Explaining backsliding: populism and citizens’ discontent

The causes of democratic backsliding and the rise of populist parties are among the most widely debated issues in the political and social sciences.Footnote ¹² Many studies blame the rise of populism and democratic erosion on structural factors that have led to widespread citizen discontent, such as rising economic insecurity, immigration and cultural change.Footnote ¹³ Others point to factors that have made existing political institutions and elites less responsive to citizens’ demands. Examples are the diminished role of political parties, the growth of technocracy, and the European Union’s democratic deficit. Still others point to the specific actions and decisions of key political actors as the main problem. Here studies have named factors such as the failure by mainstream parties to offer clear political alternatives, populist parties having moderated their positions, and the choices of politicians in making certain issues, such as migration, more salient than others.

The analyses by Issacharoff and Bartels offer competing diagnoses. Samuel Issacharoff’s Democracy Unmoored emphasises structural causes. Issacharoff’s core argument is that populism erodes democracy by undermining the institutions that make it function. Populism is commonly described as a form of politics that pits the supposedly homogeneous and morally pure people against a supposedly corrupt elite and demands that politics should express the will of the people.Footnote ¹⁴ Issacharoff follows such assessments.Footnote ¹⁵ In this sense he echoes Jan-Werner Müller, who argues that populism is ‘a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified – but … ultimately fictional – people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior’.Footnote ¹⁶ Müller sees populism as antithetical to liberal democracy, because it denies pluralism: ‘populists claim that they, and only they, represent the people’.Footnote ¹⁷ Populists therefore leave no room for legitimate opposition.

Issacharoff adds that populists favour a ‘politics of immediacy’.Footnote ¹⁸ That is, they oppose existing institutions and norms as impediments to realising ‘the will of the people’. Populists remain dependent on electoral support. Yet Issacharoff claims that their politics transforms democracies by leading to ‘caudillo command’. This is a Latin American term for a type of ‘personalist control, without party or political institutions, dependent on individual charismatic authority both with the populace and the military’.Footnote ¹⁹ What results from such rule is ‘not a totalitarian state but a dizzying array of deals and favors’.Footnote ²⁰ Democracy is eroded through a series of small incremental steps based on ordinary legal mechanisms.Footnote ²¹ The author names the intimidation of the opposition through defamation lawsuits or withholding state contracts for opponents as examples.

Issacharoff finds that a common feature of illiberal populists globally is their assault on institutions and other sites of resistance to autocratic rule.Footnote ²² One part is the manipulation of the electoral process itself through measures such as the redrawing of electoral districts for partisan advantage, the restriction of voter eligibility and the capture of institutions for the administration of elections. Another part of the populists’ assault on institutions is their attack on state bureaucracies. Populists turn civil services into political bodies. Such efforts are commonly coupled to an attack on other sources of resistance like non-governmental organisations, independent media and universities.

To explain the rise of populist politics, Issacharoff starts with economic causes. Economic factors play an important role, the author claims, as it was material well-being in post-World War II democracies that ‘sustained a complicated faith of working people in Western democracy’.Footnote ²³ In his view, democracy depends on a ‘collective sense of upward economic possibility’, which is currently faltering, because working-class people in advanced industrial countries are confronted with increased economic inequality and an erosion of their real wages.Footnote ²⁴

The problem of economic insecurity is compounded by a ‘sense of cultural estrangement from one’s own country’ for a significant part of citizens.Footnote ²⁵ This sense of estrangement results from challenges to ‘the traditional order, including changed gender roles, increased racial and ethnic pluralism, and urbanization’, but especially from immigration.Footnote ²⁶ Together with rising economic insecurity, cultural estrangement has created a divide between a more cosmopolitan-oriented part of the population that thrives in current conditions, and those who fear being left behind. These factors have created fertile ground for the rise of anti-immigrant populist parties and help explain why mainstream parties, social democrats in particular, have lost their traditional hold on political power.

Issacharoff adds that democracies’ growing inability to govern effectively is a further source of discontent that fuels the rise of populism. Historically, democracies have outperformed other systems of government, but this success story is ‘under serious challenge’, especially compared to a country like China.Footnote ²⁷ He finds fault with the diminished role of legislatures, which have ceased to be the central site for deliberation and decision-making in contemporary democratic systems. Part of the problem is that the mechanisms for ensuring participation and accountability also make it vulnerable to blockage by powerful interest groups. Where legislatures fail, executives fill the void, which leads to a rise in ‘executive unilateralism, as well as ‘increased dependence on administrative law to set policy, and the central checking role of the courts as restraints on presidentialism – even in formally parliamentary systems’.Footnote ²⁸ What is more, the incapacity of governments to ‘get things done’, leads to further calls to concentrate power in the executive, and to abandon democratic deliberation.

Issacharoff argues that a key reason for legislative failure, and the troubles of democracy more generally, lies in the reduced role of political parties.Footnote ²⁹ Parties are crucial in a democracy to effectively coordinate and translate the inevitably fragmented and abstract preferences of citizens into government policy. This task necessarily requires compromises among different groups.Footnote ³⁰ However, parties have lost ‘their participatory quality’ across a range of consolidated democracies, due to decreased party membership and party identification.Footnote ³¹ Moreover, parties have lost their connection to other organisations that formed a key basis for their support, such as labour unions in the case of social-democratic parties, or chambers of commerce in the case of centre-right parties.Footnote ³² In the US, specifically, Issacharoff finds that the parties have lost their grip over ‘funds, government employment, and the ability to stand for office’.Footnote ³³ This has allowed candidates to wrestle themselves free of party discipline. The result is ‘a politics of free agency formed largely around the personae of individuals or momentary issues, devoid of a sustaining institutional presence’.Footnote ³⁴

To address the populist challenge to democracy, Issacharoff considers that these various causes must be tackled. The final part of his book thus develops several proposals to strengthen governmental capacity, reinvigorate legislatures and limit executive power, as well as revitalise political parties, although these proposals are focused on the US context specifically. A key question, however, is whether Issacharoff’s initial analysis of the root causes of democratic backsliding is correct. To this issue I turn in the next section by comparing his work with the analysis of Larry Bartels.

