The End of the Backsliding Paradigm
Licia Cianetti, Seán Hanley
Journal of Democracy, Volume 32, Number 1, January 2021, pp. 66-80 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
[ Access provided at 23 May 2021 12:06 GMT from University of Canberra ]
https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2021.0001
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/778218
THE END OF THE
BACKSLIDING PARADIGM
Licia Cianetti and Seán Hanley
Licia Cianetti is a research fellow at Royal Holloway, University of
London. Seán Hanley is associate professor in comparative Central and
East European politics at University College London. Together they are
coeditors (with James Dawson) of Rethinking “Democratic Backsliding”
in Central and Eastern Europe (2019).
Analysts widely agree that the world has entered a period of global
democratic retreat. Quantitative indices show year-on-year declines in
aggregate levels of global democracy and in the number of countries
classified as democracies or making democratic gains. Moreover, concerns
about democratic decay now extend beyond the young democracies
of the “third wave” to some of the world’s most established democratic
polities, including the United States.
Instead of the authoritarian coups that were the most common mechanisms
of democratic reversal for much of the twentieth century, today’s
imperiled democracies more often face what has been termed democratic
backsliding, democratic erosion, or “creeping authoritarianism”: the gradual
stripping away of constitutional safeguards and piecemeal dismantling
of democratic institutions by elected politicians, often illiberally inclined
populists. Rather than overnight breakdown, democratic backsliding is a
death by a thousand cuts, in which power-hungry executives slice away
at fundamental institutional checks and balances in ways that ultimately
distort pluralism and political competition.1
While this intuitively compelling framework does much to capture the
mood of steady decline all around us, there is a risk that the concept of
democratic backsliding may become a counterproductive paradigm. Specifically,
this analytical framework can encourage reducing (un)democratic
developments to movement along a linear trajectory of progress,
standstill, or regression, thereby obscuring as much as it reveals when
applied to many troubled or turbulent democracies. In this regard, the
rise of democratic backsliding as the dominant frame for understanding
Journal of Democracy Volume 32, Number 1 January 2021
© 2021 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
67Licia Cianetti and Seán Hanley
undemocratic change is reminiscent—albeit in reverse—of the so-called
transition paradigm famously critiqued in these pages almost two decades
ago by Thomas Carothers.2
Applications of the backsliding paradigm to the countries of EastCentral
Europe (ECE) offer a stark illustration of these parallels, as well
as the pitfalls of interpretation and policy making that they generate.3
There seems to be comparatively little dispute that democratic backsliding
has been taking place in the ECE region, once seen as emblematic
of democracy’s “third wave.” Formerly hailed as remarkable transition
success stories, democracies in this region—countries such as Hungary
and Poland—have recently drawn academic and media attention as the
poster children of backsliding from consolidated democracy toward
hybrid or even fully authoritarian regimes. Scrutinized more closely,
developments in this region demonstrate both the reality and the limitations
of the backsliding paradigm. In the spirit of Carothers’s original
injunction to ask “what is happening politically,”4
we offer an alternative
view by highlighting two intermediate patterns—“democratic careening”
and tradeoffs between competing democratic values—that defy
easy understanding in terms of linear movement along a continuum from
democracy to autocracy.
A Transition Paradigm in Reverse?
Even when democracy was largely advancing on the ground, the possibility
that democratization might sooner or later go into reverse haunted
the imagination of scholars.5
But scholarly interest in democratic
backsliding has exploded in the last decade, driven by uncertainty about
the momentum of third-wave democratization. These feelings of unease
are associated with a range of phenomena: the proliferation and durability
of hybrid regimes; the international assertiveness of Russia and
China; the low quality of many new democracies; the rise of populist
parties in new and established democracies; and the social and political
fallout of a sharp global recession that few had predicted.
Yet relying on the backsliding concept to set the global research
agenda may come at a cost. In many ways it risks reproducing, in reverse,
the intellectual constraints of the overoptimistic transition paradigm
of the 1990s, highlighted by Carothers in his celebrated (though
controversial) critique. In his 2002 essay Carothers identified two critically
flawed assumptions impeding understanding of a world characterized
by a mix of persistent authoritarianism, hybrid regimes, and lowquality
democracies. These were, first, that countries moving away from
autocracy are in transition toward democracy; and, second, that there is
a linear sequence of stages leading to or from consolidated democracy,
with countries moving forward or backward and “options . . . all cast
in terms of the speed and direction with which countries move on the
68 Journal of Democracy
path, not in terms of movement that does not conform with the path at
all.”6
Carothers further argued that those under the influence of the transition
paradigm tended to take for granted that elections were always
watershed moments; to assume that
social-structural factors mattered
less than political and institutional
choices; and to neglect the importance
of state building for democra-
tization.
