Varieties of contemporary democratic breakdown and regression: A comparative analysis

Tomini, Luca; Wagemann, Claudius

doi:10.1111/1475-6765.12244

Cited by 46 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…1 See for example Altman and Perez-Liñan 2017, Bermeo 2016, Cassini and Tomini 2018, Coppedge 2017, Diamond 2015, Haggard and Kaufmann 2016, Levitsky and Ziblatt 2017, Mounk 2018, Runciman 2018, Snyder 2017, Wagemann and Tomini 2017and Waldner and Lust 2018 Our notion of democracy is based on Dahl's (1971Dahl's ( , 1998 famous conceptualization of electoral democracy as 'polyarchy', namely clean elections, freedom of association, universal suffrage, an elected executive, as well as freedom of expression and alternative sources of information.…”

Section: How Wide and Deep Does The Current Autocratization Trend Cut?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Keeping the Democratic Façade: Contemporary Autocratization as a Game of Deception

Lührmann

Lindberg

2018

SSRN Journal

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Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualization and measurement of democracy. The headquarters -the V-Dem Institute -is based at the University of Gothenburg with 17 staff. The project includes a worldwide team with six Principal Investigators, 14 Project Managers, 30 Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 3,000 Country Experts. The V-Dem project is one of the largest ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to: University of Gothenburg * For helpful comments, we thank Scott Gates, Kyle Marquardt, Jan Teorell, and participants of the APSA General Conference (8/2017), the V-Dem Research conference (5/2018) the post-doctoral working group at the University of Gothenburg and the HU/Princeton workshop on constitutionalism, dissent and resistance (6/2018), where earlier versions of this paper were discussed. In particular, we are grateful to Rick Morgen who helped to better operationalize our idea of autocratization episodes. We also benefited immensely from Philipp Tönjes' skillful research assistance. This research was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M13-0559:1, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, Grant 2013.0166, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; ERC Consolidator Grant 724191, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; as well as by internal grants from the Vice-Chancellor's office, the Dean of the College of Social Sciences, and the Department of Political Science at University of Gothenburg. 2 AbstractLess than thirty years after Fukuyama and others declared liberal democracy's eternal dominance, a third wave of autocratization is manifest. Gradual declines of democratic regime attributes characterize contemporary autocratization. Yet, we lack the appropriate conceptual and empirical tools to diagnose and compare such elusive processes. Addressing that gap, this paper provides the first comprehensive empirical overview of all autocratization episodes from 1900 to today based on data from the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem). We demonstrate that a third wave of autocratization is indeed unfolding. It mainly affects democracies with gradual setbacks under a legal façade. While this is a cause for concern, the historical perspective presented in this paper shows that panic is not warranted: the current declines are relatively mild and the global share of democratic countries remains close to its all-time high. As it was premature to announce the "end of history" in 1992, it is premature to proclaim the "end of democracy" now.3

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Section: How Wide and Deep Does The Current Autocratization Trend Cut?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Keeping the Democratic Façade: Contemporary Autocratization as a Game of Deception

Lührmann

Lindberg

2018

SSRN Journal

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“…However, the clearest CEE cases of backsliding -Hungary and Poland -lie outside the main causal patterns observed globally in the Third Wave era: a slide from democracy into a hybrid or authoritarian regime type is usually underpinned by sharp social inequality compounded by ethnic divisions (Tomini 2017, Tomini andWagemann 2017). Patterns of ECE backsliding, therefore, need to be explained in more regionally specific terms.…”

Section: / Multiple (Un)democratic Trajectories Across Ceementioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking “democratic backsliding” in Central and Eastern Europe – looking beyond Hungary and Poland

Cianetti¹,

Dawson²,

Hanley³

2020

Rethinking ‘Democratic Backsliding’ in Central and Eastern Europe

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Over the past decade, a scholarly consensus has emerged that that democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is deteriorating (Kochenov 2008, Sedelmeier 2014), a trend often subsumed under the label 'backsliding' 1. However, this emergent paradigm has focused disproportionately on the two most dramatic cases: Hungary and Poland (Müller 2014, Herman 2016, Kelemen and Orenstein 2016) and on the symptoms-executive aggrandisement and illiberal nationalism-that are most characteristic of the trajectories of those states. In bringing together contributions in this special issue, we attempt to correct for the empirical and thematic biases of this paradigm by examining democratic trajectories through the prism of cases other than Hungary and Poland in both Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and in nearby postcommunist regions, the West Balkans and the former Soviet Union (FSU). We use the term CEE as a matter of convention, to refer to post-communist states that are EU members, which-partly in consequence of EU accession-had been considered to be among the post-communist world's more successful and stable democracies. 2 The CEE subregion has been one of the main focuses of the "backsliding" agenda, as democratic deterioration was unexpected and weakly explained by existing scholarship. Introducing

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“…4 Positive scores on the six attributes indicated here are individually necessary and together provide sufficient conditions to classify a regime as democratic. Moreover, to view democratization as a long-lasting process (Tilly, 2007;Tomini and Wagemann, 2018), the minimum standards required to code a country as democratic have to be met in at least two consecutive general elections for the executive. 5 Although more stringent criteria are used here than in many other studies, 71 countries were found to be democratic in 2015 and 62 for the whole period between 2000 and 2015.…”

Section: Autocracy-to-autocracy Transitionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Subsequently, with the end of this wave in the early 1990s, the persistence of authoritarianism and the more recent spectre of a democratic rollback have profoundly reshaped the debate. Attention has thus switched to changes within authoritarian regimes in a context of apparent continuity (Schlumberger, 2007;Way, 2010), authoritarian rule in particular places (Hill, 2016), democratic recession or backsliding (for different views, see Diamond, 2015;Levitsky and Way, 2015;Bermeo, 2016;Mechkova et al, 2017;Abramowitz and Repucci, 2018;Waldner and Lust, 2018), democratic breakdown (Svolik, 2015;Tomini and Wagemann, 2018) and autocratization (Cassani and Tomini, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The stubbornness of authoritarianism: autocracy-to-autocracy transitions in the world between 2000 and 2015

Panta

2019

Riv. ital. sci. polit.

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Whilst much of the contemporary debate on regime change remains concentrated on transitions to and from democracy, this paper focuses on autocracy-to-autocracy transitions, a relatively understudied but particularly relevant phenomenon. Building on an updated typology of non-democratic regimes and through a qualitative case-by-case assessment, the present paper identifies 21 transitions from one dictatorship to another, out of 32 cases of autocratic breakdown during the 2000–15 period. Hence, after the fall of a dictatorship, the installation of a new authoritarian regime was almost twice as likely as democratization. Accordingly, the paper focuses on the 21 recorded autocracy-to-autocracy transitions and examines in which non-democratic regimes a transition from an autocracy to another is more likely to occur, which peculiar forms of authoritarian rule tend to be installed, and the specific ways in which the dismantling of the previous existing authoritarian rule is achieved.

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Varieties of contemporary democratic breakdown and regression: A comparative analysis

Cited by 46 publications

References 67 publications

Keeping the Democratic Façade: Contemporary Autocratization as a Game of Deception

Keeping the Democratic Façade: Contemporary Autocratization as a Game of Deception

Rethinking “democratic backsliding” in Central and Eastern Europe – looking beyond Hungary and Poland

The stubbornness of authoritarianism: autocracy-to-autocracy transitions in the world between 2000 and 2015

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