A different account: top-down erosion

Issacharoff offers an intuitive narrative about the rise of populism that reflects other views in the literature but finds a contrast in Larry Bartels’ Democracy Erodes from the Top. Focusing on Europe, Bartels criticises the widespread idea that the contemporary troubles of democracy are driven by a change in sentiments among citizens. Europe’s citizens have not lost faith in democratic institutions or their governments. Neither have they become deeply unsatisfied with the economy, nor more critical of the EU or immigration, nor suddenly more ‘populist’ in their political views. Bartels finds instead that citizens’ attitudes and preferences on such topics have proved remarkably stable over time. European public opinion consequently provides no evidence for a crisis of democracy: ‘whatever ails European democracy, it is not public opinion – or, if it is, the ailment is of such long standing that the notion of a “crisis” hardly seems apt’.Footnote ³⁵

Bartels bases his analysis primarily on data from the European Social Survey. This survey has tracked the political and social views of European citizens since 2002. A key advantage of the European Social Survey is its consistency in monitoring public opinion across most European countries over time, enabling a longitudinal analysis of Europeans’ political views.Footnote ³⁶

Bartels’ findings challenge common wisdom on the contemporary crisis of democracy. One of the book’s chapters discusses the euro crisis and finds ‘greatly exaggerated’ the claim that this crisis led to a ‘“popular backlash” against the EU’.Footnote ³⁷ Support for the EU received a blow, but it was a modest one and support quickly bounced back. After the euro crisis, public support for the EU was generally ‘just as strong after the crisis as it had been before it began’.Footnote ³⁸ In fact Bartels tells us that support for the EU by 2019 ‘was higher than at any point since at least 2004’.Footnote ³⁹ Bartels also finds that public satisfaction with the economy did fall during the crisis, especially in countries that were hard hit, but quickly recovered. Average European citizens’ satisfaction with the economy was higher in the 2018-2019 period than prior to the crisis.Footnote ⁴⁰ Moreover, dissatisfaction with economic conditions hardly plays a role in explaining the populist vote.Footnote ⁴¹

Bartels offers a similar assessment when it comes to Europe’s supposed ‘immigration crisis’. While the rise of right-wing populist parties suggests otherwise, public opinion regarding immigrants and immigration has proved remarkably stable, despite immigration surges in 2015 and 2016. Europeans have not become more negative about immigration, but ‘significantly more favorable’ on average.Footnote ⁴² This is the result largely because of ‘generational replacement of older cohorts by young people with more welcoming attitudes’.Footnote ⁴³ Bartels also notes that the places where citizens did become more critical of immigration ‘were mostly conservative, highly religious countries in which prominent nationalist political leaders mounted vigorous anti-immigrant campaigns – most notably, Orbán’s Hungary’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Still, even there, Bartels finds that the generational replacement effect was at work, ‘making it likely that anti-immigrant sentiment will fade with time, as it already has in other parts of Europe’.Footnote ⁴⁵

According to Bartels, the role of political leaders is a key factor in how citizens view immigration. The anti-immigrant campaigns of Viktor Orbán made Hungarians view immigration more unfavourably during this time. Similarly, Bartels argues that outsized media attention to anti-immigrant backlash creates the impression of a political crisis on the issue, rather than that such attention reflects citizens’ real anger.Footnote ⁴⁶ He claims that Angela Merkel’s welcoming approach to refugees in 2015, on the other hand, meant that support for immigration remained high in Germany compared to other European countries. It should be added, though, that the example appears outdated after the more recent rise of the Alternative für Deutschland and the emergence of immigration as a central issue in German politics.

Bartels’ story is similar when it comes to citizens’ views on the functioning democratic politics. Also here, the idea of a crisis is ‘greatly overblown’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Citizens’ satisfaction with democracy has remained robust. Europeans felt as content with the state of democracy on average in 2019 as they did in 2002. Neither did they lose trust in their politicians or parliaments. Instead, this trust remained ‘virtually unchanged’.Footnote ⁴⁸

In fact, one of Bartels’ key claims is that citizens are far less important in democracies than common wisdom holds. The contemporary focus on public opinion ‘as a barometer of democratic functioning is itself fundamentally misguided’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Bartels criticises the ‘folk theory’ of democracy, which is the idea that in a democracy the people rule, or that at least citizens’ preferences constitute ‘the primary force animating democratic politics’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Public opinion is instead a fictitious power and an ‘elitist account’ of democracy provides a more adequate picture of how democratic politics works in practice.