More than just an interesting
polemic from another era, Carothers’s
essay serves today as a timely
warning of the risks inherent in
the nascent backsliding paradigm.
The transition paradigm, Carothers
warned, was defined by the final
(desired) outcome of transition:
consolidated liberal democracy. The
backsliding paradigm similarly rests, implicitly or explicitly, on a fixed
(feared) outcome: a hybrid (competitive or electoral authoritarian) or
fully authoritarian regime. Its blanket application similarly narrows our
analytical range.
Both transition and backsliding are metaphors of movement. Yet both
also tend to reduce our view of dynamics and trajectories to three possible
options: Democracies can move forward, fall backward, or stagnate
in middling positions. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute,
for example, although its dataset offers an array of indicators of unparalleled
richness and its affiliated researchers publish cutting-edge studies,
frames the key issues in its 2020 annual report in the familiar terms of
advance versus retreat along a path between autocracy and democracy.7
While country-level studies often contain rich accounts of fluid and
open processes of (un)democratic change, transition or reverse-transition
paradigms risk flattening these trends in order to give an aggregate
verdict of democratic improvement or deterioration. When analysts rely
too much on the intuitive but overly schematic backsliding framework,
they may find themselves missing more complex dynamics involving
tradeoffs or nonlinear movement.
Conceiving of all democracies as potential backsliders often leads to
assessing their political lives in narrow terms of the extent (and forms)
of their backsliding. Countries can then only be non-backsliders, mild
backsliders, or full backsliders. As Abraham Maslow famously wrote:
“It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything
as if it were a nail.” But even in regions widely characterized by
troubled democracy, backsliding into a hybrid or authoritarian regime is
the exception, not the rule. This leaves non-backsliding countries, where
Both transition and
backsliding are metaphors
of movement. Yet both also
tend to reduce our view of
dynamics and trajectories
to three possible options:
democracies can move
forward, fall backward,
or stagnate in middling
positions.
69Licia Cianetti and Seán Hanley
different patterns not captured by this framework might be in play, as a
large, diverse, and unexplored residual category. On the ground, however,
these different patterns and outcomes are frequently much more than
sideshows to the main event. To borrow Carothers’s words,8
these nonlinear
dynamics need to “be understood as alternative directions, not
way stations” on a journey between liberal democracy and autocracy.
Lessons from East-Central Europe
We now turn to East-Central Europe—the region of successful postcommunist
democratizers located between core West European states, the
Western Balkans, and the successor states of the USSR. Central and East
European countries played a key role in the rise of both the transition
paradigm and the backsliding paradigm.9
A closer look at these states can
once again help us to refine our notions of (un)democratic change.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, the region defied a raft of early
breakdown prophecies to rapidly achieve apparent democratic consolidation,
aided by proximity to the EU. As Carothers pointed out, this
made East-Central Europe one of the few clear illustrations of the transition
paradigm in real life. The idea that this region might be losing
some of its democratic achievements to backsliding emerged just over
a decade ago. When the Journal of Democracy posed this question to
leading specialists, they highlighted a mélange of negative developments:
populism; illiberal nationalism and radicalism; fragmented and
factionalized parties; corruption and informal practices; and a weak civil
society and public sphere. Most, however, did not detect a systematic
threat to democracy—and some still saw grounds for optimism or argued
that populist movements were ambiguous phenomena, channeling
social frustrations and correcting excessive neoliberalism, that would
recast but not reverse democracy.10
Subsequent developments clarified the very real nature of the threat
to democracy in countries such as Hungary (beginning with the victory
of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in 2010 parliamentary elections) and Poland
(following presidential- and parliamentary-election victories by the
right-wing Law and Justice [PiS] in 2015). These developments brought
the region into closer alignment with theoretical notions of backsliding:
The experience of these two onetime democratic frontrunners matches
only too well the paradigm of elected populist politicians embarking on
a slow but sure program of executive aggrandizement. In both countries,
mainstream parties radicalized in sharply populist directions, building
on and deepening existing traditions of social conservatism and conservative
nationalism,11
and took on features reminiscent of radical-right
populists in older Western democracies. These newly radicalized parties
also strove to claim the mantle of anticorruption, and they received an
electoral boost from external crises that laid bare the limits of global
70 Journal of Democracy
free markets and European integration. Once securely in office with solid
majorities, PiS and Fidesz waged the familiar war of attrition against
liberal institutions and liberal civil society, gradually skewing political
competition. In commentary on East-Central Europe, these prominent
examples sometimes seem to shape discussions of expected (and feared)
patterns of political change across the entire region.12
Yet while elements observed in Hungary and Poland such as populism,
illiberal social conservatism, and attacks on media pluralism are
present elsewhere (including outside East-Central Europe), they occur
in different degrees and different combinations that—we argue—ultimately
do not amount to the same thing. On closer examination, in
much of the region democratic backsliding in the strict sense is more
conspicuous by its absence. Scholars reviewing comparative democracy
indices identify a maximum of four or five of the EU’s eleven current
postcommunist members as cases of democratic backsliding (or “democratic
erosion”), with only two—Hungary and Poland—consistently categorized
as backsliders.13
The countries of East-Central Europe exhibit a
range of political configurations and trajectories, many of which fit the
Hungarian and Polish models awkwardly or not at all. Yet with democracy
scores declining across the region, how should we understand the
many apparent “non-backsliders”? Are they instances of robust democratic
resilience, simply behind the curve, or something else entirely?
