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Democratic Dialogues: Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries
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Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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A
Welcome to Democratic Dialogues, a podcast from Cornell University's Brooks School of Public Policy center on Global Democracy. This show is about bringing cutting edge research on democracy to you, our listeners, policymakers and practitioners, journalists, students, scholars and citizens who care about the future of democratic government. In each episode we'll dig into new books and research and ask about what they mean for the challenges democracy currently faces and the potential opportunities for democracy to deepen, evolve and contribute to citizens thriving. I'm Rachel Beatty Riedel and I'm joined by my co host, Issam Vore. Hi Issam.
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D
Hi Rachel. For our first episode we are joined by four leading scholars of democracy. Kenneth Roberts, Jennifer McCoy, Murad Sommer, and Rachel Riddle herself.
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A
Thanks, Issam. So today we'll be talking about our new article, Pathways of Democratic Backsliding. Resistance and Partial Recoveries, which was published recently in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. It's a big cross regional comparative study that looks at how democracies don't just collapse collapse overnight, but erode along different pathways, and importantly, how some countries have resisted or even partially recovered. So today we'll be asking, how do we know when a democracy is backsliding? Why do some countries fight back successfully while others don't? And what lessons can the United States and democracies everywhere take from this research right now?
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D
So let me start with Jennifer and Ken. You guys in your research argue that backsliding doesn't always end in collapse. Sometimes resistance or even partial recovery is possible. What lessons from the cases covered in your research should civic leaders and politicians in the United States and globally take seriously right now?
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E
So I'll go ahead and get started in responding and thanks you some and Rachel for setting up this dialogue today on the podcast. Let me just say briefly that in our study we had 15 different countries, so we had articles from leading scholars in 15 different countries that have all gone through some sort of process of gradual incremental backsliding or democratic erosion. And in those 15 countries that we studied, a number of them have experienced at least some sort of recovery point process. And I should hasten to point out the recoveries, they're often very tentative, they're often rather fragile politically, they're often rather incomplete. And so one of the lessons is that democratic backsliding can leave democratic institutions impaired in significant ways. And yet recoveries are possible. And in particular, the countries where we identify some sort of process of recovery would include Poland, Brazil, Guatemala, Moldova, Malawi, countries in different parts of the world. And in fact, our study covered processes of backsliding in all different parts of the world. And in our work, we find that resistance to backsliding that takes place within the institutional sphere. So institutions like corporations, courts, legislatures, other government agencies, but also resistance takes place in societal spheres, whether that's the media, civil society organizations, business firms, universities, often social movements or social protests. And in our work, what we found was that containing batch lighting and promoting recovery really requires significant resistance. In both of those spheres, we found that they tend to work together and to reinforce each other. And in particular, we often saw that governing institutions like courts or legislatures are inclined to defer to autocratic leaders if they don't see society itself pushing back. And in our work in the different countries we studied, courts and legislatures and government agencies were much more likely to try to resist efforts to concentrate powers in the hands of the executive if they saw civil society and social actors themselves pushing back against it. And so I think that's one of the key lessons that we drew from our case studies was the importance of working in both of those arenas, both in the institutional arena and in societal arenas.
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B
Yeah. And I'll just add to that that in this resistance, we found that collective action is really critical because backsliders, as they're trying to concentrate power in themselves, they try to abide, divide the opposition, whether that's the political parties, but also economic sectors, civic sectors like media and universities. And so it's really critical to have collective action and to combine efforts to work toward the next elections with mobilization of these broad sectors of society. And that can include also local governments and governors in federal systems can be part of the resistance. And, you know, thinking about it, I was thinking that one reason it's so hard for the US to build this kind of resistance, this broad resistance, is that there's a lack of living memory of authoritarian rule in the US with the exception of black Americans living through the Jim Crow South. But otherwise, the US has not experienced an authoritarian period in our living memory. And also, the kind of myth of American exceptionalism gives people an overconfidence in the institutions, that they'll protect themselves, that the constitution itself will remain intact. And I think people generally believe that others and our leaders have good motives and that the democracy and rule of law will prevail. But the lessons from these countries that we studied show that it takes continuous effort and that people have to fight to protect their democracies and the rule of law.
