Understanding Democratic Backsliding

Even before the reversal of existing democracies became a global phenomenon and easily discernable in a significant number of countries, political scientists began to ponder how to describe the emerging trend of moving away from democracy. This chapter defines the term “democratic backsliding” and critically examines various approaches to understand the phenomenon. It shows that the existing literature can be divided into four approaches—structural, strategic, institutional, and regime-specific. It argues that all of these approaches have several weaknesses as they fail to offer a clear sequence of steps and/or events of democratic backsliding.