Some clues can be gleaned by considering the analytical limitations
that the backsliding paradigm shares with the transition paradigm.
Carothers criticized the transition paradigm for overemphasizing elections
as turning points. The backsliding paradigm too is to some degree
electorally centered. Electoral victories by democratically disloyal politicians
(often illiberal populists) are the logical starting point for backsliding
episodes. Elected governments are the key agents of executive
aggrandizement, and some illiberal governments in backsliding states
have enjoyed repeat electoral victories (in Hungary in 2014 and 2018; in
Poland in 2015 and 2019).
Inverting Carothers’s critique of the transition paradigm’s electoralism,
we might point out that the election of authoritarian politicians
does not necessarily lead to backsliding, for example, if institutions are
robust and checks and balances sufficiently entrenched. The logic of the
backsliding paradigm would suggest that the victory of “technocratic
populist” Andrej Babiš in the 2017 Czech parliamentary elections and
the entry of the illiberal far-right Conservative People’s Party (EKRE)
into Estonia’s new governing coalition should be classified either as
steps down the backsliding path or—if these illiberal advances do not
lead to full-on institutional erosion—as instances of backsliding averted.
However, both options inadequately capture the nature of political
change in these countries. The presence of a strong but less than dominant
populist party at the heart of the political system can generate a
71Licia Cianetti and Seán Hanley
distinct dynamic, which amounts to something less than backsliding but
more than politics as usual.
Conversely, concentrations of power that threaten democracy may
arise by routes other than politicians gaining and wielding electoral majorities.
In this sense, elections not only are insufficient on their own to
trigger democratic backsliding, but also may not be a necessary condition
of backsliding. For example, some have suggested that the rise of
powerful oligarchic structures or concentrations of corporate power capable
of party and state capture—evident in weaker democratizers such
as Bulgaria but also in Slovakia—can stifle and subvert competition and
representation to such an extent as to undermine democracy. As Antoaneta
Dimitrova pointedly observes:
Backsliding is not simply a period of bad institutional choices ushered
by illiberal populists. Instead, the possibility should be considered that
systematic interactions between governments linked to key economic interests,
in power for several electoral terms, and large constituencies depending
on these economic interests, have led to the emergence of a less
democratic framework of governance.14
Powerful elite and oligarchic networks not only plunder public resources,
but also stealthily gain control over courts, media, parties, and
even civil society. Although electoral competition, alternation in government,
and periodic upsurges of protest may continue, at a certain
point representation, political choice, and the rule of law may be so hollowed
out that democracy is effectively negated as a regime. The conceptualization
of backsliding as a primarily electoral process—one that
is triggered by “bad people” winning watershed elections and stopped
or reversed by “good people” winning them back—seems inadequate to
capture these longer-term, slower, and more complex forms of democratic
erosion.
Focusing too much on elections and the short-term fortunes of illiberal
politicians also risks aggravating the “presentist” bias inevitable
in any analysis of a gradual ongoing process, which creates a tendency
to interpret events currently in the headlines as major (un)democratic
shifts. For example, Zuzana Èaputová’s 2019 election as Slovak president—succeeding
another liberal independent, Andrej Kiska—was
hailed as a turning point for the struggle against populism in Eastern
Europe, with global implications for turning the populist tide. Once
scholars have overinterpreted the positive or negative significance of
one moment, they may be inclined to view subsequent events as equally
dramatic turns in the opposite direction. Such tendencies drive a rollercoaster
of optimism and pessimism that has often characterized discussions
of democracy historically,15
but may do little to illuminate how
troubled democracies actually work.
