Democracies Are Not ‘Backsliding’

It seems 2023 will be another dismal year for democracy.

There have been several coups in Africa. Tunisia – long touted as the Arab Spring’s one democratic success story – has seen the consolidation of an authoritarian (and xenophobic) regime.

And Donald Trump appears on course to secure the Republican nomination for the 2024 US presidential election.

How we describe such developments matters. Words have consequences.

Unfortunately, some of the language used to analyse the global democratic recession has precisely the wrong effect.

The term ‘backsliding’ – which has contributed to a curious passivity among pro-democracy forces – is a case in point.

The world is not moving ‘back’ toward some regimes familiar from the past, nor even toward dynamics and circumstances we have seen before and can easily comprehend.

Conventional wisdom has long been that while democracies make mistakes, they learn from those missteps and adjust accordingly – a feature that sets them apart from other political systems.

But authoritarians have now shown they, too, can adapt, learning from their own mistakes, those of their antecedents, and their peers.

SPIN DICTATORS

Modern autocrats have devised a new playbook for consolidating, exercising, and maintaining power – one that depends significantly on keeping some trappings of democracy.

As social scientists Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman have shown, these so-called spin dictators are a far cry from the violent or even genocidal ‘fear dictators’ who dominated the 20th century.

They eschew using overt repression to fortify their positions. They also avoid committing obvious breaches of law, and even deploy the law to achieve their aims, in what scholars call “autocratic legalism”.

These autocrats focus on manipulating public opinion, while weakening the democratic norms and institutions from which they claim to derive their legitimacy.

For example, rather than engage in old-fashioned blunt repression, they might use modern surveillance technologies, such as spyware, to identify possible dissenters.

Spin dictators also fabricate new ‘facts’ on the ground.

For example, far-right populists in Poland and Hungary fooled the European Union for long enough to restructure domestic institutions and change personnel in service of consolidating their own rule.

While undoing this damage is not impossible, it gets harder every day.

This is not to say today’s autocrats are political magicians capable of fooling all the people all the time.

They also make blunders that can endanger their rule, and they hold violence and other means of overt repression in reserve.

Russian president Vladimir Putin had no problem abandoning all pretence of legality or tolerance for dissent after he ordered the invasion of Ukraine.

However, the point remains: We are not simply returning to a kind of authoritarianism we have seen before.

REALITY AND ASSUMPTIONS

If ‘back’ is misleading, so is ‘sliding’.

Much like the phrase “erosion of democracy”, sliding suggests we are dealing with a kind of accident, or even a quasi-natural process.
Many aspiring authoritarians have a plan, and it often includes elements copied from others.

Once Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán demonstrated how to fool the EU and play for time while consolidating his autocracy, others could easily imitate him – as Poland’s ruling party has done.

‘Backsliding’ also suggests the current democratic recession is a linear process.

As Seán Hanley and Licia Cianetti observe, this “risks reproducing, in reverse, the intellectual constraints of the transition paradigm of the 1990s”.
In both cases, it has been assumed everyone is moving inexorably along the same path.

But unjustified optimism (everyone is pursuing more robust democracy) has given way to unjustified pessimism (everyone’s democracy is being “eroded”).

In reality, the world today is not experiencing a comprehensive, let alone inevitable, shift toward autocracy any more than it is experiencing the conclusive rescue of democracy.

The fact that authoritarian populists are sometimes – but hardly always – voted out of power makes this clear.

If we assume democracies are on a linear, practically inescapable, path back to old-style authoritarianism, we will fail to give adequate thought to potential paths out of the new authoritarianism.

AGENDA AWARENESS

Prior to elections with authoritarian incumbents on the ballot, liberal observers are usually clear about their desired outcome; but they rarely offer much of a plan for the day after the vote.

One might attribute this to fatalism: No one really expects power to change hands.

But it might also be a sign of intellectual laziness, with observers assuming one can simply apply off-the-shelf lessons from previous transitions – thus showing scant regard for the novel elements of today’s autocratic systems.

They would do well to acknowledge that the new authoritarians’ supporters may have very different incentives and motivations than those of the communist-era nomenklatura, for instance.

Those with a stake in kleptocratic mafia states and corrupted militaries may well be reluctant to sit down at round tables to negotiate.

Such generalisations – like those based on past experience – might be misleading, but that is the point.

To preserve, restore, or promote democracy globally, we need careful analyses of individual cases, not just broad assumptions about ‘global trends’.

• Jan-Werner Mueller, professor of politics at Princeton University, is the author, most recently, of ‘Democracy Rules’
  – Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023

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