A puzzle that emerges from Bartels’ analysis is what then explains the rise of populist parties in European politics, if it is not citizens’ dissatisfaction with migration, their misgivings about economic conditions in the wake of the euro crisis, or their loss of faith in democratic institutions? Bartels first nuances the idea that right-wing populists have been thriving in Europe. A selective focus on surges of electoral support for populist parties in specific countries does not provide the full picture. On average populist parties have won 12.4% of the vote in the 2010s. This presents only a modest increase from the vote share of around 10% these parties received in the 1980s and 1990s. Crucially, Bartels writes, insofar as populist parties have gained support, their gains are not the result of shifting public opinion. It is rather the improved ability of populist parties to effectively translate already existing sentiments into electoral gains that explains their success, often helped not just by the charisma of their leaders, but also through ‘over-the-top media coverage, and the stumbles and scandals of mainstream competitors’.Footnote ⁵¹

The bad news is that populist views are rather widespread in Europe. Bartels finds that there has long been ‘a reservoir of right-wing populist sentiment’ among European citizens.Footnote ⁵² Such support for right-wing populism is best explained by conservative ideology and anti-immigrant views, although anti-EU views, distrust in politics and discontent with democracy also play a role.Footnote ⁵³

So far, populists have only translated a slice of this fertile breeding ground into gains at the ballot box. Still Bartels maintains that it would be ‘unduly alarmist’ to see this reservoir of populist views as ‘enough to constitute a crisis of democracy’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Dissatisfied citizens have always been a part of democracies, and there is always room for political actors to mobilise that dissatisfaction. Quoting leading populism scholar Cas Mudde, Bartels holds that populism by itself remains ‘a relatively minor nuisance in West European democracies’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The ‘real threat’ to democracy ‘is that political elites will harness the ubiquitous dissatisfactions of democratic politics in support of antidemocratic rule’.Footnote ⁵⁶

The implication of Bartels’ analysis is that the health and stability of contemporary democracy crucially depend on the behaviour of political elites. As the title of his book summarises the point: democracy erodes from the top. Bartels argues that citizens did not vote for authoritarianism in either Hungary or Poland, the two key instances of democratic erosion in Europe. Orbán’s Fidesz and Kaczynski’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) were ‘rather conventional-looking conservative parties’ that ‘embarked upon the project of “illiberal democracy”’ only after they had gained power.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ordinary citizens in these countries were ‘little more than passive bystanders to the erosion of democracy’.Footnote ⁵⁸ They were voting for what could then still be considered mainstream conservative political parties against incumbents plagued by scandals. Moreover, these countries’ electoral systems translated limited election victories into outsized political power, enabling Fidesz and PiS to dismantle democratic checks and balances. A nuance in this story, which Bartels acknowledges, is that Hungarian and Polish citizens continued to vote for Fidesz and PiS in large numbers even after these parties had embarked upon their illiberal projects. Ordinary citizens tolerated democratic erosion, and the ruling parties retained broad public support.

What explains citizens’ relative passivity when faced with democratic erosion? Bartels maintains that ordinary people care much more about outcomes than procedure. As long as governments provide safety and economic well-being, ordinary citizens will tolerate the undemocratic behaviour of politicians in power.Footnote ⁵⁹ He supports this claim with evidence that Hungarians and Polish citizens felt considerably better off under the Fidesz and Law and Justice-led governments.Footnote ⁶⁰ Not only did their satisfaction with the economy increase significantly, they also became more content with how their national governments and even with how democratic politics functioned. This reading is consistent with accounts that point to Hungary’s stagnating economy, widespread corruption, and failing public services as key factors in Fidesz’s recent electoral defeat by Péter Magyar’s Tisza party.Footnote ⁶¹

Bartels’ analysis contrasts with that of Issacharoff, though the two analyses are not wholly incompatible. The emphasis Bartels puts on the role of political elites connects to Issacharoff’s concerns about the demise of political parties as intermediary institutions. If we accept Bartels’ view that political elites are crucial for the stability of democratic systems, the structures in which politicians operate and translate citizens’ views into policy are crucial. The argument that political parties no longer adequately serve as a bridge between citizens and the political process provides a possible explanation for why populist actors have been able to step into the fray. Also, if ordinary citizens prioritise outcomes over democratic procedures, enhancing the governing capacity of democratic systems and improving their ability to deliver economic security are possible ways to help strengthen public support for democracy and mainstream parties.

It may also be possible to reconcile Issacharoff and Bartels’ analysis at a deeper level. Although citizens’ attitudes on key policy issues are largely stable, it could still be true that factors such as economic insecurity, perceptions of economic decline or cultural change trigger citizens to vote for populist parties. While not having transformed citizens’ views, the structural factors named by Issacharoff may still play a crucial role in affecting how citizens act on those preferences in elections. This reading could also explain why other studies do find that economic insecurity has increased the populist vote. A recent systematic review and meta analysis of the link between economic insecurity and populism found, for example, that economic insecurity explains around a third of the recent growth in populism.Footnote ⁶² This review even went so far as to conclude that ‘the existing scholarship presents enough evidence to conclusively disperse any doubts about the causal role of economic insecurity in the populist backlash against globalization’.Footnote ⁶³ Recent academic work shows, however, that debate on this issue continues.Footnote ⁶⁴

Should we accept Bartels’ broader claim that the stability of democracy depends crucially on elites? Even if political elites play a vital role for democratic stability, it seems hard to get around the fact that citizens remain key actors in democracies. Citizens can prevent undemocratic politicians from gaining office if they refuse to vote for them. Equally, they can vote them out of office, like the Polish people did with the PiS government or Brazilians did with Bolsonaro. For this reason, it remains crucially important to better understand why citizens are often rather passive bystanders to democratic erosion, as well as how their commitment and willingness to stand up for democracy can be improved.