This problem ties in with a broader inattention to underlying conditions
72 Journal of Democracy
(“economic level, political history, institutional legacies, ethnic make-up,
sociocultural traditions, or other ‘structural’ features”), a shortcoming
detected by Carothers in the transition paradigm and also evident in the
backsliding paradigm.16
This is true even with regard to analyses of EastCentral
Europe, despite political culture and communist legacies having
previously been go-to explanations for democratic difficulties and political
variation in the region. Following global trends, the tendency has been
to explain backsliding in ECE countries by invoking more general proximate
causes such as electoral volatility, political polarization, and the rise
of populist parties and ideologies; or exogenous shocks such as the Great
Recession, the European refugee crisis, the Eurozone crisis, Russiansponsored
manipulation, and more recently, the covid-19 pandemic. In
such analyses, domestic social, economic, and political structures tend
to remain in the background, or to be subsumed in discussions of the
global context. In particular, the unexpected susceptibility of onetime
democratic frontrunners such as Hungary and Poland has reinforced the
view of backsliding as contagion—“Orbánization” driven by the spread
of illiberal ideas; a Hungarian-inspired playbook for unscrupulous elites
crafting a transition from democracy that can be enacted almost regardless
of structural conditions.17
Entering the Twilight Zone
A focus on linear movement backward or forward—with the direction
determined by summing up a balance sheet of democratic pluses
and minuses—is especially problematic for analyzing countries that do
not move (much) in either direction or that move erratically in contradictory
directions. Scholars are, naturally, aware of such cases, in which
states “have moved back and forth or hovered on the precipice” for extended
periods.18
In other instances, democracies morph in troubling and
fundamental ways without sliding (or beginning to slide) into hybrid,
competitive authoritarian regimes. Examined through the backsliding
paradigm, these countries—and the array of democratic difficulties they
display—either are relegated to a loosely theorized twilight zone of
“stagnant” cases, or are rendered as democratically resilient success stories
or lucky instances of backsliding averted.19
These broad categorizations,
however, do not necessarily give the clearest sense of what might
be going on politically. As Dan Slater has pointedly asked, “How might
we best make sense of instances when the democratic game changes
in decisive ways even as democracy neither collapses nor more firmly
consolidates in the process?”20
Stagnant or resilient need not mean immobile.
Such classifications may hide patterns of change and adaptation
that tell us more about (un)democratic development than narratives of
movement along a supposed linear path.
To counter the schematic transition paradigm, Carothers outlined
73Licia Cianetti and Seán Hanley
two “broad political syndromes” that better approximated real-life patterns
into which third-wave countries were settling. Tentatively following
in his footsteps, we use examples from the ECE region to sketch
two intermediate patterns visible today: 1) bumpy, dynamic sequences
of episodic crisis and confrontation falling short of the clash between
authoritarian-minded illiberals and “prodemocracy” forces envisaged in
accounts of backsliding (akin to what Slater has called “careening”);
and 2) cases marked by tradeoffs between distinct democratic values,
whose complex dynamics defy the “all good things go together” logic
that often informs thinking about democratization, backsliding, and the
quality of democracy.21
Unsettled Politics as a Different Game in Town
In the backsliding paradigm, the electoral success of democratically
disloyal populist parties or leaders is seen as the first step on the path to
backsliding. But in some polities where populist governments inclined
toward bypassing constitutional restraints take office, subsequent developments
follow a pattern that diverges from these expectations. Populist
challenges to the liberal fundamentals of democracy can be too weak
and unsystematic to push decisively in the direction of a hybrid regime.
Such challenges may also be stymied by institutional resistance or pushback
from opposition or civic movements, perhaps leading to defeat in
sometimes skewed but still competitive elections. Some observers view
such episodes as “near misses” that offer lessons in democratic resil-
ience.22
Others, however, detect a more drawn-out pattern, a riskier but
nevertheless democratic state of “swerves” or “endemic unsettledness”
producing turbulent and changeable episodes of polarized mobilization
and countermobilization.23
Such dynamics are well captured by Slater’s
metaphor of democratic careening, which conveys the idea of movement
that is not unidirectional (democratizing or backsliding) but “back and
forth from side to side, with no clear prospect for steadying in sight.”24
Although it may be reinforced by sociocultural and identity cleavages,
careening is driven by many sources of polarization and by the unresolved
tension between rival blocs making competing democratic claims. On one
side is a “populist” claim to channel a democratic majority, typically one
including previously excluded groups and concerns, whose will overrides
institutional constraints. On the other side one finds a “liberal” claim to
defend constitutionality, institutions, transparency, the rule of law, and
the rights of minorities. The dynamics of careening rest on an unstable
balance between the two: Both sides have (opposing) democratic claims
of some validity, while neither has the political weight or coherence to
enforce a settlement along its preferred lines. This confrontation brings
no quick resolution. Populist triumphs within this dynamic are not entry
points to a new politics of democratic backsliding, and populist setbacks
74 Journal of Democracy
do not herald a quick return to democratic consolidation. Rather than
marking the lead-in to a new and different political game, this struggle
between opposing democratic claims is the game.
