# Democratic Backsliding The incremental erosion of democratic norms, institutions, and practices by elected leaders who use legal or quasi-legal mechanisms to concentrate power, weaken accountability, and dismantle the guardrails that constrain executive authority. The term's analytical contribution is its insistence on *gradualism* and *internal agency*: unlike a coup d'état, which is sudden, violent, and carried out by outsiders to the democratic process, backsliding is carried out by *incumbents* using the *tools of democratic governance itself* — executive orders, legislative supermajorities, judicial appointments, norm violations, procedural manipulation — in barely visible steps that make it difficult to identify a single moment at which democracy ceases to exist. The concept entered formal political-science usage through Nancy Bermeo's influential 2016 paper "On Democratic Backsliding" in the *Journal of Democracy*, where she defined it as "the state-led debilitation or elimination of any of the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy." [[Steven Levitsky]] and [[Daniel Ziblatt]] brought the framework to a mass audience with [[How Democracies Die]] (2018), which argued that modern democratic collapse rarely resembles the dramatic military takeovers of the Cold War era but instead proceeds through a recognizable sequence of norm erosion carried out by elected authoritarians. ## Mechanisms Bermeo's 2016 taxonomy identifies three primary mechanisms through which backsliding operates in the twenty-first century: **Executive aggrandizement.** The incumbent gradually expands executive power at the expense of legislative and judicial checks — packing courts, staffing agencies with loyalists, governing by decree, using emergency powers as routine instruments. This is the mechanism most visible in the U.S. context through [[Schedule F]], the systematic installation of acting officials to bypass Senate confirmation, and the [[Project 2025]] blueprint for restructuring the federal bureaucracy around presidential loyalty. **Strategic manipulation of elections.** Not outright electoral fraud but the systematic tilting of the playing field — gerrymandering, voter suppression, media capture, weaponization of state resources for incumbents, and the delegitimization of electoral outcomes. The process makes elections technically free but substantively unfair. **Promissory coups.** Military or executive seizures of power justified by promises to restore democracy and clean up corruption — a pattern more common in the Global South than in consolidated Western democracies, but conceptually important for understanding how democratic language can provide cover for antidemocratic action. ## Key scholars The contemporary literature on democratic backsliding draws on several overlapping research programs: **Nancy Bermeo** established the modern analytical framework with her 2016 taxonomy. Her key insight was that the *form* of democratic breakdown has changed: the classic military coup is increasingly rare, replaced by subtler forms of erosion that are harder to identify and harder to resist precisely because they maintain the surface appearance of democratic procedure. **[[Steven Levitsky]] and [[Daniel Ziblatt]]** synthesized decades of comparative politics research in [[How Democracies Die]], arguing that democratic resilience depends not just on formal institutions (constitutions, courts, legislatures) but on *informal norms* — particularly mutual toleration (treating opponents as legitimate) and institutional forbearance (not using the full extent of one's legal powers). When these norms collapse, formal institutions follow. **Anna Grzymala-Busse** has focused on how democratic backsliding operates through institutional capture — the colonization of the civil service, judiciary, and regulatory agencies by partisan loyalists who transform neutral institutions into instruments of the ruling party. ## The distinction from coup The conceptual distance between backsliding and coup is the analytical work the term does. A coup is sudden, violent, extra-constitutional, and carried out by actors outside the democratic process (typically the military). Backsliding is gradual, largely nonviolent, quasi-legal, and carried out by *elected officials operating within the system*. The backslider doesn't abolish the constitution — they hollow it out. They don't shut down the courts — they pack them. They don't cancel elections — they tilt the playing field until elections become formalities. This distinction matters because backsliding is *harder to resist* than a coup. There is no single triggering event that mobilizes opposition. Each individual step is small enough to be normalized, explained away, or defended as routine governance. The cumulative effect becomes visible only in retrospect. ## RWKB relevance Democratic backsliding is arguably the *meta-concept* for everything the vault tracks — the slow-motion erosion of democratic guardrails through norm violation, institutional capture, and legal manipulation. The vault's coverage of [[Schedule F]] (converting career civil servants to political appointees), [[Project 2025]] (a comprehensive blueprint for executive-branch capture), judicial packing via the [[Federalist Society]] pipeline and [[Leonard Leo]]'s network, the [[Republican Party]]'s abandonment of mutual toleration, and [[Donald Trump]]'s systematic norm violations all describe components of what the backsliding literature would recognize as a textbook case. The international comparison is central: [[Viktor Orbán]]'s [[Hungary]] is the most-cited example of successful backsliding within a formally democratic system, and American New Right thinkers have explicitly adopted Orbán's model — [[Heritage Foundation]] delegations to Budapest, [[Rod Dreher]]'s relocation, [[Conservative Political Action Conference]] Hungary. The vault documents both the domestic erosion and the international transmission belt. ## Distinct from neighbors - **Authoritarianism** — the endpoint; backsliding is the *process* by which a democracy moves toward it. A fully authoritarian regime has arrived; a backsliding regime is still in transit. - **Coup d'état** — sudden, violent, extra-constitutional seizure. Backsliding is the opposite in form: gradual, quasi-legal, internal. The two can coexist (a failed coup can accelerate backsliding) but are analytically distinct. - **[[Illiberal Democracy]]** — a closely related concept naming the *result* of backsliding: a system that retains elections but has shed the liberal constitutional protections (press freedom, judicial independence, minority rights) that make elections meaningful. - **[[Kleptocracy]]** — backsliding and kleptocracy often co-occur (institutional capture enables extraction) but the concepts emphasize different dimensions: backsliding emphasizes *democratic erosion*, kleptocracy emphasizes *financial extraction*. ## See Also - [[How Democracies Die]] — the popular synthesis - [[Schedule F]] — institutional capture mechanism - [[Project 2025]] — the operational blueprint - [[Viktor Orbán]] — the international exemplar - [[Illiberal Democracy]] — the regime-type backsliding produces - [[Kleptocracy]] — the financial dimension of captured institutions - [[Sadopopulism]] — the political-strategy companion - [[Authoritarianism Lexicon]] — alphabetical MOC