Conceptualizing Democratic Resilience and Pathways of Autocratization

• In Event: The Roots of Resilience: Democratic Durability, Renovation and Redemocratization

Abstract

Work on democratic transition and consolidation, and competitive authoritarianism, which dominated comparative studies of political regimes in the last decades, rested on the implicit assumption that once consolidated democracy is a stable or resilient political system (Boese et al 2021: 887). It therefore left us poorly placed to account for the decline in the quality of democracy around the world over the last twenty years. This limitation prompted the emergence of new work on the factors that could explain such wide-ranging democratic regression (Bermeo 2016; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Waldner and Lust 2018).

Yet, to this day, little attention has been paid to democratic resilience (for an early exception, see Burnell and Calvert 1999; see also Ganghof 2012; Mainwaring 1999). This is despite the evidence that several political systems – including the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Fiji, Gambia, Honduras, Malawi, Nepal, Seychelles, and Zambia – ultimately resisted the authoritarian tide. The most recent wave of scholarship has not helped explain why democracy has proved – so far at least – to be more resilient in some state than in others. We therefore need a new approach to conceptualizing democratic resilience, understood as the ability of political systems to avoid democratic erosion or, once autocratization has begun, full breakdown. Based upon a systematic review of the literature on democratic resilience, the paper makes five main contributions.

First, it argues that true resilience implies not only avoiding democratic erosion, but also the ability of political systems to adapt to develop stronger foundations. In other words, resilience must be conceptualized as combining survival and the capacity for renovation. Second, the paper critiques the tendency of existing literature to search for a single factor that is most effective at explaining variation in resilience, rather than looking at constellations of factors that facilitate resilience by reinforcing one another. We argue that each factor is only effective when it exists within a supportive institutional and normative web. In other words, the interaction between factors rather than their sum shapes a system’s resilience. Third, we counter the “temporal” fallacy, namely the tendency to think that because several countries are experiencing declines in their democracy scores there must be a common cause. Instead, we demonstrate, that the key actors and drivers of democratic erosion vary markedly both across and between regions. The global trend towards autocratization is made up of several pathways, each with its distinct logic. Fourth, we suggest that what matters for democratic durability is likely to depend on the nature of the authoritarian challenge, and so the roots of resilience cannot be understood outside of the pathway to autocratization in a given country.

Finally, we illustrate four of the most common autocratization pathways witnessed in recent years, and explore the different constellations of factors that enabled political systems experiencing these different pathways to withstand challenges and even adapt. The paper therefore develops a stronger theoretical foundation for new research on democratic resilience, and begins the process of deploying it to conduct more nuanced empirical analysis.

Authors

• Nic Cheeseman, University of Birmingham

• Licia Cianetti, University of Birmingham

• Marie-Eve Desrosiers, University of Ottawa