Democratic backsliding — the state-led debilitation or elimination of the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy — changed character after the Cold War: open-ended military coups, executive coups, and blatant election-day fraud declined, while promissory coups, executive aggrandizement, and strategic electoral manipulation rose. Nancy Bermeo's 'On Democratic Backsliding' (2016) documented this shift, observed that successor dictatorships have become shorter-lived and less repressive and that the current mix of backsliding is more reversible, and designated an open question that remains unresolved: how are these positive trends in successor-regime durability and authoritarian intensity related to the changes in the varieties of backsliding? The same concluding discussion raises two related challenges that frame the open question without being co-mandatory components of it: a scholarly challenge — knowing more about how the slide backward into hybridity takes place, given that incremental erosion is legitimated through the very institutions democracy promoters prioritize, often with popular support and ambiguous legality — and a policy challenge, since backsliding can sometimes occur with the intention of deepening rather than destroying democracy, hardest when its supporters have a credible democratizing agenda of their own. Substantial post-2016 progress documents gradual, legal autocratization and formal and case-based theories of erosion, but no systematic account links varieties of backsliding to successor-regime durability and repressive intensity.

Background

Democratic backsliding is the state-led debilitation or elimination of the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy, as distinct from a one-shot illegal overthrow. In a highly influential 2016 article in the Journal of Democracy, Nancy Bermeo showed that the mix of backsliding forms has changed since the Cold War: open-ended coups d'état (military seizures of power with no promised return to elections), executive coups or autogolpes (freely elected chief executives suspending the constitution outright), and blatant election-day vote fraud are all declining, while three newer forms are rising. Promissory coups are coups whose leaders explicitly promise to hold elections and restore a better democracy; Bermeo showed that the share of successful coups framed this way rose from roughly 35 percent to 85 percent after 1990, yet post-coup elections rarely restored the pre-coup level of freedom. Executive aggrandizement is the piecemeal weakening of checks on executive power through formally legal channels — constitutional amendments, referenda, legislative supermajorities — without replacing the executive, as in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Ecuador under Rafael Correa. Strategic electoral manipulation is the tilting of the electoral playing field long before election day (harassment of the opposition, disqualification of candidates, skewed media access) in ways designed to avoid detection by international observers. Bermeo also documented two 'positive' trends in outcomes: when backsliding does culminate in breakdown, today's successor autocracies are on average shorter-lived and less repressive than their Cold War-era predecessors (a smaller share remains nondemocratic for five or more years, and their mean Polity score — the standard -10 to +10 expert-coded index of regime type — is higher in the first five years), and the current mix of backsliding is more easily reversed. Bermeo's concluding discussion designates one explicit open question and raises two related challenges. The open question is an empirical linkage: are the milder successor-regime outcomes a consequence of the shift toward incremental varieties of backsliding, a common cause, or an artifact of measurement? In her words, 'How these positive trends are related to changes in the varieties of backsliding remains an open question' (pp. 17–18). The first related challenge is scholarly and processual: how does gradual institutional erosion unfold — 'piece by piece, often with popular support and ambiguous legitimacy' — given that each step is typically legal or contested in its interpretation; as Bermeo writes, 'we need to know more about how the slide backward into hybridity takes place' (p. 14). The second related challenge is policy-facing and concerns a vexing ambiguity: backsliding 'can sometimes occur with the intention of deepening rather than destroying democracy,' and the policy challenge may be greatest when supporters of backsliding have a credible democratizing agenda of their own — when the impetus for institutional change comes from marginalized groups that rise up to demand a more inclusive and responsive democratic model, as indigenous groups in the Andean region did during the era of neoliberal reform; Bermeo's answer is that responses must consider what motivates the citizens involved and that each country's experience requires an individual, historically informed response (p. 16). Later literature often labels this second challenge the problem of distinguishing destructive backsliding from 'contested democratic deepening,' a term that does not appear in Bermeo's article. Since 2016 the field has built substantial machinery around these questions. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project provides expert-coded indices such as the Electoral Democracy Index (EDI), enabling episode-based designs that identify connected periods of decline; the Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) framework codes 680 episodes from 1900–2019 into four types, explicitly including democratic deepening in democracies alongside liberalization in autocracies and autocratic regression. Lührmann and Lindberg (2019) used V-Dem data to establish that the post-1994 'third wave' of autocratization predominantly affects democracies, that a strategy they call democratic erosion (legal accession to power followed by gradual undercutting of democratic norms) accounts for about 70 percent of autocratization episodes beginning in democracies in 1994–2017, and that the pace and depth of decline are milder than in earlier waves. Related concepts include democratic careening (Slater 2013), the unstable alternation of democratic deepening and authoritarian backlash that does not sit on a simple democracy–autocracy continuum. Formal theorists have modeled backsliding as strategic interaction between executives and the institutions that constrain them (vertical restraints such as voters, horizontal restraints such as courts), and an active measurement debate questions whether waves and episodes are well identified at all. What no later work supplies is the account Bermeo's open question calls for: a systematic tying of the varieties of backsliding to successor-regime durability and authoritarian intensity. Nor does later work settle the deepening-versus-destroying ambiguity she raised, which the source itself frames as a policy challenge requiring individual, historically informed responses rather than as a demand for a general classification framework.

Problem Statement

The open question as stated in the conclusion of Bermeo (2016, pp. 17–18): Given that open-ended coups, executive coups and blatant election-day fraud are declining while promissory coups, executive aggrandizement and strategic electoral manipulation are increasing, and given that successor regimes after democratic breakdown are now on average shorter-lived and less authoritarian than in the past — how are these positive trends related to the changes in the varieties of democratic backsliding? In Bermeo's words: 'How these positive trends are related to changes in the varieties of backsliding remains an open question.' The question asks for a systematic empirical or theoretical account of the relationship between the variety (or mix) of backsliding through which a democracy declines and the durability and repressive intensity of the resulting successor regime — for instance, determining whether the milder successor outcomes are caused by the shift toward incremental varieties, share common causes with it, or reflect measurement artifacts. These alternatives are illustrative rather than exhaustive, but the linkage is a general, not single-case, one: relating the variety (or mix) of backsliding through which a democracy declines to the durability and repressive intensity of the resulting successor regime across more than one variety of backsliding, and specifying which relation is claimed to hold.

Two related challenges from the same concluding discussion provide context for the linkage question but are not co-mandatory completion components of it. First, a scholarly challenge (p. 14): 'we need to know more about how the slide backward into hybridity takes place' — how democracies slide backward into hybridity (regimes mixing democratic and authoritarian features) piece by piece, typically through legal or ambiguously legitimate steps and often with popular support, so that neither domestic nor international actors easily recognize or condemn it. Second, a policy challenge (p. 16): backsliding 'can sometimes occur with the intention of deepening rather than destroying democracy,' and the challenge may be greatest when supporters of backsliding have a credible democratizing agenda of their own, arising when the impetus for institutional change comes from marginalized groups that rise up to demand a more inclusive and responsive democratic model; the source treats this ambiguity as requiring individual, historically informed responses that consider what motivates the citizens involved, not as a demand for a validated general framework with explicit criteria.

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