reveals that the classic open-ended coups d'état of the Cold War years are now outnumbered by what I call promissory coups; that the dramatic executive...