Bartels also says little on what produces pro-democratic politicians. He emphasises that identifying and analysing ‘the forces shaping the behavior of powerful political actors in democratic systems’ is indeed a key task, but not one at the forefront of contemporary political science.Footnote ⁶⁵ In his view ‘[a] more forthrightly “elitist” theory of democratic crisis’ would help to better understand the forces shaping political behaviour.Footnote ⁶⁶ The development of such a theory lies outside the scope of his book, which he characterises as ‘essentially, a ground-clearing effort, not a construction project’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Furthermore, if so much depends on responsible political elites, a crucial question is what these elites should do to maintain a healthy democracy faced with the rise of populist politics. The answer is not straightforward, as I discuss below. Yet before turning to that issue I first consider how these books assess the role of constitutional checks on political institutions as a way to halt democratic decay.

Do constitutions and courts protect against democratic decay?

Whether one thinks democracy erodes chiefly through the actions of political elites or as the result of widespread citizen discontent, the challenges of populism and democratic backsliding appear to affirm that democracies require some form of protection against themselves. Authoritarians can come to power by democratic means, threaten fundamental rights and erode the democratic institutions that underpin freedom and equality. The lesson that several post-World War II European democracies took from the experience with fascism was that democracy had to be disciplined by legal means. Constitutional courts were a crucial linchpin in this limitation of parliamentary powers.Footnote ⁶⁸

The legitimacy of such counter-majoritarian institutions remains a hotly debated issue in constitutional theory today. Political constitutionalists stress that the democratic process is a better way to achieve the values of constitutionalism, offering political equality and respect for citizens’ dignity.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, those who have argued that constitutional checks on democratic power and judicial review are crucial to save us against potentially tyrannical majorities, may see their position revindicated in the rise of illiberal politics. Still political constitutionalists have countered that constitutional safeguards and courts are but fragile barriers to democratic decay and can be abused to entrench authoritarian politics.Footnote ⁷⁰

The books under discussion give reason to question the efficacy of constitutional safeguards and courts as barriers to democratic decay. Of the three books discussed, Samuel Issacharoff devotes most attention to the role of courts as an answer to backsliding.Footnote ⁷¹ He finds that judicial interventions can serve as a temporary ‘brake’ that can delay backsliding, but not as a permanent fix. There is a wide range of countries in which courts have sought to preserve democratic competition, with some even going so far as striking down constitutional amendments to preserve democratic government. An example is the Indian Supreme Court’s reliance on the basic structure doctrine to prevent constitutional amendments that would have eroded electoral democracy.Footnote ⁷² Another example is the Colombian Constitutional Court, which struck down as undemocratic a constitutional amendment that would have allowed then-President Álvaro Uribe to run for a third term.Footnote ⁷³

Issacharoff also tells us, however, that where courts take up the task of preserving democracy, they invite ‘efforts to compromise these institutions and to subvert them into instruments of “abusive judicial review”’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Whether a constitutional court will be ‘a hopeful bastion of protection for political accountability’ appears to require that political competition already exists.Footnote ⁷⁵ If such competition is not in place ‘the constitutional courts can be captured through appointments by the executive or simply overwhelmed by the realities of centralized political power’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Issacharoff suggests that relying on the ordinary courts to check the undemocratic actions of populists may be more effective. Compared to specialised constitutional courts, the ordinary judicial system is more difficult to capture.Footnote ⁷⁷

In this respect, Issacharoff considers that there is a link between populism and corruption, which can be tackled through the ordinary justice system.Footnote ⁷⁸ He defines corruption as ‘the violation of well-established prohibitions on the personal enrichment of public officials as a result of trading power for money’.Footnote ⁷⁹ One reason why Issacharoff considers that populist governance results in corruption, is that populists focus on ‘immediate gratification’ and tend to hand out special favours to loyalists. This approach to governing fits with how populists divide the world into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’. The short-term orientation of populists also fits with the anti-institutional nature of their politics, especially their aversion to parties. Parties provide a longer-term horizon to politics, as they have ‘a life beyond the careers of individual politicians of today’.Footnote ⁸⁰ When that longer-term horizon disappears, the danger of corruption looms, because ‘[w]hen the only aim is immediate election, the bounties of the state can be claimed to reward the faithful’.Footnote ⁸¹

Besides being less prone to capture, Issacharoff also suggests that ordinary courts are more likely to stand above the fray of polarisation where politicians are charged on grounds of corruption. Where politicians are prosecuted for acts that stand in close connection with the role of their office, court proceedings are more likely to be seen as partisan attacks. Conversely, where officeholders are charged on the more mundane grounds of corruption, they target the failing of the individual, not the office, so Issacharoff claims. In this vein, he maintains that the prosecution of Donald Trump in civil or criminal proceedings ‘for vote tampering’ or ‘tax evasion and financial fraud’ separates ‘the person of President Trump from the office he held’.Footnote ⁸²

Yet Issacharoff’s idea that corruption cases halt democratic erosion, remains but a suggestion. He does not offer a systematic body of evidence that supports the idea, beyond discussing the case of South Africa, where anti-corruption rulings helped bring down President Jacob Zuma. Issacharoff also acknowledges that corruption is not a feature of populism everywhere, as it was absent in Poland under the PiS government.Footnote ⁸³

It is also uncertain whether courts will avoid being seen as partisan when ruling on corruption charges. When Marine Le Pen was convicted in 2025 for embezzlement of EU funds, populists from across the world decried the judgment as a political attempt to silence her. Le Pen herself spoke of a ‘political decision’, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán posted ‘Je suis Marine!’ on social media and Donald Trump called the ruling ‘another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going so far as to put that Opponent in prison’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The example suggests that we should not pin our hopes on the ordinary courts in the face of authoritarianism. Like constitutional courts, they appear vulnerable.

