Following democracy’s global advance in the late twentieth century, recent patterns of democratic “backsliding” have generated extensive scholarly debate. Since backsliding towards autocracy is often the work of elected leaders operating within democratic institutions, it challenges conventional thinking about democratic consolidation, the enforcement of institutional checks and balances, and the reproduction of democratic norms. Drawing insights from classic literature on democratic transitions and consolidation, this volume examines the nature of contemporary threats to democracy, recognizing that the central challenge is not always to induce the compliance of those who lose elections, but rather those who emerge victorious and turn the institutional leverage of incumbency into a source of ongoing competitive advantage. There is, then, both a “loser’s dilemma” and a “winner’s dilemma” embedded in the study of democratic resiliency. Patterns of backsliding have revealed the contingent and potentially contested underpinnings of democratic institutions in any political order, given the presence (whether latent or active) of authoritarian political and cultural currents. Democracy is, therefore, best understood not as a standardized regime template or a static endpoint of political development, but rather as a dialectical frontier that advances ‒ and sometimes recedes ‒ according to the dynamic interplay countervailing forces.

Whether old or new, democracies are fragile. There are no guarantees that they will last. Why? Part of the answer is that democracy is an inherently unfinished project. There is always more political work to do. The institutions that define democratic life, such as a robust civil society, political parties that structure public opinion and voting behavior, and free, fair, and competitive elections, moreover, are just as available to authoritarians, as to democrats. Finally, democracies operate in an international system that supports the spread of dictatorship, as well as democracy.

As explained in Chapter 1, state institutions are inevitably transformed into sites of regime contestation between democratic and autocratic forces when democratic backsliding is threatened or underway. That is especially the case in social and political contexts where exclusionary forms of majoritarian rule or ethnonationalism contest liberal and pluralist civil societies. The challenge for scholars is to identify the conditions under which key institutional sites serve as bastions of democratic accountability and resilience, and how and when these sites can be neutralized or even transformed into weapons of autocratization. Often referred to as “referee institutions” (such as constitutional courts and electoral commissions) and tools of horizontal accountability for checking executive aggrandizement (including ombudsman, investigative bureaus, and information commissions), key state agencies must be sufficiently capacious and nonpartisan to serve as guardrails in times of democratic contestation and regime uncertainty.

Abstract

Why are analysts so surprised by cross-national waves of popular mobilizations against authoritarian rulers? This chapter compares three such waves – the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the colour revolutions in postcommunist Europe and Eurasia, and the Arab uprisings – and develops two complementary lines of explanation. One is the inherent difficulty of making such predictions because of the ability of some short-term events to convert individualized private anger into large-scale public actions. While compelling, this explanation needs to be supplanted with a second one: the tendency of analysts to exaggerate the strength and the durability of authoritarian regimes and rulers.

Waves of Popular Upheavals

Over the last quarter of a century, there have been three cross-national waves of popular mobilizations against authoritarian rulers. The first was in 1989 (more strictly speaking, 1987–1991), when citizens in one regime after another in what was then called the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe rose up in large numbers to demand that their communist rulers leave power. The second was the colour revolutions in post-communist Europe and Eurasia from 1998–2008. In this wave, citizens in collaboration with civil society groups and opposition parties in nine competitive authoritarian regimes in the region – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Croatia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine – carried out unprecedented and extraordinarily ambitious electoral challenges to authoritarian incumbents or their anointed successors. When the losers in most of these contests refused to admit defeat, citizens mounted large-scale post-election demonstrations that in many instances forced a transfer of political power to the opposition. The final wave, which is ongoing, is the subject of this volume. Once again, large-scale demonstrations broke out in a series of countries within the same region – in this case, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Like the other waves, these popular uprisings settled quickly on the radical goal of removing authoritarian incumbents from power.

CLUSTERED COLLAPSE

Why did communism end in some countries, but not in others? The purpose of this volume is to present a range of specialists in both former and more durable communist regimes in order to provide answers to this question. The usual approach in explaining variations in political outcomes, such as regime durability and departure, is to treat countries as separate units and compare them with one another – through either the use of case studies or more quantitative approaches – in order to assess the explanatory power of rival hypotheses. Although a perfectly logical way to proceed and one that has certainly served the test of time, such an approach may not always be warranted. This is particularly the case when there are reasons to think that political outcomes in different countries might be connected to one another. In this situation, the assumption of separate political trajectories is problematic; international and transnational influences must be taken into account; and methodologies need to be readjusted to recognize the interlinked nature of political change.