Slater identifies careening in East and Southeast Asian democracies
(Thailand, Taiwan, and Indonesia), where it takes the form of clashes
between rival party-backed social movements, sometimes overlapping
with conflict between presidents and prime ministers. But parallel patterns
have emerged in the very different ECE context. Their most visible
expressions are upsurges of grassroots civic protest, unaligned with
any party or movement and typically triggered by incumbent corruption
and bad governance: for instance in Bulgaria (2013, 2020), Romania
(2012, 2017–19), Slovenia (2012–13), the Czech Republic (2019), and
Slovakia (2012, 2018). Instances of popular mobilization and civic protest
are usually framed within the backsliding paradigm as “prodemocracy”
movements of resistance against autocratically inclined leaders.25
In East-Central Europe, however, (anti)corruption—which is central to
the politics of the region—feeds both liberal claims about the crucial
checking role of unelected institutions and civic protest movements and
populist claims to be mobilizing the popular will against corrupt, outof-touch
elites. Moreover, as Veronika Stoyanova’s critical analysis of
the 2013 protests in Bulgaria highlights,26
citizen mobilization in this
region can be shot through with class conflict, with demands for good
governance, accountability, and the rule of law potentially serving a
better-educated, urban, middle-class constituency while pushing questions
of socioeconomic inclusion and egalitarian demands off the political
agenda. This divergence of interests has the potential to produce
precisely the type of faceoff between opposing coalitions seen by Slater
as the driver of careening in Southeast Asia.
The different perspective that the careening frame offers is well illustrated
by the seemingly divergent cases of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
With a technocratic populist government led by the agro-food and
media magnate Andrej Babiš as prime minister and with left-nationalist
Miloš Zeman as president, the Czech Republic might seem to be traveling
along the familiar backsliding trajectory, albeit with backsliding taking a
comparatively mild form due to Babiš’s limited electoral support, his lack
of a consistent ideological narrative, and a strong grassroots pushback
against his conflicts of interests and threats to democratic checks and bal-
ances.27
Conversely, Slovakia elected liberal independent presidents in
2014 and 2019, was convulsed by civic protest movements in 2018, and
dislodged the long-dominant left-populist Smer party in 2020 parliamentary
elections. It is usually seen as a regional bright spot where liberal
forces have pushed back successfully and forced illiberalism into retreat.
Yet looking through the lens of democratic careening offers a different,
and perhaps more accurate, view of two cases that turn out to have
a great deal in common. Considered in these terms, tendencies toward
75Licia Cianetti and Seán Hanley
authoritarian populism and the opposing liberal pushback in both countries
figure as opposed democratic claims. When mass protests arose in
Slovakia following the 2018 murder of journalist Ján Kuciak and his
fiancée, participants decried Prime Minister Robert Fico as heading a
corrupt state where the rule of law had been subverted. Fico, meanwhile,
framed himself as a besieged democrat resisting a Europe-wide threat to
popular rule from unelected institutions and movements without an electoral
mandate. Rather than pushing democratic politics decisively forward
or backward, in both countries the “liberal” and “populist” camps
are weaker than they seem. Even at moments when political developments
suddenly careen in one camp’s favor, this may simply prepare the
ground for a swing back in the opposite direction.
In such settings, populist advances have their limits. Despite holding
the offices of president and prime minister, populist forces in the Czech
Republic were pushed back by oppositional civic protest and institutional
constraints (especially as Babiš’s party failed to gain control of
countervailing institutions such as the Senate). In Slovakia, even when
Smer commanded a majority (during its stint in government from 2012
to 2016), it did not attack democratic institutions in a concerted way. On
the other hand, when politics recoils and careens back in a liberal direction,
grassroots protest and institutional pushback do not translate into a
permanent reset. The Slovakian coalition government’s new players—
many of which are top-down, personalistic parties—appear vulnerable
to capture by vested interests, and in some cases these parties are cultivating
anticorruption agendas framed along populist lines. Civic protest
in the Czech Republic has failed to give rise to a coherent liberal political
movement or party, and existing opposition parties are fragmented.
The Southeast Asian experience suggests, however, that even if liberal
and center-right forces were to unite and manage to defeat Babiš, the
result would likely be another transient stage of careening, rather than
immediate substantive democratic renewal.
Democratic Inclusion versus Democratic Stability
Just as apparent backsliding can conceal more complex patterns of careening,
apparent democratic success may conceal problematic tradeoffs,
for instance between democratic inclusion and democratic stability. The
exclusion of sections of the population from full and meaningful democratic
participation is usually seen as uncontroversially bad for democracy.
It is a known risk factor for democratic collapse and a contributor
to poor policy making.28
Exclusion can come in different forms: It can be
based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, or intersections thereof, and can
be enshrined in law or established in practice. Yet forms of exclusion are
not simply minuses to be added to the tally when calculating a country’s
degree of backsliding or backsliding potential. In some circumstances, ex-
76 Journal of Democracy
clusion can function as a stabilization mechanism that sustains functional
democratic institutions and even efficient governance by shielding them
from potentially destabilizing (if democratically invigorating) contestation.
