One of the most common explanations of the ongoing wave of global democratic backsliding is that democracies are failing to deliver adequate socioeconomic goods to their citizens, leading voters to forsake democracy and embrace antidemocratic politicians who undermine democracy once elected. Yet a close look at twelve important cases of recent backsliding casts doubt on this thesis, finding that while it has some explanatory power in some cases, it has little in others, and even where it applies, it requires nuanced interpretation. Backsliding is less a result of democracies failing to deliver than of democracies failing to constrain the predatory political ambitions and methods of certain elected leaders. Policymakers and aid providers seeking to limit backsliding should tailor their diplomatic and aid interventions accordingly.
Cases of democratic backsliding have been multiplying across the globe in recent years, triggering a restless search among Western policymakers and aid providers for causal explanations. One of the most common ideas to have emerged in this policy community is that the blame lies in democracies’ failure to deliver: When democracies do not provide their citizens with adequate socioeconomic benefits, the thinking goes, many of those citizens will lose faith in democracy and embrace antidemocratic political figures who, once elected, will undercut democratic norms and institutions. From this idea follows the policy conclusion that to stop democratic backsliding concerned policymakers and aid providers must help new or struggling democracies do better at delivering the goods to their citizens, such as jobs, higher wages, food security, or access to education. Writing in Foreign Affairs last year, Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, argued that “to . . . swing the pendulum of history back toward democratic rule, we must break down the wall that separates democratic advocacy from economic development work and demonstrate that democracies can deliver for their people.”1
It seems almost inarguable that governments of any political character that provide strong socioeconomic results for their citizens will, on average, be more stable and long lasting than those that do not. Yet it is much less clear that a failure to deliver on the part of democracies is a major cause of the wave of democratic erosion that has washed across multiple regions in the past twenty years. There are some cases where it seems to be at least partly true. In Tunisia, for example, accumulated popular frustration with the socioeconomic performance of every government that ruled the country after its transition to elected, civilian rule in 2011 clearly factored in President Kais Saied’s decision to carry out a self-coup in 2021, overturning the country’s democratic experiment. Yet there are also cases where the “democracy-not-delivering” argument seems much less true, if at all: Poland, for example, enjoyed an enviable economic record in the years prior to the onset of its democratic backsliding in 2015. Clearly, an empirically well-informed picture is needed to probe the complexities lurking within this intuitively appealing but sweeping idea.
To develop such a picture, we examined twelve countries that experienced democratic backsliding during the past twenty years from a starting point of either electoral democracy or liberal democracy: Bangladesh, Brazil, El Salvador, Hungary, India, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United States. This group, drawn from the approximately 25 to 40 countries (depending on the specific measures used) that are usually identified as having experienced backsliding in the time period, includes some of the most internationally prominent cases of backsliding — Brazil, Hungary, India, Turkey, and the United States — while also being representationally diverse along multiple dimensions, including population size, level of wealth, and geographic location.2 The countries in this group are also diverse in terms of their level of democracy prior to the onset of backsliding: Some were relatively well-consolidated democracies, such as Poland and the United States; others were much less so, including Bangladesh, Nicaragua, and Turkey. The backsliding trajectories of these countries also vary: Democratic erosion has been severe in some, such as Bangladesh and Hungary, and mild in others, including the United States; likewise, backsliding is ongoing in some, for example, El Salvador and India, but appears to have been reversed (at least for now) in others, including Brazil and Poland.
For each country, we analyze a range of socioeconomic and political developments to answer three key questions: First, was the election of the leader who ended up engaging in backsliding clearly linked to a failure of democracy to deliver? Second, did that leader campaign on an antidemocratic platform? And third, when the backsliding unfolded, did citizens embrace it? Our findings raise substantial doubt about the utility of the democracy-not-delivering thesis as a broad causal explanation of the recent wave of democratic backsliding. That thesis has some explanatory power in certain cases, but little in others. Even where the thesis does apply, it involves considerable empirical complexity and requires nuanced interpretation. Our findings reinforce on a global basis a crucial insight drawn from the important study by Larry Bartels of democratic trends in Europe — that democracies “erode from the top” rather than at the behest of their citizens.3 Policymakers and aid providers seeking to stem democratic erosion globally should direct their energies and resources accordingly and prioritize bolstering institutions and norms that can constrain predatory powerholders.
