#authortarian

JeremyNewberger

How Democracy can disappear and change our lives.

Democratic erosion from within has become one of the most consequential political developments of the twenty‑first century, marked not by sudden coups or violent seizures of power but by a gradual, legally mediated decline in which elected leaders and partisan institutions undermine the foundations of constitutional governance. Comparative political research shows that modern backsliding typically begins when incumbents—often enjoying genuine electoral legitimacy—use their authority to weaken institutional constraints, delegitimize opponents, and manipulate the rules of political competition while maintaining the outward appearance of democratic procedure. This pattern, visible in cases ranging from interwar Europe to contemporary Hungary, India, and Venezuela, reveals that democratic decline is most dangerous when it is incremental and cloaked in legality rather than openly authoritarian.

A central mechanism of internal democratic decay is the erosion of what scholars call “democratic guardrails,” including judicial independence, a professional civil service, autonomous electoral commissions, and a free press. These institutions are designed to constrain executive power, but they are vulnerable to partisan capture when incumbents frame oversight as obstruction or elite sabotage. Once courts are packed, regulatory agencies politicized, and independent media delegitimized, the institutional architecture that sustains democracy becomes hollowed out. The system may still hold elections and maintain constitutional language, but its capacity to check abuses of power is significantly weakened.

Extreme political polarization accelerates this process by transforming political disagreement into existential conflict. When citizens view their opponents not as legitimate rivals but as threats to the nation, they become more willing to tolerate norm violations committed by their preferred leaders. This erosion of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance—two norms historically essential to democratic stability—creates a political environment in which zero‑sum conflict replaces compromise. Legislatures become arenas of partisan warfare, courts are attacked as biased actors, and the media landscape fractures into mutually hostile information ecosystems, making it increasingly difficult for citizens to agree on basic facts or hold leaders accountable.

At the same time, economic inequality, corruption, and declining trust in public institutions create fertile ground for illiberal appeals that promise order, national renewal, or protection from perceived internal enemies. Leaders exploit these grievances to justify expansions of executive power, often framing their actions as necessary responses to crisis. Digital technologies further intensify these dynamics by amplifying misinformation, enabling targeted harassment of journalists and opposition figures, and weakening the shared civic culture that democratic deliberation requires. As public trust erodes, citizens become more susceptible to narratives that portray democratic institutions as ineffective or corrupt, thereby legitimizing further concentration of power.

Over time, these dynamics produce a cumulative transformation in which democratic institutions remain formally intact but lose their substantive capacity to constrain power. Scholars describe this outcome as “competitive authoritarianism,” a hybrid regime in which elections occur but incumbents enjoy structural advantages so significant that genuine alternation of power becomes unlikely. The central insight of contemporary research is that democracies rarely die in a single moment; rather, they are hollowed out incrementally through legal reforms, norm violations, and institutional manipulation that appear individually minor but collectively alter the character of the regime. This pattern underscores that the most significant threats to democracy arise not from external enemies but from internal actors who exploit democratic mechanisms to erode them, revealing that the survival of democracy depends not only on constitutional design but on the resilience of democratic norms, the strength of independent institutions, and the willingness of citizens to defend them even when doing so conflicts with short‑term partisan interests.

Bermeo, Nancy. “On Democratic Backsliding.” Journal of Democracy, vol. 27, no. 1, 2016, pp. 5–19.

Freedom House. Freedom in the World 2024: The Mounting Damage of Democratic Erosion. Freedom House, 2024.

Huq, Aziz Z., and Tom Ginsburg. “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy.” UCLA Law Review, vol. 65, 2017, pp. 78–169.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Svolik, Milan W.. The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge University Press, 2012.