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Annual Review of Political Science

Volume 27, 2024

Theories of Democratic Backsliding

  • Edoardo Grillo1, Zhaotian Luo2, Monika Nalepa2 and Carlo Prato3
  • 1Department of Economics and Management, University of Padova, Padova, Italy 2Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA; email: [email protected] 3Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
  • Vol. 27:381-400 (Volume publication date July 2024)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on April 18, 2024
  • Copyright © 2024 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

We review recent contributions to the modeling of democratic backsliding. We organize these theories according to () the source of constraints on the executive (vertical or horizontal restrainers) and () the target of backsliding (electoral manipulation or executive aggrandizement), and then use these concepts to build a scaffold for a meta-model of democratic backsliding. This meta-model allows us to describe and compare the premises and insights of this scholarship. We further apply our two-dimensional classification to more than 30 empirical papers and show how these theories can guide research design. We conclude by highlighting open issues for future research.

Keyword(s): democratic backsliding, electoral manipulation, executive aggrandizement, formal modeling
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2024-07-29
2025-06-22
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Theories of Democratic Backsliding
Annual Review of Political Science 27, 381 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-041322-025352
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-041322-025352
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-041322-025352
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