The limits of constitutions and courts as effective bulwarks against democratic decay also emerges in the other two books. Bartels does suggest that in some political systems it will be more difficult for authoritarian leaders to have their way. The fragmentation of political power in the US creates a significant obstacle against authoritarianism, while in Hungary and Poland the electoral system gave authoritarian actors outsized political majorities compared to their electoral support. But overall, Bartels argues that ‘[t]he key, it seems, is not the institutions themselves, but the character and values of the political leaders operating within and upon them’.Footnote ⁸⁵

The significance of political elites upholding democratic norms is a recurring theme in the work of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Their more recent Tyranny of the Minority builds on their earlier bestseller How Democracies Die.Footnote ⁸⁶ Democracies die, Levitsky and Ziblatt claimed in that earlier work, when political elites fail to respect unwritten democratic norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. Democracy requires that political actors treat their political adversaries as legitimate opponents – mutual toleration – and use their legal powers with restraint – institutional forbearance. Where politicians start to treat each other as enemies to be defeated at all costs and interpret the law accordingly, democracy is hard to sustain.

In Tyranny of the Minority Levitsky and Ziblatt reaffirm that democracy depends on political elites’ respect for basic democratic norms. Drawing on Juan Linz, they argue that democracy requires political leaders to reject violence, accept electoral outcomes, and break with antidemocratic forces. When mainstream politicians tolerate authoritarian actors, they not only lend legitimacy to extremism but also help shield it from accountability.Footnote ⁸⁷ For example, French conservatives tolerated anti-democratic extremists in the 1930s and so mortally wounded French democracy. Conversely, when Spanish soldiers tried to overthrow Spain’s then recently restored democracy in 1981, political leaders across the spectrum, along with King Juan Carlos, united to defend democratic institutions, leading to the coup’s failure. Democracy was saved.Footnote ⁸⁸

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s emphasis on the importance of unwritten democratic norms is connected to their view that ‘[e]ven well-designed constitutions cannot, by themselves, guarantee democracy’.Footnote ⁸⁹ In How Democracies Die the authors noted how several countries in Latin America, as well as the Philippines, modelled their constitutions on that of the US. It did not prevent them from falling into dictatorship or civil war.

A major reason for the limitations of constitutional law in maintaining democracy lies in the fact that constitutional rules are always incomplete. They inevitably contain gaps and are open to different interpretations. What is more, politicians can kill democracy through constitutional hardball: ‘behavior that broadly conforms to the letter of the law but deliberately undermines its spirit’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Selective enforcement of the law to target rivals, as well as abuse of impeachment or emergency powers are all examples. Particularly dangerous is that ‘politicians do not openly violate the law; their hands remain clean’.Footnote ⁹¹

For those reasons Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote in How Democracies Die that ‘[a]ll successful democracies rely on informal rules that, though not found in the constitution or any laws, are widely known and respected’.Footnote ⁹² Yet, as I discuss in the next section, this emphasis on informal norms or ‘guardrails’ raises complicated questions in and of itself.

Democratic norms and norm breaking

While one can readily acknowledge the limitations of law and courts in sustaining democracy, a political pro-democratic norm consensus appears fragile as well. A crucial contemporary challenge is that authoritarian-minded political actors are also undermining informal democratic norms. How should political elites deal with politicians that tend towards undemocratic behaviour and what can be done to maintain a democratic norm consensus? The answer is less straightforward than an emphasis on political elite behaviour suggests.

Both Bartels and Levitsky and Ziblatt refer to the importance of what Nancy Bermeo has called politicians’ ‘distancing capacity’ from anti-democratic actors. In her historical study of democratic breakdowns in Europe during the inter-war period and those in Latin America during the later 20^th century, Bermeo concludes that the capacity of politicians and parties to condemn and prosecute political violence and lawlessness proved crucial for democracy’s survival.Footnote ⁹³ Bartels adds that ‘[t]he ability and willingness of mainstream political elites to “distance” themselves from political extremism is important even in times and places where that extremism does not rise to the level of violence and lawlessness’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt named various ways in which mainstream parties can distance themselves from anti-democratic actors: excluding them from the ranks of their own parties; avoiding alliances with them; and forming coalitions with pro-democratic parties to defeat authoritarian actors.Footnote ⁹⁵

Bartels is not shy to point out ‘some clear failures of Europe’s mainstream politicians to distance themselves from extremists’.Footnote ⁹⁶ These include the unwillingness of Europe’s conservative politicians, at least for a long time, to condemn Orbán’s dismantling of constitutional democracy in Hungary. Bartels also discusses the exclusion of the Sweden Democrats by mainstream political parties in Sweden as a more positive, although now outdated, example of distancing.

Yet Bartels acknowledges that ‘distancing’ may only work well as a short-term strategy. In the long term, barring populist parties from power, or keeping toxic issues off the political agenda, risks alienating sections of the population for feeling unfairly and undemocratically excluded.Footnote ⁹⁷ Levitsky and Ziblatt similarly argue that strategies of containment and militant democracy offer only short-term remedies. Containment, which unites democratic parties in broad coalitions to isolate authoritarian actors, succeeded in interwar Belgium and Finland. Yet when such coalitions persist, they risk stifling political competition and appearing ‘collusive, exclusionary, and illegitimate’, potentially fuelling populist backlash.Footnote ⁹⁸ Militant democracy – using legal tools to exclude and prosecute antidemocratic forces – faces similar limitations and is prone to abuse.Footnote ⁹⁹

