The Roots of Resilience: Democratic Durability, Renovation and Redemocratization

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Twenty years of autocratization has inspired a wide range of literature on democratic backsliding and the conditions that have facilitated the rise to power of undemocratic leaders and political elites. This has included analyzing the impact of economic and social processes such as globalization and migration, rising political polarization, elite aggrandizement, and the recent return of coups in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Less common has been research that explains why some countries have remained relatively stable or even become more democratic over the same period. This includes countries such as the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Fiji, Gambia, Honduras, Malawi, Nepal, Seychelles, and Zambia. These cases are not only worth understanding because they have bucked the broader global autocratization trend, but also because they may have important lessons to teach us about how political systems can withstand authoritarian threats and shocks.

This has inspired a nascent wave of scholarship on democratic resilience: the capacity of democratic political systems to not only reproduce themselves over time, but also to adapt to new challenges. The papers in this panel address four of the most pressing questions currently facing this new literature. First, how should we conceptualize democratic resilience and how are the factors that account for resilience different from those that facilitate democratization? Second, why do some countries demonstrate greater democratic resilience, and a stronger capacity for renovation and rebirth, than others? Third, under what conditions does re-democratization – the resurgence of democratic forces following a period of autocratization – occur? Fourth, in what ways are processes of re-democratization different from initial episodes of democratization, for example do these processes impact on key democratic institutions and norms differently than democratization processes?

The papers do this from a number of perspectives and methodological approaches. The first paper (Cheeseman, Cianetti, Desrosiers) draws on a systematic review of the literature on democratic resilience to identify weaknesses in current theorization. In particular, it critiques the tendency of existing literature to search for a static set of factors to explain variation in resilience, rather than focusing on the interactions and cumulative effects across factors that facilitate resilience. It also argues 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 potential pathway to autocratization in a given state. The second paper (Williamson, Akor, and Edgell) builds on this analysis by assessing resilience in response to one of the more common autocratization pathways: executive aggrandizement. Reviewing the experience of five democracies that demonstrated resilience under these circumstances, the authors conclude that judiciaries, civil society, and the media played a critical role in these cases. This was only possible, however, because anti-democratic incumbents came from centrist parties and made critical errors, including major policy blunders and miscalculations, ultimately costing them their position and allowing democracy to rebound. The third paper (Levitsky and Way) addresses the structural foundations of democratic resilience. More specifically, by drawing on statistical and case study evidence, the authors argue that the resilience of democracy is rooted primarily in the dispersion of economic resources.

The next two papers develop the analysis further by considering instances of re-democratization or democratic “U-turns”. One (Lindberg) provides a quantitative analysis of all cases of re-democratization since 1990, utilizing the Varieties of Democracy dataset (V-Dem). It also develops the conceptualization around a new type of regime transformation episode – “democratic reversal” – in which autocratization is closely followed by democratization. The final paper (Leininger) complements this large-N review with a case study of Zambia – one of the only countries to move towards democracy during the COVID-19 pandemic. It demonstrates the significance of opposition political mobilization for the defeat of unpopular autocrats, but also the importance of informal alliances between opposition movements and civil society groups for the maintenance of the political space required for re-democratization to take place.

Taken together, these papers therefore provide fresh and timely insights into both the theory and the reality of democratic resilience.

Sub Unit

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Individual Presentations

• Conceptualizing Democratic Resilience and Pathways of Autocratization - Nic Cheeseman, University of Birmingham; Licia Cianetti, University of Birmingham; Marie-Eve Desrosiers, University of Ottawa

• Executive Aggrandizement and Democratic Resilience - Christopher Akor, The University of Alabama; Myles Williamson, University of Baltimore; Amanda B. Edgell, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

• The Structural Foundations of Democratic Resilience - Steven Levitsky, Harvard University; Lucan A. Way, University of Toronto

• U-Turns: Episodes of Democratic Turnarounds since 1900 - Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg; Fabio Angiolillo, Gothenburg University; Marina Nord, University of Gothenburg; Felix Wiebrecht, University of Gothenburg; Martin Karl Lundstedt, Gothenburg University

• Democracy Protection at Work: Re-democratization in Zambia - Julia Leininger, German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS, formerly German Development Institute)

Chair

• Nic Cheeseman University of Birmingham

Discussant

• Ben William Ansell University of Oxford