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D
Thank you so much. That's very interesting to see the different spheres in which backsliding could happen. And how can we have a holistic strategy to understand the mechanisms of backsliding? That's very interesting. Thank you. So now, Rachel and Murad, I think your paper identifies four distinct pathways of democratic backsliding. For a policymaker or a journalist who's trying to understand what's happening today, what are these pathways and why it's important to recognize which pathway a country is on, and how does that shape the options for resistance?
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F
Yeah, maybe I'll go first with that one. This was really an enriching study for us as well, because we looked at very diverse group set of countries. I think identifying these pathways and looking at these countries, first of all, invite us to look, to be watchful, because these are very diverse democracies, developing more developed electoral democracies, liberal democracies, they all backslided, and at least three pathways leading to some common logic of executive aggrandizement, which tells us that no country is really immune from democratic backsliding. There are four different pathways, but in the end they all backslide democracy with similar consequences with the erosion of for checks and balances and the erosion of democratic freedoms and rights. So civil society and citizens should be always watchful. Having said that, unpacking these different cases and identifying these pathways helped us to also see what is going on the inside institutions and democratic spheres. Because democratic backsliding succeeds often because it is not really very visible to citizens and observers what exactly is happening. And in the case of legislative capture, for example, many citizens are not very knowledgeable about the procedures and practices within legislatures, so they don't know when they see that democracy is eroded, it's already too late. So identifying these pathways invite us to, or show us where to look as far as civil society and democracy advocates are concerned. And then of course, we as scholars as well as citizens are interested in finding solutions and, you know, prevent backsliding and also recover from democratic backsliding. And depending on which pathway a democracy finds itself, then there are different, different strategies that democratic actors can implement to, to overcome. With the pathways of executive power grab and plebiscitory override, for example, institutions become very important because these are relatively faster forms of democratic backsliding. And when that happens, then institutions should act and they should act fast and stop it. In the case of legislative capture, electoral coalitions and electoral mobilization becomes very crucial because it is in early stages possible to slow down and stop democratic backsliding by democratic opposition actors taking joint action together with civil society to stop it. And finally, I think this is all not just doing A versus B behavior, but I think also discourse ideology framing politics is mostly a battle over legitimacy, depending on whether it is elite collusion, which is our fourth pathway of democratic erosion, legislative capture, plebiscite override, or executive power gap, then opposition has to really think very hard how to frame their defensive actions, because they're fighting against a particular type of legitimacy, a claim of legitimacy, and they have to find a way to counteract it.
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D
Thank you, Rachel.
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A
Yes, great. If I can just add on to what my co authors and colleagues have said. We think these pathways are so important because they help us to understand exactly which kind of institutional and social arenas are more open for resistance and responses, and which are more closed off and captured by the very processes of democratic erosion. So in particular, as Marant was just suggesting, it's not random which pathway a particular country is on. Right. Like that is also a strategic choice by the executive and the ruling party trying to push for a concentration of power. And they'll push across a whole variety of arenas. And where they experience, you know, resilience or push back, they maybe recede. And where they see a route forward, they continue. So, for example, we can identify places in which you're much more likely to have legislative capture in the use of the legislature for executive concentration, where you have electoral systems that lead to a kind of unrepresentative plurality gaining that legislative control. Right. So electoral systems that are not highly representative, whether that's due to gerrymandering or other kinds of inbuilt protections for geographic or other kinds of constituents who have overrepresentation in the electoral system, you can pretty easily get to a majority control of the legislature with only a plurality of the vote. And then once you have majority of the legislature, you can use that to capture other institutional arenas to appoint judges to legislate restrictions on rights, on media, on civil society groups, actions. Right. And this is all through democratic, supposedly representative legal procedures. So just as Mehrat was suggesting, then it's kind of hard to identify that these aren't rights enhancing, democracy enhancing actions. They're executive aggrandizement, they're limiting rights, they're limiting representation for future tilting of the playing field in favor of the executive or the ruling party's continued power and concentration. So that's the key element is this kind of identifying which arenas are captured, which arenas are still available for democratic resistance and contestation, and how we think about identifying this process of democratic erosion or democratic resistance not just according to a kind of statutory or like nominally defined. These are democratic institutions because they exist in democracies. Elections and legislatures and courts and bureaucracies exist in both democracies and autocratic regimes. And they're used to different purposes. Either they're used to uphold the rule of law and represent citizens best interests and represent inclusion and plurality and rights enhancing, or they're used to enhance the immunity and the executive concentration around the powers of the president and limit those kinds of checks and balances. So it's really, you know, I think this is a useful way for us to kind of paint a portrait, a framework for understanding what pathways present different kinds of opportunities to challenge this democratic backslide sliding and where resilience and resistance may be found at any given point in this sequence.