Mainstream parties have been able to maintain a norm-consensus against radical right parties in some countries. Political scientist Léonie de Jonge discusses how radical right parties in the Belgian region of Wallonia failed to gain electoral support, while they did succeed in neighbouring Flanders. De Jonge argues that this difference can be explained in part by the maintenance of a strong elite norm consensus against the radical right in Wallonia. There, political parties have upheld a strict political cordon sanitaire, and the media have refused to give coverage to radical right parties. The Flemish media have instead become more accommodative over time and the political cordon sanitaire in that region has proven to be less firm.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Nonetheless, once such a norm-consensus is broken, it is not so clear how it can be effectively restored. A complication in this respect is that populist parties themselves have moderated their positions and have often deliberately severed links with more extremist groups.Footnote ¹⁰¹ When norm violations by populist politicians are ambiguous, it is harder to condemn them effectively and gradual norm erosion is a more likely result.Footnote ¹⁰²

A related problem with the emphasis on informal norms, pointed out by Tushnet and Bugarič, is that informal norms are also incomplete and subject to disagreement.Footnote ¹⁰³ Levitsky and Ziblatt stress the incompleteness of written law and turn to informal norms as an answer. Yet it is unclear why informal norms would not face the same problem. Especially as, without a written text, it is complex to identify which informal norms are in place, and there can always be discussion about how and whether such norms apply to new circumstances.

Perhaps the most fundamental challenge to an emphasis on informal norms, however, is the argument that breaking such norms is not always bad for democracy. In fact, some norm-breaking might even be required to further democratic causes. As political theorist Corey Robin put this idea sharply in response to Levitsky and Ziblatt: ‘Democracy is Norm Erosion’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Robin claimed that norms are only democratically valuable when linked to democratic features of a political system, while norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance do not benefit democracy if implemented in an undemocratic context.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt themselves pointed towards this difficulty in admitting that ‘America’s democratic norms … were born in a context of exclusion’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It was polarisation over slavery that first destroyed the norm of mutual toleration in US politics during the mid-nineteenth century. Following the Civil War, mutual toleration became reestablished ‘only after the issue of racial equality was removed from the political agenda’ and Southern Democrats had been allowed to strip away the democratic rights of African Americans.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In turn, Levitsky and Ziblatt noted how the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act would ‘fully democratize the United States’, but ‘also polarize it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Robin argues that, in these historical contexts, it is not possible to qualify mutual toleration and institutional forbearance as genuinely democratic. While respecting norms might have fostered stability, breaking them played a crucial role in achieving a more complete democracy.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The question of whether furthering the cause of democracy requires upholding or breaking norms underpinning the political system, is familiar in the contemporary context of the United States and Poland.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In response to norm-violation under the first Trump Presidency, Jan-Werner Müller argued that Democrats should respond by playing hardball: ‘When autocratic legalists use the letter of the law to violate the spirit of democratic institutions, their opponents should do the opposite’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Examples would be bringing Senate proceedings to a halt or packing the Supreme Court when Democrats returned to power. A concrete instance of such hardball tactics was California’s 2025 redrawing of its congressional map in response to Republican gerrymandering in Texas.Footnote ¹¹² In Poland, scholars have debated whether the new government, after its 2023 election victory, may legitimately bend the law in order to restore democracy and the rule of law.Footnote ¹¹³ Some have even gone so far as arguing that the Tusk government should violate constitutional rules in order to achieve this purpose such as by extinguishing the Constitutional Tribunal – obeying the spirit of the law, perhaps, if not the letter.Footnote ¹¹⁴

In How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt warned against the use of such hardball tactics for seemingly democratic purposes. In their view, such strategies would be counterproductive, scaring away moderates and offering those in power a justification to suppress the opposition.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Moreover, if successful, such hardball tactics would only offer a Pyrrhic victory, leaving ‘a democracy stripped of its remaining protective guardrails’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Yet in Tyranny of the Minority Levitsky and Ziblatt shift their focus to the legal structures that enable or block majority rule. More specifically, they argue that enabling democratic majorities to govern is the best way to safeguard democracy. This leads them to advocate constitutional change in the US, given the American Constitution’s minoritarian biases. In advocating for constitutional change, however, the authors may have ended up closer to endorsing the position that hardball is necessary to save American democracy.

Democratising democracy?

The central argument of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s Tyranny of the Minority is that the United States stands on the brink of becoming ‘a genuinely multiracial democracy’, but that its constitutional architecture enables minority rule –

allowing partisan minorities to block, and even impose, policies against the will of majorities.Footnote ¹¹⁷ These countermajoritarian features of the US Constitution have enabled democratic erosion, rather than being a clear safeguard for democracy. Not the tyranny of the majority, but the tyranny of the minority is America’s key democratic problem.

When a political system makes minority rule possible, democracy’s mechanism of self-correction no longer works satisfactorily. In a well-functioning democracy competitive elections compel parties to respond to voters’ demands – or face electoral defeat. But where the electoral system allows parties to win that do not represent popular majorities, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that ‘the incentive to adapt’ is weakened.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In their view, it is this feature of the US political system that helps to explain the radicalisation of the Republican Party. The party has been pushed by its base in an extreme direction, and electoral arrangements have provided insufficient incentives for the party to change course. The Republican Party has ended up as an anti-democratic party: unwilling to accept defeat in elections, condoning violent behaviour, and failing to break with antidemocratic forces.

As the authors find fault with the US Constitution itself and key features of the political system, it leads them to a different appreciation of the informal norms underpinning that system. In How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt were highly critical of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 plan to pack the Supreme Court. Yet in Tyranny of the Minority they describe the effort more sympathetically as aimed at correcting the excessive countermajoritarianism of the court.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In How Democracies Die they described the Senate filibuster – which effectively requires a three-fifths supermajority for most legislation to pass in the Senate – as a rule promoting deliberation and protection for minority parties in the Senate, even if Republicans came to abuse it as a tool in their hyper-partisan politics.Footnote ¹²⁰ In Tyranny of the Minority, however, they qualify the filibuster as a problematic feature of minority rule.

