By comparing results based on expert and popular surveys, this article finds that popular support for democracy was dwindling even in the decade before expert surveys (such as Freedom in the World and V-Dem) began to show the reality of democratic retreat. Decreasing support for democracy is tied to low satisfaction with how democracy works in practice, and it contributes to the rise of populist leaders who concentrate power in the executive branch. These phenomena reflect the waning capacity of the state to improve governance across all countries. As a result, democracy is likely to face another lackluster decade if both structural and institutional problems are left unsolved.
About the Authors
Yun-han Chu
Yun-han Chu was an academician of Academia Sinica, where he was also Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute of Political Science, and professor of political science at National Taiwan University.
Analogies with interwar Europe are often misdirected. In the 1920s and 1930s, regime breakdowns occurred in struggling new democracies, but established democratic systems exhibited remarkable endurance.
Like the “transition paradigm” before it, the concept of democratic backsliding threatens to flatten our perceptions of complex political realities. Examples from East-Central Europe illustrate the ambiguous dynamics at play…