Performance Realities
To examine whether poor socioeconomic performance precedes the election of leaders who engage in backsliding, we looked at three core economic indicators — inequality, poverty, and growth — in the five years prior to each of the pivotal elections in question.4 The idea that anger over rising inequality drives citizens to embrace illiberal politicians is perhaps the most common form of the democracy-not-delivering thesis. Indeed, some prominent Western observers concerned about rising inequality around the world point to it as a major cause of democracy’s global travails.5 Yet, although rising levels of domestic inequality undoubtedly pose many problems for democracies (and other types of political systems), the link to backsliding is not apparent.
In eight of the twelve cases under study, inequality was trending downward in the five years before the elections that brought to power leaders who ended up moving against democracy, averaging an almost 7 percent drop in the country’s Gini coefficient. In the four countries where that was not the case — Brazil, India, Tunisia, and the United States — inequality was roughly stable in the relevant period. A fallback argument for the democracy-not-delivering thesis might be that what is crucial is not the direction of inequality but the overall level. But here, too, the hypothesis falls short: In most cases, inequality in the backsliding countries was not higher than average when compared with their regional peers. With respect to poverty rates, the picture is similar: In five years before backsliding began, poverty levels decreased in nine of the twelve countries — substantially in some cases, such as India and Poland.
What about economic growth? Has the election of antidemocratic leaders typically been preceded by decreasing or low growth rates? In most of the cases, growth was relatively stable for at least five years prior to the onset of backsliding. And in some — Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, Poland, and Turkey — growth was not just stable but relatively high in regional and global terms. In the years leading up to their backsliding, these countries were widely considered developmental stars rather than laggards. Three of the cases did see a major economic downturn prior to the pivotal election — Brazil, Hungary, and Tunisia. In Brazil and Hungary, the downturn began several years before the election; in Tunisia, the covid-19 pandemic led to a sharp recession the year before Saied’s self-coup, adding a harsh edge to the long-mounting anger among Tunisians about the country’s poor economic performance in the decade after the democratic revolution. The United States, meanwhile, experienced an economic slowdown in 2016, the year of its pivotal election, but that was after relatively strong growth (at least compared to democratic peers in Europe) from 2010 to 2015.
Although the democracy-not-delivering thesis usually focuses on these core elements of socioeconomic performance, what about other elements of governance performance? Two appear to have played an important role in shaping the outcomes of the pivotal elections in some of the twelve cases: corruption and crime. In Brazil, the vast Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) corruption scandal involving the Brazilian Workers’ Party and other mainstream Brazilian political actors in the mid-2010s was a major driver of many citizens’ alienation from the country’s traditional political elite and their turn to Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 election.6 Perceptions of significant levels of corruption also contributed to the losses by incumbent parties in India in 2014 and Mexico in 2018.7 With respect to crime, El Salvador’s extended period of extremely high levels of violent crime played a central role in citizens giving up on the two mainstream political parties and embracing Nayib Bukele in the 2019 election (although it is worth noting that the country had actually seen a significant decrease in homicides in the three years prior to Bukele’s election).8 In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte centered his successful presidential campaign around his claim that the country’s crime situation was out of control and that he would fix it.
Yet even with this widening of the lens, the search for what led to the election of these various leaders requires looking beyond performance shortcomings that fit easily into the democracy-not-delivering framework. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega managed to return to power in 2006 largely because the two main parties on the other side of the political aisle split their vote, rendering Ortega’s 38 percent vote share enough to win in the first round.9 In Poland, a complex mix of factors — including shrewdly targeted campaign promises about new governmental benefits and a somewhat vague desire for change on the part of many voters — put the populist Law and Justice party over the line in 2015.10 In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s effective pushing of certain hot-button pro-Islamist issues helped him and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to gain power in 2002 and remain in power in 2007.11 And in the United States, it was not primarily economic backlash from “left behind” working-class Americans facing financial hardship that drove Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, but rather his skillful tapping of cultural animosities and anxieties — about immigrants, racial minorities, and China, for example — as well as other factors, such as the strong personal dislike of Hillary Clinton among certain voter groups in key swing states.12
Moreover, even when governmental performance becomes a major issue in a pivotal election, perceptions rather than the realities of performance tend to matter most. As Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels have shown, voters’ perceptions of governmental performance may be only loosely tied to the objective facts about governmental performance. This sobering reality about elections and democracy weakens the assertion that the electoral success of backsliding leaders can be traced to specific performance shortcomings of their incumbent opponents.13 Underlining this reality, charismatic electoral challengers in recent years have often demonstrated notable skill in negatively shaping citizen perceptions about the incumbent’s performance, a phenomenon perhaps fueled by increasingly fast-moving and manipulable media environments. In the Philippines, for example, the anticrime emphasis of Duterte’s 2016 campaign was a successful demagogic tactic to stir up public fears: “framing the country’s minor drug problem as a major social one, effectively manufacturing a crisis.”14 Similarly, the 2016 Trump campaign’s emphasis on the dangers of immigration flows into the United States amplified voters’ fears that their status in society was under threat and resonated especially with non–college-educated whites, who overwhelmingly backed Trump.15
In short, the outcomes of the pivotal elections in the twelve cases under study were determined by a dense mix of social, cultural, political, and economic factors. A sense of grievance on the part of voters was often present, but their grievances ranged widely across different domains and often had little to do with governments’ poor socioeconomic performance. Moreover, contingent political factors, such as the Nicaraguan opposition splitting the vote in 2006, and subjective voter perceptions often counted significantly alongside more structural factors. While democracy’s failure to deliver the socioeconomic goods is relevant to some degree in some of the cases, according it a central explanatory role for democratic backsliding represents an imposition of an overly simple idea on a highly complex reality.