Would the undemocratic features of the US constitutional system and its underlying informal norms not justify hardball tactics to save democracy? The authors stop short of endorsing that option. Yet, as Sam Rosenfeld notes in an insightful review of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book, such hardball tactics may be precisely what achieving democratic reforms requires:

Levitsky and Ziblatt trace the roots of the Republican Party’s march away from democracy back to the civil rights revolution. As Democrats embraced civil rights, Republicans capitalised on white backlash through the ‘Southern Strategy’, gradually becoming the party of racial conservatism. This shift helped them dominate presidential elections from 1968 to 1988. Yet as the US grew more diverse – non-Hispanic whites declined from 88% of the population in 1950 to 58% in 2020 – the Republican Party increasingly became a minority party.Footnote ¹²²

Growing diversity in American society increased support for immigration and multiculturalism – posing a challenge to a Republican Party shaped by the Southern Strategy and increasingly defined by racial resentment. Rather than broadening its base, the party doubled down on voter suppression tactics to maintain power, such as ID laws and curtailed early voting in various states where they controlled the legislature. The Republican Party became captured by a racial conservative base of White Christians who perceived America’s growing diversity as an existential threat. The demographic shift upset the traditional American racial hierarchy and ignited fears that whites would become a minority in their own country – an issue Donald Trump successfully capitalised on to secure the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.

Yet the US retains several problematic countermajoritarian rules that enable minority rule. The Electoral College favours less populous states and can award the presidency to candidates who lose the national popular vote. The Senate, with equal representation for each state, heavily overrepresents rural areas. The filibuster further entrenches minority power by requiring a three-fifths supermajority for most legislation to pass in the Senate. These features were not the result of principled design but stemmed largely from compromises with small states and protections for slavery during the Constitution’s framing.

The undemocratic effects of the US system’s countermajoritarian features have deepened over time. Urbanisation has exacerbated the imbalance between rural and populous states: in 1790, a Delaware voter had 13 times more Senate influence than one in Virginia; by 2000, a Wyoming voter had nearly 70 times the influence of a Californian.Footnote ¹²³ As Democrats became the party of urban voters and Republicans that of those in rural areas, the system began to systematically favour Republican interests. Between 1992 and 2020, Republican presidential candidates lost the popular vote in all but one election yet won the presidency three times.Footnote ¹²⁴ Senate representation is even more skewed: states with less than 20% of the population can form a Senate majority, and just 11% can block legislation via filibuster.Footnote ¹²⁵ These dynamics also shape the Supreme Court: justices can be nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators representing a minority of Americans.Footnote ¹²⁶ Additional distortions stem from first-past-the-post voting and gerrymandering, which produce ‘manufactured majorities’ that thwart majority opinion on issues like abortion, gun control, and economic inequality.Footnote ¹²⁷

The US stands out among mature democracies for retaining extensive mechanisms of minority rule, Levitsky and Ziblatt write. Most other democracies dismantled countermajoritarian features during the twentieth century: expanding suffrage; reforming electoral systems to reflect majority preferences; overhauling unelected upper chambers; and removing supermajority thresholds. These changes, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, ‘helped give rise to modern democracy’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Judicial review remained the exception, but even on that issue, most countries mitigated its countermajoritarian effects through term limits or mandatory retirement for constitutional judges.

While the US did introduce key democratic reforms in the twentieth century – such as direct Senate elections and equal-sized voting districts – core features of minority rule remained intact, including the Electoral College, first-past-the-post voting, Senate malapportionment, and the filibuster. Levitsky and Ziblatt therefore label the US ‘a democratic laggard’, pointing to the extraordinary difficulty of constitutional amendment as a major barrier to institutional renewal.Footnote ¹²⁹

Levitsky and Ziblatt claim that saving American democracy ultimately requires constitutional reform. Quoting Jane Addams – ‘The cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy’ – they contend that elections are the best way to defeat extremist minorities.Footnote ¹³⁰ But for that to happen it is necessary that ‘popular majorities actually prevail in elections’.Footnote ¹³¹ In its current set-up ‘America’s excessively counter-majoritarian institutions reinforce extremism, empower authoritarian minorities, and threaten minority rule’.Footnote ¹³² The answer is ‘to double down on democracy’, by ‘dismantling spheres of undue minority protection and empowering majorities at all levels of government’.Footnote ¹³³

More specifically, the authors propose three key reforms.Footnote ¹³⁴ First, they call for more robust protection of the right to vote. Voting registration in the US should be automatic and the authors propose a constitutional amendment to enshrine the right to vote in the US Constitution, which would provide a basis to challenge voting restrictions. Second, they seek to ensure electoral outcomes reflect majority preferences. This requires replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote, reforming the Senate to better reflect population distribution, as well as replacing first-past-the-post voting system for the House of Representatives and state legislatures with a system of proportional representation in larger electoral districts. Third, they propose weakening entrenched countermajoritarian institutions – abolishing the Senate filibuster, easing constitutional amendment procedures, and imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices, while stopping short of eliminating judicial review altogether. It should be noted, however, that with Trump currently in power, the authors would likely not favour the immediate introduction of these reforms.