To put it simply, exclusion means that there are fewer actors able to
rock the boat; the entrance of previously excluded voices, despite its clear
desirability from the point of view of an optimal inclusive democracy, can
have destabilizing effects on existing democratic arrangements. Paradoxically,
predictable patterns of political competition that sustain institutional
and policy consensus may be achieved at the expense of a pluralistic
political arena that allows for contestation, challenge, and change.
The Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia—which have large, marginalized
Russophone minorities making up between a quarter and a third of each
national population, and which display patterns of mutually reinforcing
ethnic and social exclusion—provide strong examples of this mechanism
at work. By most accounts and per all major democracy indices, Latvia
and Estonia have remained very successful democratizers. Indeed, Estonia
(with Slovenia) is often ranked the highest performer among the EU’s
postcommunist member states, and Latvia is not far behind.29
Nonetheless,
their state- and democracy-building efforts were led by ethnic-majority
elites who enshrined collective advantages establishing ethnic Estonian
and Latvian “titular” populations as the sole legitimate proprietors of the
state, above and sometimes against the sizeable Russian-speaking minori-
ties.30
Exclusionary citizenship laws left out a sizable portion of Estonia’s
and Latvia’s Russian-speakers, and with a steady stream of policies aimed
at defending the small Baltic languages, language has remained a highly
politicized issue and a key social cleavage that shapes party politics.
Upon independence, the mass disenfranchisement of Russian-speakers
through citizenship laws minimized contestation and debate over
forms of democratic transition and Europeanization. The resulting
exclusionary democratic settlement, which limits the influence of the
Russian-speaking minority over policy making, was further crystallized
through language legislation and by party political dynamics that preserved
the majority elite’s grip on power. In a context where Russianspeakers
were on average more working-class and left-leaning in their
economic outlook, economic-policy discussions that cast hard-hitting
neoliberal reforms as ethical imperatives further reduced the scope for
debate, while maintaining a certain degree of stability and predictabil-
ity.31
In Latvia, despite a volatile party system characterized by frequent
electoral booms and busts for newcomer (often populist) parties, parties
new and old always regroup on the Latvian side of the ethnic divide
when forming governing coalitions—excluding the large “Russian” party
Harmony. In Estonia, the minority-friendly (but Estonian-led) Center
Party until very recently was similarly excluded from coalition-building.
Seen through the lens of a tradeoff between inclusion and stability,
Estonia and Latvia appear to have attained their status as regional leaders
77Licia Cianetti and Seán Hanley
in democratization not despite, but because of this pattern of exclusion.
Rather than endangering their democratic stability, it has underpinned
this stability and shaped the way these democracies work by cementing
majority elites’ control over policy making. Over the years, minorities
have mobilized (particularly in Latvia) and have even extracted concessions,
especially when backed by strong international pressure. However,
majority elites have managed to remain “democracy’s gatekeepers,”
legislating on minority-sensitive issues such as language and education
as well as on economic policy with little in the way of opposition.
The logic of the backsliding paradigm would lead us to label Estonia
and Latvia either as progressing (with some hiccups) toward consolidation
or, in light of the success of nationalist far-right parties and their inclusion
in governing coalitions, as facing some risk of democratic back-
sliding.32
Consideration of tradeoffs, however, reveals the limits of this
view: Classifying Estonia and Latvia as “normal” or even consolidating
democracies obscures the ways in which ethnic and social exclusion are
embedded in their institutions, with serious implications for democratic
quality. At the same time, classifying them as backsliders is also misleading.
In both countries, far-right parties’ electoral success, illiberal
ideas, and participation in governing coalitions are not new and do not
in practice subvert existing democratic arrangements. While social and
ethnonationalist exclusion are hardly good for democracy, in contexts
where they are foundational—part of the normal rules of the game—
they do not necessarily threaten stability.
In Estonia, recent developments suggest that the long-established tradeoff
between inclusion and stability may soon be upset by growing polarization:
The Center Party now leads an unlikely coalition government
with the “establishment” nationalist Pro Patria and the far-right nationalist
EKRE. Even here, however, a shift to careening—with this dynamic
pitting a rebranded, populist, and less minority-friendly Center Party
against the liberal center-right Reform—might prove a better conceptual
framework than backsliding for understanding patterns of change.
Refreshing Our Analytical Toolkit
The notion of democratic backsliding has coalesced into a clear concept:
slow, formally legal descent into a hybrid regime, orchestrated
by power-concentrating elected leaders in a relatively predictable sequence.
In countries such as Hungary and Poland, this concept captures
a disturbing reality. However, even in a region that is genuinely experiencing
sharp democratic decline (as is the case in East-Central Europe),
the tendency to read all recent (un)democratic developments through the
lens of “backsliding” obscures crucial dynamics of tradeoffs, fluctuation,
and sideways movement. While the picture that emerges in EastCentral
Europe is far from rosy, most states in the region do not fit
78 Journal of Democracy
the backsliding paradigm. All unhappy democracies are, to paraphrase
Tolstoy, unhappy in their own ways.