Embracing What?
The other main component of the democracy-not-delivering thesis is the proposition that when citizens are disappointed with the socioeconomic results of democratic governance, they knowingly embrace antidemocratic alternatives — in effect voting against democracy out of frustration with it. Here, too, the record of the twelve cases under review does not provide strong support. Instead, it generally bolsters another crucial finding of Larry Bartels concerning the emergence of political illiberalism in Poland and Hungary: When Poles voted in Law and Justice in 2015 and a majority of Hungarian voters chose Fidesz and Viktor Orbán in 2010, they were voting for change but not consciously for illiberalism: Only after the elections did it become clear that the winners were bent on radically reshaping the political system, resulting in “illiberalism by surprise.”16
In the pivotal elections under review here that brought to power leaders who ended up undercutting democracy, citizens were voting for change, as citizens in democracies often do in elections. But for the most part they were not voting for political figures who were openly promising antidemocratic action or threatening to undo democracy. In Turkey, for example, Erdoğan did not campaign on a platform of political illiberalism or antidemocracy in either 2002, when he was first elected prime minister, or in 2007, when he was reelected for the first time. He and his party instead positioned themselves at the intersection of the center-right and Islamic traditionalism, offering a democratic alternative to the mainstream parties that had long dominated Turkish politics.17 In his first term as prime minister, Erdoğan initiated some democratic reforms, such as lifting restrictions on broadcasting and reporting in Kurdish, gaining praise from Western governments for his prodemocratic actions.18
In Bangladesh in 2008, when the people voted into power the Awami League, a political party that would go on to significantly curtail democracy in the country, they were not making a purposely antidemocratic choice. The Awami League’s record both in and out of power was not unblemished — for example, the party had at times encouraged violence among its supporters.19 Yet compared to its main rival, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the Awami League was arguably the more prodemocratic choice at the time given the BNP’s multiple prior undemocratic actions, such as ruling by executive ordinance and rigging some by-elections in the 1990s.20
Narendra Modi’s historic victory in India’s 2014 elections was driven mainly by his record of economic success in his home state of Gujarat and his reputation as a no-nonsense, business-friendly leader who would drive through economic reforms and fight corruption.21 The many disgruntled Tunisians who voted for Kais Saied in 2019 likewise were not opting for an antidemocratic figure. Saied was a constitutional-law scholar who had helped to draft the country’s post–Arab Spring constitution, and he promised prodemocratic reforms, such as devolving power to local governments and incorporating direct elements of democracy, including recall elections. His opponent in the runoff, Nabil Karoui, appeared as the greater risk to democracy, having enjoyed close ties with the country’s former dictator, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali (1987–2011).22
Some of the leaders elected in the case-study countries who later drove democratic erosion had acted undemocratically in their political pasts. Yet their campaigns were not rooted in that fact, and their victories do not appear to have been either. Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, for example, refused to concede his loss in the 2012 presidential election. But when he ran again in 2018, he did not base his campaign on attacking the institutions or norms of Mexican democracy. It was oriented instead around his promise to make Mexico a more fully inclusive country by achieving fundamental pro-poor economic changes.23 In Poland, Law and Justice’s commitment to democracy was undoubtably blemished going into the 2015 elections — party leader Jarosław Kaczyński had, after all, praised Orbán’s model of illiberal governance and expressed a desire to implement it in Poland. But the party kept these antidemocratic positions out of view in the 2015 campaign, softening its image to appeal to voters who were simply tired of the “boring” incumbent party.24
