Democratic Decay: Conceptualising an Emerging Research Field

Daly, Tom Gerald

doi:10.1007/s40803-019-00086-2

Cited by 65 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The Czech Republic (Hanley and Vachudova 2018), Romania (Dawson and Muir 2012;Sedelmeier 2014;Iusmen 2015) and Slovenia (Bugarič 2015) are among the new member states that are accused of playing fast and loose with the EU's standards. 2 A plethora of labels have been suggested to capture these events (Daly 2019). Popular descriptors include backsliding, de-democratization, an illiberal turn, and a return to authoritarianism.…”

Section: The Conventional View: Democratic Backsliding and The Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

Ambiguity and interpretive politics in the crisis of European values: evidence from Hungary

Mos

2020

East European Politics

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The European Union, courtesy of Orbán's Fidesz and Kaczyński's Law & Justice, is supposedly experiencing a crisis of values. This article points to two fatal errors in the design of EU values: ambiguity and practical unenforceability. Politicians can exploit these flaws by interpreting ambiguous values in self-serving ways. Based on an analysis of the Hungarian Prime Minister's speeches, it shows that descriptions of Orbán as an unrepentant challenger of EU values miss the mark. Instead, Orbán used the plasticity of EU values to style himself as a pro-European statesman, ready to steer the Union back to its moral roots.

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Section: The Conventional View: Democratic Backsliding and The Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

Ambiguity and interpretive politics in the crisis of European values: evidence from Hungary

Mos

2020

East European Politics

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“…Foa and Mounk’s (2016, 2017) articles have galvanized cross-national statistical research on the fate of democracy, as critics responded to their work (e.g., Alexander & Welzel, 2017; Inglehart, 2016; Norris, 2017; Voeten, 2017; Zilinsky, 2019) and a variety of other studies appeared (e.g., Claassen, 2019; Daly, 2019; Mechkova et al, 2017; Waldner & Lust, 2018). However, results from quantitative research about democratic backsliding and deconsolidation are mixed.…”

Section: The Concept Of Democratization and Democratic Backslidingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their work has drawn attention of many critics (e.g., Alexander & Welzel, 2017;Inglehart, 2016;Norris, 2017;Voeten, 2017;Zilinsky, 2019), and the debate has spurred new research into the early, small, yet troubling signs of potential deconsolidation of democracy. This new research examines democratic deconsolidation as part of the broader "backsliding" movement on the continuum from autocracy to full democracy (e.g., Claassen, 2019;Daly, 2019;Huq, 2018;Waldner & Lust, 2018).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth, Institutional Trust, and Democratic Backsliding

Kwak

Tomescu-Dubrow

Slomczynski

et al. 2020

American Behavioral Scientist

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In recent decades, many countries ranging from quasidemocratic regimes to well-established democracies have faced democratic backsliding. In this study, we draw on Foa and Mounk and other related literature to examine the effects of regime delegitimation on democratic backsliding, focusing on youth’s trust in political institutions—parliament, legal systems, and political parties—relative to trust of the older population. We use an unbalanced panel data set that combines a country-year indicator of liberal democracy from the Varieties of Democracy project with aggregate survey-based measures of absolute and relative institutional trust from the Survey Data Recycling database; the data set covers 46 countries from 2009 to 2017. We find that the ratio of youth’s institutional trust to that of older persons has a substantive effect on the quality of liberal democracy in the future, and that the effect is amplified by the relative size of the youth population.

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“…However, some have rejected an exclusively voluntaristic conception of the term, arguing that we also need to understand the factors which shape the opportunity structures exploited by illiberal entrepreneurs, such as 'fading conditionalities, corruption, and economic crisis' (Dawson and Hanley 2016: 23). If backsliding is an active process, it occurs in contexts of 'democratic decay' (Daly 2019). To understand de-democratisation, we must 'distinguish the causes of vulnerability to backsliding from the proximate causes of actual backsliding' and integrate both supply-side and demand-side factors in our model of de-democratisation (Andersen 2019: 647).…”

Section: Varieties Of De-democratisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Backsliding Away? The Quality of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe

Stanley¹

2019

JCER

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The emergence in Central and Eastern Europe of populist and illiberal political parties, some of which have succeeded in gaining power and implementing controversial reforms, has prompted concern about the condition of democracy in countries of the region and attempts to theorise and explain these changes. Starting from the premise that neither overly negative nor overly positive assessments of democratic quality give an adequate picture of reality, this paper draws upon comparative data measuring several aspects of democracy to identify broad patterns of democratic development in the region. It concludes that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe fall into three broad categories: those where consolidated democracy is currently stable; those where there is clear evidence of backsliding from consolidated democracy; and those where there is evidence of backsliding prior to full consolidation of democracy. These differences notwithstanding, it is clear that the quality and durability of democracy in the region is more fragile and provisional than commonly assumed.

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Democratic Decay: Conceptualising an Emerging Research Field

Cited by 65 publications

References 29 publications

Ambiguity and interpretive politics in the crisis of European values: evidence from Hungary

Ambiguity and interpretive politics in the crisis of European values: evidence from Hungary

Youth, Institutional Trust, and Democratic Backsliding

Backsliding Away? The Quality of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe

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