A challenge to these proposals is that many require the US Constitution to be amended – an endeavour that faces nearly insurmountable obstacles. It would also require Americans to acknowledge that their revered Constitution has become a key obstacle to democracy in America. The authors readily acknowledge the scale of this challenge but argue that reform is impossible unless ideas are first articulated and debated. They also point out that significant constitutional changes, such as ending slavery or introducing equal women suffrage, were considered highly unrealistic when first conceived.Footnote ¹³⁵

In this respect, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest we can learn from ‘moments of democratic progress’ in the history of the US.Footnote ¹³⁶ These moments include the constitutional amendments and laws that gave political rights to African Americans during Reconstruction, as well as the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Lessons from these episodes, the authors tell us, are that change depended on ‘sustained social movements’ that can alter ‘the political calculus’.Footnote ¹³⁷

What the authors recall as well, however, is how long democratic constitutional change took. The constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote in the US took 52 years to materialise. The Seventeenth Amendment that provided for the direct election of the US Senate ‘was preceded by decades of failed initiatives’.Footnote ¹³⁸ If saving American democracy urgently depends on constitutional reform, this history offers little cause for optimism.

Yet even if Levitsky and Ziblatt’s proposals would be taken up, one can wonder whether they would be sufficient to decisively defeat anti-democratic actors. While their proposed democratic reforms are perhaps radical in the US context, they seem rather conventional when viewed through a European lens. After all, the proposed reforms would bring the US closer to the sort of political system that several European democracies already have in place. Still the problem of populism also exists in these countries, raising the question of whether Levitsky and Ziblatt’s proposed reforms would really achieve enough. For example, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that uniting parties in a large pro-democratic front to isolate authoritarian actors would be only a short-term remedy. Yet there is reason to doubt that electoral competition, on its own, can effectively substitute for such containment as a safeguard of democracy. Right-wing populist parties may fail to achieve outright political majorities in proportional systems but remain a force to be reckoned with. Excluding them from political power often necessitates cross-spectrum coalitions. In the Netherlands, for example, the exclusion of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party led to successive centrist coalitions. Some argue that this development narrowed political choice and boosted support for more radical alternatives, precisely as Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest.Footnote ¹³⁹ Yet admitting populists into government would ignore their warning that tolerating semi-loyal democrats risks democratic collapse.

What is more, one can ask how much Levitsky and Ziblatt’s overall diagnosis is challenged by Trump’s 2024 presidential election victory. In 2024 Trump did win the popular vote and increased his vote share among key demographics, including Americans under thirty, Hispanic voters and black men.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ These uncomfortable facts suggest that Trump’s extreme brand of politics proved popular with voters.

Does responding to populism and backsliding therefore require more fundamental democratic reform? Mark Tushnet and Bojan Bugarič, for example, argue that democracy can be improved by complementing representative democracy with referenda and democratic innovations, such as deliberative polls.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Rather than seeing populism necessarily as a threat to liberal democracy, Tushnet and Bugarič implore us to consider it as pointing towards the shortcomings of modern representative democracy that forms of direct democracy go some way in addressing. They contend that ‘ordinary people can productively bring local knowledge and common sense to bear on matters of public policy’.Footnote ¹⁴² Referenda and democratic innovations can ‘capitalize on local knowledge more effectively than the standard institutions of representative democracy do while preserving the benefits that flow from specialized knowledge not widely held among ordinary people’.Footnote ¹⁴³

Larry Bartels’ Democracy Erodes from the Top, however, casts doubt on the claim that democratic innovations provide an answer to populism and backsliding. Bartels finds no evidence that overall levels of trust in political institutions or satisfaction with democracy have significantly declined in Europe over the past two decades.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ This analysis challenges the view that backsliding and the rise of populism are due to popular dissatisfaction with representative democracy. Consequently, it is unclear that democratic innovations offer an effective response to contemporary populism and democratic decline, whatever other merits such innovations may have.

Concluding reflections

The three books reviewed in this essay – Issacharoff’s Democracy Unmoored, Bartels’ Democracy Erodes from the Top and Levitsky and Ziblatt’s Tyranny of the Minority – are unlikely to end academic debates over the causes of democratic backsliding and on how to respond to it. Discussion will likely continue on the extent to which the rise of populism and global democratic decay stems from factors such as rising economic insecurity, immigration and cultural change. Bartels’ work, however, offers a well-developed argument that political elites have a key role in ensuring democratic stability.

What remains unclear is how a pro-democratic elite consensus can be maintained or restored once eroded. Still required is a better understanding of the factors that produce pro-democratic politicians, as well as the factors that have led political elites in several countries to depart from democratic principles and norms. The three books discussed do converge in expressing some scepticism about the role of law: constitutional courts and constitutional limits on political power appear but a short-term barrier to democratic erosion. Reforming political systems to better enable majorities to rule – the solution proposed by Levitsky and Ziblatt for the US – could work in theory. Yet it also appears utopian in the current American context and leaves the problem that populist parties will likely remain a feature of contemporary democracies for the foreseeable future, now that they have learned to translate long-existing sentiments into electoral success.

Perhaps scholars should shift their attention from a focus on grand designs or the root causes of democratic decay to the more mundane issue of what works: how backsliding can be effectively resisted when it happens; how democracy can be restored following a period of regression; and how citizens’ support for democracy can be strengthened.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ For those tasks it will help to understand how existing constitutional democracies can better live up to their professed ideals. The notion of backsliding should not mislead one into thinking there ever was a perfect democratic status quo. Improving the governing capacity of democracies, increasing economic security, addressing inequality, and enhancing the responsiveness of political institutions are ways to make democratic systems live up to their underlying promises. Doing so may make it easier to defend them when challenged, even if such reforms will not remove all sources of discontent.