Prior to running for president of El Salvador in 2019, Nayib Bukele had engaged in some illiberal actions in his capacity as mayor of San Salvador, for example, ordering cyberattacks on newspapers critical of him. Yet in his 2019 presidential campaign, he positioned himself as the choice to save Salvadoran democracy — as a reformer in between the country’s two longstanding parties on the right and left, who would return power to the people through anticrime and anticorruption measures.25 Daniel Ortega entered Nicaragua’s 2006 election with a clear antidemocratic past, having presided over the authoritarian Sandinista regime from 1979 to 1990. Yet in the intervening years he had participated in the country’s messy multipartism. For his 2006 bid, Ortega did not position himself against the country’s political establishment but rather as a candidate of “love, reconciliation, and forgiveness” who would do more for the country’s poor than his two center-right rivals.26
In only three of our twelve case studies could it be said that the winner of the pivotal election in question ran on a campaign that specifically promised systemic antidemocratic actions — though not with the stated intention of undermining the entire democratic system: Duterte in the Philippines and Trump in the United States, both in 2016, and Brazil’s Bolsonaro in 2018. Before being elected president, Duterte had ruled Davao City with an iron fist, ordering extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals, drug users, and communist rebels. Instead of downplaying this on the campaign trail, Duterte “shrugged off accusations of human-rights abuses, promising to implement his Davao model nationwide.”27 He also threatened to disband, quiet, or ignore Congress, the courts, and human-rights activists if they got in his way, and he praised former dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Donald Trump, at 2016 campaign rallies, led cheers calling for his main opponent, Hillary Clinton, to be “locked up” and said that he would respect the results of the election only if he won. Similarly, Bolsonaro, who dismissed accusations that he was a threat to Brazilian democracy as “fake news” despite being a well-known apologist for the country’s 1964–85 military dictatorship, said during the 2018 campaign that he would wipe his political opponents “off the map.”28 Even in these cases, however, antidemocratic threats or promises were part of much larger platforms that candidates stood for or pledged to fulfill.
In short, the idea that voters in these twelve countries were purposefully choosing an antidemocratic path in electing leaders who ended up working against democracy once in power does not hold up to empirical scrutiny. In most of the cases, voters were embracing the promise of significant, even disruptive change, whether in economic, social, or political domains. Some of their preferred candidates represented a risky path, democratically speaking, given past antidemocratic incidents or records. But except in a few cases, voters were not throwing their support behind political figures who were advocating an end to democracy or openly questioning the value of democracy per se. Most of the voters in these pivotal elections were not turning against democracy; in fact, many appeared to be trying to save democracy by giving it a pointed but reform-oriented reset.
Once Backsliding Is Underway
Can it be argued that, even if voters in these pivotal elections were not knowingly voting for the dismantling of democracy, once those leaders gained power and began to undercut democratic norms and institutions, their supporters embraced these moves? In other words, if citizens in backsliding countries are not choosing democratic erosion before the fact, do they become contented enablers once such deterioration is underway?
Some of the backsliding leaders in the case-study countries have enjoyed notably high levels of popularity while in office. López Obrador, Bukele, Duterte, and Modi stand out in this regard. López Obrador enjoyed approval ratings above 60 percent in the final months of his single, six-year presidential term, and his chosen successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, easily won Mexico’s June 2024 election. Bukele’s approval ratings among Salvadoran voters have stayed sky-high, at times topping 90 percent since he became president in 2019, and he was reelected in 2024 with almost 85 percent of the vote. Duterte’s popularity remained high throughout his presidency as well, and his party swept the midterm elections in 2019, giving it control of both legislative houses. Modi and his party expanded their support during their first ten years in power.