We need to better understand these intermediate patterns, of which we
have sketched only two, and to do so we need to develop a more diverse
conceptual toolkit. We will, in particular, need to think about processes
of change that are more complex than progress or regression along a continuum
of regimes. The type of patterns we have highlighted might sustain
themselves over extended periods, but they are better seen as openended
processes rather than fixed outcomes. In a country such as Estonia,
stability bought at the price of social and ethnic exclusion may at some
point morph into careening. In turn, a dynamic of careening may give
way to one of textbook backsliding—though in a case such as the Czech
Republic, a reworked form of technocratic populism or even a renewal
that kick-starts democratic consolidation is equally plausible. Political
scientists will, in particular, need to think hard about conceptualizing
and identifying the tipping points that bring about such changes of state.
Rethinking along these lines could also carry policy implications. In
contexts that match up closely with the backsliding paradigm and its stylized
division between prodemocracy and authoritarian-minded actors,
prioritizing civic resistance and the defense of independent institutions
to impede would-be autocrats and boost democrats must of course be a
priority. However, for countries whose dynamics follow ambiguous and
intermediate patterns of the kind sketched here, a wider set of responses,
going beyond the formulation of a general antipopulist playbook, may
need to be developed to support liberal-democratic development. This is
true as much for older, troubled democracies as for younger democracies
in regions such as East-Central Europe. If intermediate syndromes
are more than mere stepping stones on the way to paradigmatic backsliding,
then different strategies of democracy promotion will be needed to
address these cases—strategies that openly recognize the uncomfortable
normative and political choices among stability, inclusivity, and contestation
that practitioners may encounter on the ground. Democracy’s global
malaise is real, but it is also complex; if we are to have any hope of finding
effective remedies, we must redouble our efforts at diagnosis.
NOTES
We thank James Dawson, Ellie Knott, Sherrill Stroschein, Cristian Surubaru, Natasha Wunsch,
and ECPR 2020 co-panelists for comments on previous versions of this article, and
Brian Stone for reading our final draft.
1. Nancy Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” Journal of Democracy 27 (January
2016): 5–19; Larry Diamond, “Democratic Regression in Comparative Perspective: Scope,
Methods, and Causes,” Democratization, online 15 September 2020; Anna Lührmann et al.,
Autocratization Surges—Resistance Grows: Democracy Report 2020 (Gothenburg: V-Dem
Institute, 2020); Elisabeth Bakke and Nick Sitter, “The EU’s Enfants Terribles: Democratic
Backsliding in Central Europe Since 2010,” Perspectives on Politics, online 24 July 2020.
79Licia Cianetti and Seán Hanley
2. Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy
13 (January 2002): 5–21.
3. We define East-Central Europe as comprising the postcommunist countries that
joined the European Union in the 2004, 2007, and 2013 enlargement rounds.
4. Carothers, “End of the Transition Paradigm,” 18.
5. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth
Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 290–294; see also Larry Diamond,
“Is the Third Wave Over?” Journal of Democracy 7 (July 1996): 20–37.
6. Carothers, “End of the Transition Paradigm,” 7.
7. See diagram in Lührmann et al., Autocratization Surges, 11.
8. Carothers, “End of the Transition Paradigm,” 14.
9. See Licia Cianetti, James Dawson, and Seán Hanley, “Rethinking ‘Democratic
Backsliding’ in Central and Eastern Europe—Looking Beyond Hungary and Poland,” East
European Politics 34, no. 3 (2018): 243–56.
10. The Editors, “Is East-Central Europe Backsliding?” Journal of Democracy 18 (October
2007): 5–6; Ivan Krastev, “Is East-Central Europe Backsliding? The Strange Death
of the Liberal Consensus,” Journal of Democracy 18 (October 2007): 56–63.
11. Béla Greskovits, “Rebuilding the Hungarian Right Through Conquering Civil Society:
The Civic Circles Movement,” East European Politics 36, no. 2 (2020): 247–66;
Zsolt Enyedi, “Right-Wing Authoritarian Innovations in Central and Eastern Europe,”
East European Politics 36, no. 3 (2020): 363–77.
12. “East-Central and Southeast Europe: Illiberal Drift,” in Bertelsmann Stiftung, ed.,
Transformation Index BTI 2018: Governance in International Comparison (Gütersloh:
Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2018): 84–92.
13. For example, reviewing the V-Dem dataset, Ben Stanley identifies Poland, Hungary,
and the Czech Republic as backsliders (“Backsliding Away? The Quality of Democracy
in Central and Eastern Europe,” Journal of Contemporary European Research 15, no.