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D
Rachel, thank you. You brought a very important and interesting point of the strategic choice of which pathway and backsliding. And I think polarization could be part of that strategic choice as well, in which I see in your research, that polarization looms really large in your research and also in politics today. So if I may ask, how does polarization fuel backsliding, and what can be done to counter it without worsening that divisions or those divisions within the society as we see these days in the US or across the globe?
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B
Yeah, extreme polarization, what we call pernicious or toxic polarization, really creates this us versus them divides in societies. And it's often instigated by or exacerbated by leaders with their rhetoric that is trying to identify an enemy and try and pull people toward themselves. And this division, this us versus them division, then leads people to see others if they're identified as an enemy. The opponents as an existential threat to themselves, to the nation, to their way of life. And this can make them more receptive to behavior that undermines equality before the law or the rights to vote and participate by everyone. So it's undermining democracy, and they do it because they believe it would be harmful to themselves if the opponents come back to power. So to combat that, you know, we learn from our lessons, as we talked about before, building large coalitions to resist this kind of democratic threat. This could be necessary to overcome the polarization, which is the first step to work collectively. And it may take identifying an actual new line of division so that we can build a larger coalition across political parties, across civic movements, labor movements, economic firms, even the entertainment industry and social media influencers are really important. But identifying a new problem to build this coalition. So recently in our cases and now in the world, corruption is an issue that is really galvanizing people around the world to mobilize and protest against their governments. For the United States, I would actually suggest such a line and an issue, A broad message could be freedom and fairness versus cruelty and corruption. And that can bring in issues that people care about, like the freedom to live and work as they choose to plan a family as they choose to live a life in safety with healthcare and good education for their children, and the fairness to reduce the outsized influence that a few people and corporations of extreme wealth have on our politics and on our collective decision making.
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E
So let me follow up on Jennifer's comments about polarization, because I think this is one of the key challenges that we often face in contemporary democracies. Polarization is especially problematic. It often has sort of an inertial quality. It reinforces itself, especially when different political actors find that it works for them to attract an audience if you're in social media, or to win votes if you're running for office, by demonizing the other side, exaggerating issues, pulling on fake news, oftentimes it attracts support, unfortunately. And so counteracting that, I think, is a real problem. But I think one of the key things that we have to keep in mind is that for backsliding to succeed, it requires a broad coalition of different actors to try to support a backsliding incumbent. And so for the democratic opposition, trying to find ways to. To drive a wedge in between them, to try to divide them, and to try to isolate and contain those actors on the other side who are genuinely anti democratic, but to try to find ways to bring over and work with those actors on the other side who may not necessarily disagree, may not necessarily agree with you on all the policy issues. They may have a different ideological position, but they believe in democracy and they believe in using democratic institutions to resolve the differences. Because we have to remember there's nothing undemocratic about having disagreements and even about having some polarization in democracy. In fact, a certain level of polarization may even be healthy for democracy. It allows political parties to represent different groups and interests in society. It allows meaningful debate around policy alternatives. Where polarization becomes a problem, as Jennifer was saying, is when it becomes very pernicious and you begin to demonize the other side, it becomes us versus them. And some actors begin resorting to anti democratic forms of behavior to isolate or to exclude the other side. So finding ways to work with actors in the political arena who you may not agree with on the issues, but you can work with them democracy democratically, and doing that so that you can isolate and contain the actors on the other side who in fact may be anti democratic. And I think that's one of the key challenges strategically that opposition forces tend.
- [23:28]
D
To face, that is really important. And bringing framing into the conversation, as Jennifer mentioned, I think that's a very important issue. And that leads me to my next question, which if you could give one practical piece of advice to Those worried about US democracy heading into the 2026 election cycle, what would that be? Also, what other democracies or newly competitive authoritarian countries that have recently experienced democratic backsliding do you think this research speaks to? And what advice do you think this research suggests?
