Conceptual Ambiguity and Autocracy: How Backsliding Regimes Portray Backsliding

• In Event: Take On Me: Institutional Rejection in Europe

Abstract

Democratic backsliding often depends on a permissive regional environment, especially in Europe in which the EU could use significant budgetary leverage to constrain backsliding. Backsliding governments will, therefore, seek to obfuscate and reinterpret their autocratization efforts as legitimate political action. Yet, theory and evidence of what this intuitive strategy implies in political practice remains limited. This study examines how backsliding governments portray backsliding in interactions with the EU’s democratic political actors. I argue, first, that backsliders make strategic and targeted use of the fuzzy and contested boundaries of the concept of democratic backsliding. They present their action as the legitimate pursuit of conservative (instead of autocratic) ideology, majoritarian (instead of undemocratic) reform, confined (instead of systemic) institutional adjustments, and a sovereign (instead of EU-wide) concern. Second, I expect that backsliding governments adapt their discourse strategically to maximize conceptual resonance with the audience, speaking differently to party political actors in the European Parliament, bureaucratic actors in the European Commission, and government actors in the (European) Council. I provide evidence based on European parliamentary debates and institutional communication between the EU’s backsliding governments and the Commission and Council. The argument contributes to a growing literature specifying the tactics backsliding and autocratizing governments employ to protect themselves from international interference. It also stresses that the academic and political struggle to define the concept of backsliding sharply creates opportunities for backsliding governments to obfuscate their actions and avoid international pressure.

Author

• Thomas Winzen, Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf