University of Michigan Democratic Backsliding in United States Paper Write a 3 to 5 page double-spaced (1” margins, 12 point font) “reflection paper” that answers the following questions:Some analysts worry that the U.S. may be in danger of backsliding from a democracy to a non-democratic regime. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this assessment? In your answer, analyze the democratic backsliding that has occurred in other countries (e.g., Nicaragua, Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, etc.). What types of actions were taken by leaders of those countries that produced the democratic backsliding? To what degree have these types of actions occurred in the U.S., and what indications are there that they could occur in the near future? Are there other conditions that might influence the prospects for democratic backsliding? Finally, what do these case comparisons suggest are the main factors protecting democracy from backsliding? On Democratic Backsliding
Nancy Bermeo
Journal of Democracy, Volume 27, Number 1, January 2016, pp. 5-19 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2016.0012
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On Democratic Backsliding
Nancy Bermeo
Nancy Bermeo is the Nuffield Chair of Comparative Politics at Oxford
University and PIIRS Senior Scholar at Princeton University. Her most recent book (coedited with Deborah Yashar) is titled Parties, Movements and
Democracy in the Developing World (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
S
cholars have devoted huge amounts of attention to explaining why democracies break down, but systematic and explicitly comparative work
on precisely how they break down has been less common. Political scientists have focused more often on economic and institutional correlates
than on choices and choosers, even though these may be more amenable
to direct influence and rapid intervention.
What kinds of concrete actions transform a regime from one type to
another? Which techniques of transformation are most common? Analyzing what has come to be known as democratic backsliding moves us
toward answers to these questions, for it forces us to focus on the actual
choices that change regimes.
The term democratic backsliding is frequently used but rarely analyzed.
This explains why a careful recent survey concluded “we know very little” about it.1 Part of the problem is the term’s extraordinary breadth. At
its most basic, it denotes the state-led debilitation or elimination of any of
the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy. Since the political institutions that sustain democracy are myriad (including all the institutions that enable people to formulate and signify preferences and then
have them weighed by their elected representatives), the term embraces
multiple processes. Since the state actors who might initiate backsliding
are themselves diverse (ranging from monarchs to presidents to military
men), the term embraces multiple agents. In sum, the concept has so many
referents that it needs immediate specification to have practical meaning.
Like an old steamer trunk, it is opaque and unwieldy but yields much that
proves useful when it is unpacked.
This essay unpacks the concept of democratic backsliding by explorJournal of Democracy Volume 27, Number 1 January 2016
© 2016 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
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Journal of Democracy
ing six of its major varieties. It illustrates that forms have varied in
frequency over time; that some of the most blatant forms of backsliding are now less common; and that more vexing forms of backsliding
are becoming more common. Ironically, we now face forms of democratic backsliding that are legitimated through the very institutions that
democracy promoters have prioritized. Overall, trends in backsliding
reflect democracy’s slow progress and not its demise.
A close historical look at the varieties of backsliding reveals that the
classic open-ended coups d’état of the Cold War years are now outnumbered by what I call promissory coups; that the dramatic executive
coups of the past are being replaced by a process that I call executive
aggrandizement; and finally, that the blatant election-day vote fraud that
characterized elections in many developing democracies in the past is
being replaced by longer-term strategic harassment and manipulation.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest use of the
English word “backsliding” dates from 1554, when the Scottish Protestant theologian John Knox (1513–72) employed it in a pamphlet entitled A
Faythfull Admonition to the Professors of God’s Truth in England. More
famously, “backsliding” also appears in the King James Bible (1611),
where it translates a prophetic plea (Jeremiah 3:22) for Israel to drop its
“faithless” or “wayward” habits in order to resume a relationship of loyalty
to God. When linked with the word democratic, the term’s current secular
meaning is in keeping with its origins in that it denotes a willful turning
away from an ideal. But where does backsliding from democracy lead?
Backsliding can take us to different endpoints at different speeds.
Where backsliding involves rapid and radical change across a broad
range of institutions, it leads to outright democratic breakdown and to
regimes that are unambiguously authoritarian. Where backsliding takes
the form of gradual changes across a more circumscribed set of institutions, it is less likely to lead to all-out regime change and more likely to
yield political systems that are ambiguously democratic or hybrid. Democratic backsliding can thus constitute democratic breakdown or simply
the serious weakening of existing democratic institutions for undefined
ends. When backsliding yields situations that are fluid and ill-defined,
taking action to defend democracy becomes particularly difficult.
Positive Trends
Democratic backsliding has changed dramatically since the Cold
War. Three of the most dramatic and far-reaching varieties of backsliding seem to be waning. Coups d’état, executive coups by elected leaders,
and blatant election-day vote fraud all have declined in frequency.