- [24:15]
A
So I'll jump in on that Issam and start with the US which your question posed. And I think one of the important things to keep in mind Drawing from our research around the United States right now is that there are real threats to democracy in the United States that we need to take seriously and not dismiss out of hand to say, well, there's still a Supreme Court or there's still a legislature, so there is not a threat. Right. We need to take seriously the threats, know what they represent. And also there exist real possibilities for democracy to respond, to prevail, for citizens to respond. And we can't take for granted that democracy will go in either direction. There is an enormous amount of agency in this moment for narratives, for the kinds of repolarization that Jennifer and Ken were talking about, the ways in which different ideas about what the future should hold are in contestation. And so to act collectively to overcome other types of divisions around, you know, I prefer this and you prefer that, but to act collectively for our right to differ and to debate different kinds of policy preferences and to push for democracy to make it responsive to citizens with a clear eyed awareness of what the threats are and which arenas are more open for pressure and which are not. And I think that's one thing that sometimes in the United States there's less awareness of where power lies or where pressure could be applied. Right, because maybe there's general protest and that's important. But maybe to identify the particular arenas of power and where these decisions are being made could help to articulate the pro democracy forces in a more powerful way around this shared agreement of rights and values and practices. So when I think about, like what other kinds of democracies our research speaks to, some of the interesting parallels to the United States case are Poland, South Korea, Brazil, where there have been real contestations, significant democratic threats backsliding in certain ways, and real opportunities for opposition to block that. And we're at different places, but there's no guarantee for democracy tomorrow. It's not consolidated, it's never secure. But the biggest gains for democracy to make for the future have always come through citizens acts to defend it, to expand it, and to make it real.
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D
Thank you, Rachel Murad.
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F
I'm very worried about US democracy, of course, but there are. I mean, what Rachel said, I think agency is really, really very important. And I would also say that actually there are even more parallels between the US and other democracies in trouble, depending on what issues that we focus on. One thing, for example, I witness right now in the US as well, is that this confusing fighting hard with shouting hard in a polarized, perniciously polarized context. When democracy is backsliding, many people rightly of course realize that they need to do something urgent against it about it. But they think that just replicating what the other side is doing, which is perniciously polarizing, vilifying politics, just doing it in reverse and just basically shouting harder will necessarily bring success. But usually this backfires. Success usually results from finding your front line, your battle lines, more strategically and carefully. Like Jennifer said, you need to find the right fault line cleavage based on which you will organize your politics to defend democracy. You need to be strategic and you need to be clever. And no other cases in the world. Another parallel is actually what we call regime uncertainty. This happens in Turkey, in other countries as well, since democratic backsliding happens incrementally and by using seemingly legal democratic methods, people become confused and they become divided into alarmists versus cautioners who say that, okay, let's wait, focus on issues. We have an elected government, it is not too late yet. Versus people who say that we need to take action now and there is an imminent threat that is facing the country and it is not easy to overcome that division. And this becomes a factor that really weakens oppositions that want to defend democracy. We need to find a way to overcome that. We need to agree that there is a threat and then also agree on a common strategy. Another issue is that often I think it is very challenging, backsliding is very challenging because it forces oppositions to also become critical of themselves and to renew themselves. Because even in the case of these executive takeovers, there is a background, there are certain background factors, weaknesses of democracy that really make people elect these leaders, political parties that backslide democracy, people who want to defend democracy need to look very carefully and see what these weaknesses were. And which also resulted in so many people searching for some disruptive solution, some the autocratic leaders who promise to save them. But that also requires often not some ideological renewal, which means that you need to criticize your own worldview, but also organizational and also the leadership, renewables.
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A
People.
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F
In the media, in political parties, often there needs to be some changes, and that is very hard because nobody wants to see his or their own mistakes or faults and they want to continue what they are doing. So this, I would say, is one of the most difficult things for democratic oppositions to succeed. And finally, I would say that often I think we need to shift from focusing on resistance to recovery. And that's something that we also highlighted in the special issue. Because even though we have relative success cases, we do not have stellar success examples where we can say that democr is bulletproof, safe, now, after overcoming democratic backsliding, people have to think hard about how they can rebuild democracy in a more inclusive, satisfactory, and robust fashion. And they also need to think about what they will do with that democracy, not only procedures, but what this democracy will deliver to people in terms of all kinds of things that they care about, from security to freedom.
- [33:04]
D
Thank you, Ken.
