Democracy Protection at Work: Re-democratization in Zambia

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

Abstract

Autocracy is spreading. Once a democratic regime begins to autocratize, it is likely to face a turn to autocracy. However, nearly a dozen autocratizing countries have resisted a sustained breakdown of democracy (Wiebrecht et al. 2023). Research on democratic resilience has begun to address these cases. Despite some evidence that these regimes share specific characteristics that make them more resilient (e.g., executive constraints, mass mobilization, alternation of power, etc.), the particularities of these countries stand out. A thorough and in-depth analysis of the factors that enabled resilience against sustained regime breakdown in specific cases is thus a first step toward building more generalizable knowledge. Most studies on democratic resilience focus on domestic factors, while their interplay with international factors is not sufficiently taken into account. This paper aims to address this limitation by analyzing the interplay between international and domestic factors that influenced Zambia's turnaround between 2012 and 2022.

Author

• Julia Leininger, German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS, formerly German Development Institute)