4 [2019]: 343–53); Valeriya Mechkova, Anna Lührmann, and Staffan I. Lindberg identify
only Poland and Hungary (“How Much Democratic Backsliding?” Journal of Democracy
28 [October 2017]: 162–69); Lindberg finds that Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Lithuania
deteriorated sufficiently to downgrade from “liberal” to “electoral” democracy (“The
Nature of Democratic Backsliding in Europe,” Carnegie Europe, 24 July 2018, https://
carnegieeurope.eu/2018/07/24/nature-of-democratic-backsliding-in-europe-pub-76868);
Lührmann and Lindberg find three episodes of “democratic erosion” in CEE: Hungary
(2010–17), Poland (2013–17), and Croatia (2013–17) (“A Third Wave of Autocratization
Is Here: What Is New About It?” Democratization 26, no. 7 (2019): 1095–113).
14. Antoaneta L. Dimitrova, “The Uncertain Road to Sustainable Democracy: Elite
Coalitions, Citizen Protests and the Prospects of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe,”
East European Politics 34, no. 3 (2018): 260. On these issues see also Grigorij Meseznikov,
“Slovak Corruption: Enemy of Democracy, Ally of Extremism.” Balkan Insight,
16 December 2019, https://balkaninsight.com/2019/12/16/slovak-corruption-enemy-ofdemocracy-ally-of-extremism;
Radosveta Vassileva, “Is Bulgaria the EU’s Next Rule of
Law Crisis?” EUobserver, 12 September 2018.
15. David Runciman, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from
World War I to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
16. Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” 8.
80 Journal of Democracy
17. See for example Jan-Werner Müller, “Eastern Europe Goes South,” Foreign Affairs
(March –April 2014): 14–19; Eszter Zalan, “How to Build an Illiberal Democracy in
the EU,” EUobserver, 8 January 2016; Amanda B. Edgell et al., “An Update on Pandemic
Backsliding: Democracy Four Months After the Beginning of the Covid-19 Pandemic,”
V-Dem Institute Policy Brief No. 24, 30 June 2020.
18. Diamond, “Democratic Regression,” 5.
19. See for example Scott Mainwaring and Fernando Bizzarro, “The Fates of ThirdWave
Democracies,” Journal of Democracy 30 (January 2019): 99.
20. Dan Slater, “Democratic Careening,” World Politics 65 (October 2013): 730.
21. Sonja Grimm and Julia Leininger, “Not All Good Things Go Together: Conflicting
Objectives in Democracy Promotion,” Democratization 19, no. 3 (2012): 391–414.
22. Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq, “Democracy’s Near Misses,” Journal of Democracy
29 (October 2018): 16–30.
23. Slater, “Democratic Careening,” 730; Lenka Bustikova and Petra Guasti, “The
Illiberal Turn or Swerve in Central Europe?” Politics and Governance 5, no. 4 (2017):
166–76; see also Michael Bernhard, “Chronic Instability and the Limits of Path Dependence,”
Perspectives on Politics 13 (December 2015): 976.
24. Slater, “Democratic Careening,” 730.
25. Lührmann and Lindberg, Autocratization Surges; Sarah Repucci, Freedom in the
World 2020: A Leaderless Struggle for Democracy, https://freedomhouse.org/report/free-
dom-world/2020/leaderless-struggle-democracy.
26. Veronika Stoyanova, Ideology and Social Protests in Eastern Europe: Beyond the
Transition’s Liberal Consensus (New York: Routledge, 2018).
27. Seán Hanley and Milada Anna Vachudova, “Understanding the Illiberal Turn: Democratic
Backsliding in the Czech Republic,” East European Politics 34, no. 3 (2018): 276–96.
28. Luca Tomini, When Democracies Collapse: Assessing Transitions to Non-Democratic
Regimes in the Contemporary World (New York: Routledge, 2018); Jane Mansbridge,
“Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A Contingent
‘Yes,’” Journal of Politics 61 (August 1999): 628–57.
29. Their Freedom in the World scores have remained largely unchanged in recent
years, with Estonia at 94 on a 100-point scale in every report since 2017, and Latvia at 87
from 2017 to 2019, rising to 89 in 2020. Both countries’ liberal democracy index scores in
V-Dem since 1990 make them regional leaders.
30. Licia Cianetti, The Quality of Divided Democracies: Minority Inclusion, Exclusion,
and Representation in the New Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019).
31. Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits, Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012); Licia Cianetti, “Consolidated Technocratic
and Ethnic Hollowness, but No Backsliding: Reassessing Europeanisation in Estonia and
Latvia,” East European Politics 34, no. 3 (2018): 317–36.
32. See for example Béla Greskovits, “The Hollowing and Backsliding of Democracy
in East Central Europe,” Global Policy 6 (June 2015): 28–37.