UC Davis

Democracies across the globe, including large and significant democracies such as the United States, have experienced democratic backsliding over the last few decades, or even reversion to electoral authoritarianism. These trends have in turn prompted a literature that focuses on the correlation of democratic backsliding to various political, international, or societal factors. However, a relatively newer literature has focused on the process of democratic backsliding itself, or how prospective autocrats (backsliders) attempt to undermine their democracy. This latter literature has already provided important insights into the process of backsliding in the aggregate, but I find existing theories struggle to reliably predict individual backsliding sequences. The problem, I contend, is that the current literature focuses on identifying a narrow range backsliding sequences (or even a specific sequence) across all cases, which overlooks the influence of variations in (for example) institutions and society between one democratic context and another. Accordingly, I provide a theory that views individual backsliding sequences as idiosyncratic, but largely explainable and significantly shaped by three common and mutually-interacting, key elements: 1) backsliders' motivation for backsliding; 2) the institutions, societal actors, or laws that a backslider identifies as relevant for backsliding given their context ("targets"), and 3) the tools backsliders have available to undermine their democracy. To test my theory, drawing from a variety of sources (reports, news articles, scholarly journals), I collected data on 14 different cases where backsliding occurred, then subsequently conducted in-depth case studies on 8 of them, describing the backsliding sequence of latter cases in detail. I find that the logic of my theory largely holds, with backsliders visibly undermining targets relevant to their context, and episodes largely following my general predictions; however, my theory of how backsliders use their tools received relatively more mixed support. Ultimately, I contribute to the literature a new theory of the democratic backsliding process that is better at explaining individual backsliding cases, and an emphatic reminder that political context cannot be overlooked when theorizing about the process of democratic backsliding.