These leaders have sustained their popularity at least in part by giving their supporters what they want, whether it is hard-nosed anticrime policies in El Salvador and the Philippines, pro-poor economic policies in Mexico, or pro-Hindu social policies and vigorous nationalism in India. In line with Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik’s findings regarding the United States — that in a highly polarized context voters are unlikely to turn against undemocratic politicians when they generally agree with their policies — many people in these four countries appear to be willing to overlook or tolerate a backsliding leader’s antidemocratic moves.29 For example, Filipino voters were “willing to put up with extrajudicial killings, political repression, and the gutting of liberal institutions because they [saw] Duterte as a strong leader. They question[ed] his methods but not their effectiveness.”30 In some cases, it is likely that supporters of backsliders do not just overlook the democracy factor but embrace the illiberalism of their leader — whether it takes the form of systematic discrimination against certain groups or attacks on the courts — because they view it as justified, sometimes as payback for perceived wrongs of the past.
It is important to be cautious, however, about attributing the popularity of some backsliding leaders to genuine voter satisfaction based on promises delivered. Most of these leaders manipulate public opinion in various illegitimate ways. The leaders of Bangladesh, Nicaragua, and Turkey, for example, have cracked down harshly on those who dissent or criticize the ruling party. The leaders of almost all twelve backsliders employ substantial control over the media to shape the information space in their favor. In the 2022 electoral campaign in Hungary, for example, the main opposition candidate for prime minister was given just a few minutes on the state-dominated television to make his case to voters, in contrast to months of wall-to-wall adulatory coverage of Prime Minister Orbán and his party.31 Likewise, before the 2023 elections in Turkey, the state channel TRT gave Erdoğan’s campaign 32 hours of coverage, compared to just 32 minutes of coverage for his main challenger.32
Backsliding leaders also frequently use state resources to fund their own parties’ political campaigns and to coopt important businesses and other key groups, while harassing opponents with regulatory retaliation, tax inspections, and other punitive measures. During Ortega’s first decade in power, he simultaneously maintained support from the poor through patronage and backing from the Nicaraguan business community in exchange for lucrative contracts.33 In many backsliding contexts, it would be a serious mistake to say that large shares of voters are going along happily and knowingly with democratic erosion — many are being bludgeoned, bribed, or manipulated via illegitimate means into acquiescing.
In the United States, Brazil, and Poland, backsliding leaders lost enough popularity, and faced strong enough institutions of countervailing power, that they ended up losing power in failed reelection attempts. Their loss of popularity had a mix of causes. In the case of Trump, for example, the first year of the covid pandemic hit his presidency hard, both its negative economic effects and the weaknesses it exposed in his governance style. Although the antidemocratic actions of Trump, Bolsonaro, and Law and Justice appear to have played some role in weakening their popular support, it is not a straightforward story.
In all three cases, it appears that the leaders’ antidemocratic actions did not much faze core supporters, in line with Graham and Svolik’s finding mentioned above. Survey research ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election showed that even before ballots were cast, there was a strong desire among Trump supporters for the incumbent to fight against an electoral defeat. The leading justification provided by those who supported Trump’s effort to undermine the results was not concern about the integrity of the election, but simply that they supported Trump and disliked Biden.34 These supporters either did not perceive their antidemocratic actions as that harmful or were willing to accept them for other policy gains.
At the same time, polling data indicate that the antidemocratic actions of Trump, Bolsonaro, and Law and Justice did hurt them on the periphery of their supporter circles — among voters who initially gave them a try but were not necessarily firmly committed. Moreover, their democratic transgressions helped to mobilize their opponents and get them to the polls in even greater numbers. Law and Justice’s assaults on Polish democracy, for example, cost it support from among previous backers and sparked large-scale antigovernment protests in the run-up to Poland’s 2023 elections, which produced an alternation of power.35
Prioritizing Constraint
The idea that a failure of democracies to deliver is a major cause of the recent wave of democratic backsliding is intuitively appealing. Many democracies are struggling to provide secure, prosperous lives for their citizens, and many are struggling to maintain solid democratic norms and institutions. Yet the evidence for a causal link between these two phenomena in twelve prominent contemporary cases of democratic backsliding is mixed at best. In most of the cases, inequality and poverty were heading downward in the five years before the election that brought a backsliding leader to power, while growth was largely stable or even high. Sharp economic downturns did seriously damage the popularity of incumbent democratic governments in three of the cases (Brazil, Hungary, and Tunisia), and citizen anger over high levels of crime and corruption was a key factor in bringing an antidemocratic leader to power in at least Brazil and El Salvador.
Overall, however, it was a wide range of factors, not just economic and governance grievances, that led voters in these countries to elect leaders who ended up eroding democracy. These factors include broader sociocultural anxieties, the impressive electoral and narrative skills of some of the leaders in question, specific features of electoral laws, the new fluidity and corruptibility of media environments in many democracies, and the frequent appeal to voters almost everywhere of change for change’s sake.