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E
Let me talk about one of the challenges that I think the democratic opposition forces often face in context of backsliding. I think we can see it in the contemporary United States, where state power, whether it's financial power, regulatory power, policing power, we see state power being used in a very coercive way and even in a punitive way, where different private actors are worried that they will be punished in some way, that they will face the consequences if they challenge the administration and if they don't make concessions and follow the line that they are being asked to follow. So you see a version of this story playing out with universities, you see it with the media, you see it with private business firms, potentially. We see sort of a growing efforts to try to monitor, to regulate and restrain civil society in forms of social protests. And ultimately, we're all living in what social scientists recognize to be a collective action problem. Collective action problem is where the interests of the individual actors do not align with the larger collective interests in defending democracy itself. And if all of the universities would stand together and push back against efforts on the part of the administration to. To force concessions and to restrict funding, if all other universities would stand together and say, this is a fundamental assault on academic freedom and the traditions of scientific progress in the United States, the universities would have a lot of leverage and the media as well. But instead, what you see is all the individual actors are trying to keep their heads low, trying not to attract attention. They're trying to negotiate some sort of arrangement with the administration in order to protect themselves. And so the idea is that they're trying to limit the cost to themselves, but in so doing, they undermine the broader effort to try to stand up and defend democratic principles in the system at large. So I think societal actors need to be aware of this collective action problem that you see in many different places and recognize the need to stand together. If we're going to defend the democratic system, you know, there may be risks associated with that, but our ability to withstand those risks will be much stronger if we stand together, we coordinate, and we recognize and defend the key norms that are required to make democracy function.
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D
Thank you so much, Kim.
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A
Jennifer.
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B
Well, all the comments my colleagues made are really Important, the warnings. I want to remind people there's a lot of dissatisfaction around the world with the way democracy seems to be working. People are unsatisfied with this and they have a lot of really legitimate concerns and grievances. But our research shows, many scholars, research shows that democracies in the long term perform much better and give us better outcomes for our lives, for our economies, for our health, than strongmen rule or autocracies, authoritarian governments. And so what we've got to do is work on this. I want to. Rachel and Marat focused on agency, which is just the decision, voluntary decisions to act. It's choices that we all make. And this is absolutely critical. We can, you know, it was choices that led to backsliding and it'll be choices that lead to recovery. But as we do that, what we've learned from research is that building community is really important. And we've all gotten isolated over through the pandemic with social media. There's been a lot of breakdown in community and in, you know, associations that people used to belong to and see each other. And if we start to rebuild that and work on whatever issue is important, we can rebuild relationships across dividing lines. And at the same time, if we can pay attention to what is actually happening in politics, in the news, be alert, learn from other countries that we have all this research, how other countries have resisted, have rebuilt back their democracies, have improved it, then we can be aware and it won't be so hard to kind of come together. What Marat talked about, this difficulty in interpreting what's happening, what's really happening, Is it just, you know, one side won and they're implementing the policies they want, or are they really undermining the rules and the institutions, the norms and habits that we had that protect everybody? And if that's the case, that we need to act together. So as we're doing that and begin to work, when we have relationships, it's easier to go out and protest together or it's easier to talk to another university president or another law firm that may be trying to decide what to do with a given threat or a given carrot that's being extended to try to divide and to build this collective action that Ken talked about. And finally, I would say we have to really think about at the same time, the long term kinds of changes that we want. How do we want our democracy to work? What kinds of changes do we need in our economy, in our healthcare sector, in our education and in the way we elect people to the legislature? What kinds of accountability we're going to have over our elected representatives. There are major reforms being considered, being proposed, being experimented with around the world that we can learn from and begin to work toward those to improve the way our democracy works for everybody.
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A
Jennifer I think that's such an important point and to connect the idea of building community to collectives, to decisions that we make and decisions that we make oriented around which kinds of changes we want to see. So I think that those are some really strong takeaways for our listeners to consider and to put into action in our own lives, in whatever countries we may be listening to this podcast in. And so with that, I want to thank all of our guests. That's all for today's episode of Democratic Dialogues from Cornell University's Brooks center on Global Democracy. We hope that you enjoyed the conversation and continue to join us in thinking about the challenges and possibilities for democracy today. You can find our episodes on your YouTube channel, the New Books Network website, social media, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks to our guests Jennifer Marat and Ken, and thanks to you all for listening. I'm Rachel Beatty Riedel and with my co host, Issam Bora. We'll be back soon with another dialogue on democracy. Until then, stay engaged, stay informed and stay committed to democratic dialogue. We'll be back soon with another dialogue on democracy. Until then, stay engaged, stay informed and stay committed to democratic dialogue.