In addition, most of the winners of these pivotal elections did not campaign on promises of dismantling democracy. Some had illiberalism in their political pasts, including Daniel Ortega and Narendra Modi. But even those for whom that was true focused their electoral strategies on other issues, such pro-poor economic policies in the case of Ortega or economic reform and dynamism in the case of Modi. Some appeared to be the more democratic choice compared to their main opponents, as in Bangladesh in 2008 and Tunisia in 2019. The illiberalism that emerged in the twelve case-study countries was thus more illiberalism after the fact than illiberalism by promise. Most voters in these countries could not be said to have consciously turned away from democracy in making the choices they did at the ballot box.
What this suggests is that pointing to poor socioeconomic performance by democratic governments and citizen anger about that performance as the primary drivers of democratic backsliding is a mistake. The onus for backsliding belongs on those leaders who gain power for a wide range of reasons, including in many cases by promising to renovate democracy, but then once in power relentlessly amass unconstrained power by overriding countervailing institutions and undercutting basic democratic norms and procedures. Backsliding in these cases is thus less about a failure of democracy to deliver than about a failure of democracy to constrain — that is, to curb the predatory political ambitions and methods of certain elected leaders.
This conclusion does not absolve the outgoing democratic governments in these and other cases from their many shortcomings in terms of how they have governed and what they have delivered to citizens, which have unquestionably caused or aggravated countless hardships and wrongs. Indeed, such shortcomings have contributed to the resurgence in recent years of the old debate — dating back to the 1960s and before — about whether autocracies are better able than democracies to deliver economic benefits. But our findings point the primary finger of blame for democratic backsliding at the politicians and political parties that have acted antidemocratically and the weakness of democracy’s institutional guardrails in these countries.
This analytic conclusion points to an overarching policy conclusion. The community of public and private organizations working internationally to slow or reverse the tide of democratic backsliding should emphasize bolstering the independence and strength of those institutions that serve as guardrails against antidemocratic encroachments by political figures determined to steamroll countervailing institutions and gain unchecked power. On the side of public institutions, this may include courts, anticorruption bodies, electoral-management bodies, and those parts of local government that have preserved some autonomy from national political control. It may also include work with national parliaments, if that can be done in a way that augments the role of parliament as a check on executive power. On the nongovernmental side, this will often mean support for independent media and independent civic groups that seek to hold power accountable whether by protecting political and civil rights, increasing government accountability, or countering political misinformation and disinformation.
Focusing on fortifying constraint is not the same as a generalized strategy of political institutional support — it needs to be carefully tailored to reinforce democratic guardrails and avoid soft-edged governance programming that may inadvertently help to strengthen an overweening political power structure. Such a strategy will ideally include a mix of well-coordinated elements of aid programming, diplomatic interventions, and economic carrots and sticks. None of the various constituent elements of such a strategy are new for democracy supporters, but they should be joined together more purposely into integrated efforts to buttress prodemocratic constraints on power.
Prioritizing such an approach does not mean international supporters of democracy should forsake ongoing or potential new efforts to help new or struggling democratic governments deliver better socioeconomic results for their citizens. Those efforts are worth doing in and of themselves to contribute to a better life for people across the democratic world. And in some cases, they may over time help to alleviate sociopolitical pressures that could encourage citizens to take risks with disruptive and potentially undemocratic alternatives. But such efforts should be viewed as a complement to, not a substitute for, a primary strategy of strengthening domestic sources and structures of prodemocratic constraint and disincentivizing politically predatory leaders from deepening their antidemocratic quests.
NOTES
1. Samantha Power, “How Democracy Can Win: The Right Way to Counter Autocracy,” Foreign Affairs, 16 February 2023, www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/samantha-power-how-democracy-can-win-counter-autocracy.
2. Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Press, “Understanding and Responding to Global Democratic Backsliding,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 20 October 2022, https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/10/20/understanding-and-responding-to-global-democratic-backsliding-pub-88173.
3. Larry M. Bartels, Democracy Erodes from the Top: Leaders, Citizens, and the Challenge of Populism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).
4. The World Bank, “World Development Indicators,” last updated 19 December 2023, https://databank.worldbank.org.
5. See for example, Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Inequality and Democracy,” Project Syndicate, 31 August 2023, www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/inequality-source-of-lost-confidence-in-liberal-democracy-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-2023-08.
6. Wendy Hunter and Timothy J. Power, “Bolsonaro and Brazil’s Illiberal Backlash,” Journal of Democracy 30 (January 2019): 68–82.
7. Eswaran Sridharan, “India’s Watershed Vote: Behind Modi’s Victory,” Journal of Democracy 25 (October 2014): 20–33; and Mariano Sánchez-Talanquer and Kenneth F. Greene, “Is Mexico Falling into the Authoritarian Trap?” Journal of Democracy 32 (October 2021): 56–71.
8. “A Charismatic Populist Aims for El Salvador’s Presidency,” Economist, 2 February 2019, www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/02/02/a-charismatic-populist-aims-for-el-salvadors-presidency.
9. Kai M. Thaler, “Nicaragua: A Return to Caudillismo,” Journal of Democracy 28 (April 2017): 157–69.
10. Joanna Fomina and Jacek Kucharczyk, “The Specter Haunting Europe: Populism and Protest in Poland,” Journal of Democracy 27 (October 2016): 58–68.
11. Sultan Tepe, “Turkey’s AKP: A Model ‘Muslim-Democratic’ Party?” Journal of Democracy 16 (July 2005): 69–82; and Banu Eligür, “The Changing Face of Turkish Politics: Turkey’s July 2007 Parliamentary Elections,” Middle East Brief 22 (November 2007): 1–7.
12. Diana C. Mutz, “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (May 2018): E4330–E4339.
13. Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
14. Marco Garrido, “The Ground for the Illiberal Turn in the Philippines,” Democratization 29 (June 2022): 674.
15. Brian F. Schaffner, Matthew Macwilliams, Tatishe Nteta, “Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism,” Political Science Quarterly 133 (Spring 2018): 9–34.
16. Bartels, Democracy Erodes from the Top.
17. Tepe, “Turkey’s AKP: A Model ‘Muslim-Democratic’ Party?”
18. See for example, Barack Obama, “Remarks By President Obama to the Turkish Parliament,” The White House, 6 April 2009, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-obama-turkish-parliament.
19. Ali Riaz, “The Pathway of Democratic Backsliding in Bangladesh,” Democratization 28 (January 2021): 179–97.
20. Jalal Alamgir, “Bangladesh’s Fresh Start,” Journal of Democracy 20 (July 2009): 41–55.
21. Rajiv Kumar, “India’s Watershed Vote: What It Means for the Economy,” Journal of Democracy 25 (October 2014): 46–55.
22. Nate Grubman, “Coup in Tunisia: Transition Arrested,” Journal of Democracy 33 (January 2022): 12–26.
23. Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Andrés Manuel López Obrador and a New Era of Politics in Mexico,” Brookings, 3 July 2018, www.brookings.edu/articles/andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-and-a-new-era-of-politics-in-mexico/.
24. Fomina and Kucharczyk, “The Specter Haunting Europe: Populism and Protest in Poland.”
25. Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez, “Latin America Erupts: Millennial Authoritarianism in El Salvador,” Journal of Democracy 32 (July 2021): 19–32.
26. Salvador Martí i Puig, “The Adaptation of the FSLN: Daniel Ortega’s Leadership and Democracy in Nicaragua,” trans. Claire Wright, Latin American Politics and Society 52 (Winter 2010): 79–106.
27. Julio C. Teehankee and Mark R. Thompson, “The Vote in the Philippines: Electing a Strongman,” Journal of Democracy 27 (October 2016): 126.
28. Philip Reeves, “With Memories of Dictatorship, Some Brazilians Fear a Hard-Right Turn,” NPR, 26 October 2018, www.npr.org/2018/10/26/660984573/with-memories-of-dictatorship-some-brazilians-fear-a-hard-right-turn.
29. Matthew H. Graham and Milan W. Svolik, “Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States,” American Political Science Review 114 (May 2020): 392–409.
30. Garrido, “The Ground for the Illiberal Turn in the Philippines,” 684.
31. Kim Lane Scheppele, “How Viktor Orbán Wins,” Journal of Democracy 33 (July 2022): 45–61.
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33. Ana Gabriela Rojas, “Por qué se rompió el idilio de Daniel Ortega con la Iglesia católica y los empresarios de Nicaragua, sus principales apoyos en la última década,” BBC News Mundo, 25 April 2018, www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-43875066.
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35. Fomina and Kucharczyk, “The Specter Haunting Europe: Populism and Protest in Poland.”
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