The decline of classic coups d’état. Coups are illegal attempts by military or other state elites to oust a sitting executive. Historical analysis shows
Nancy Bermeo
7
Figure 1—Coup Frequency in Democracies, 1950–2014
Coups as a Percentage of
Democracies
Coup attempts
Successful coups
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Year
Source: Regime data are from Polity IV, supplemented with Polity IV data modified by
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch (see endnote 6). Coup data are from Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne’s “Coups d’état, 1950 to Present” dataset (www.uky.edu/~clthyn2/coup_data/
home.htm). A detailed explanation of the axes for this figure and how the data sources
were used may be found at www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/supplemental-material.
a dramatic decline in all coups and especially the open-ended military coups
that gave rise to long-lasting and brutal dictatorships during the Cold War.
As Figure 1 shows, the probability that a democracy will be targeted by any
sort of coup has dropped dramatically. The probability reached a thirty-year
low after 1995, and although it rose slightly as the first decade of the new
century ended, it is still significantly less than it was during the 1960s.
The likelihood of a democratic government being the target of a successful coup has also declined markedly, dropping to nearly zero in the
early 2000s. Though it has recently risen slightly, the drop in the success
rate that began during the Cold War has not been reversed.
The decline of executive coups. Alongside the decline of classic coups
d’état there has been a decline in executive coups. These “self-coups” or
autogolpes involve a freely elected chief executive suspending the constitution outright in order to amass power in one swift sweep. Executive
coups associated with dictatorships (such as that of Ferdinand Marcos
[1965–86] in the Philippines) were fairly common during the Cold War
and the decade after its end. During the 1990s, there were a full five executive coups—in Peru in 1992 (under Alberto Fujimori), in Armenia in
1995 (under Levon Ter-Petrosian), in Belarus in 1995 (under Alyaksandr
Lukashenka), in Zambia in 1996 (under Frederick Chiluba), and in Haiti
in 1999 (under René Préval).2 Since then, happily, the number of executive coups in democracies has plummeted: Between 2000 and 2013, Niger
was the only democracy in the world to experience an executive coup.
The decline of election-day vote fraud. Alongside the declines in
these two types of coup-based backsliding, there has also been a reported drop in blatant election-day vote fraud. Electoral malpractice as
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Journal of Democracy
Figure 2—Vote-Fraud Allegations by Western Monitors
in Post-1975 Democracies, 1991–2012
Percentage of Western-Monitored
Elections
Vote-fraud allegations
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
1991–95
1996–2000
2001–2005
2006–2010 2011–2012
Year
Source: See source note in Figure 1. Additional election data are from Susan Hyde’s
NELDA project (http://hyde.research.yale.edu/nelda/). A detailed explanation of the axes
for this figure and how the data sources were used may be found at www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/supplemental-material.
a whole has not diminished, but there is near-consensus that open fraud
on election day has decreased. Figure 2 shows the trend. The extent
to which this trend is being driven by normative change, the rise of
election monitoring, or the deterrent effects of parallel vote tabulation
remains under debate, but the decline itself has been widely noted. Seasoned election observers report that cheating has “become more subtle,”
that “blatant manipulation on election day seems less and less common,”
and that fraud in polling stations has been reduced.3 A recent study of
African elections found that count falsification, ballot-stuffing, and ballot-box fraud were relatively rare and that “the vote count process was
the most highly regarded dimension in the whole electoral process.”4 In
the words of another firsthand observer, “Today, only amateurs steal
elections on election-day.”5
Continuing Challenges
The decline in the three varieties of backsliding outlined above is
certainly gratifying. Unfortunately, other varieties of democratic backsliding either remain unchanged or are on the rise. These have been
understudied and merit our immediate attention.
Promissory coups. A first persistent variety of backsliding involves
what might best be called promissory coups. Promissory coups frame
the ouster of an elected government as a defense of democratic legality and make a public promise to hold elections and restore democracy
as soon as possible. Whereas Cold War coupmakers usually cast their
seizures of power as open-ended, most coupmakers today emphasize the
temporary nature of their intervention and frame it as a necessary step
Nancy Bermeo
9
toward a new and improved democratic order. The share of successful coups that falls into the promissory category has risen significantly,
from 35 percent before 1990 to 85 percent afterward.6
Analyzing the aftermath of the twelve successful promissory coups
that took place in democracies between 1990 and 2012, we see a dismal
picture. Few promissory coups were followed quickly by competitive
elections, and fewer still paved the way for improved democracies.
The general who spearheaded the 1991 Haitian coup blandly called
it “a correction of the democratic process,”7 but military violence soon
showed that the promise of elections was never going to be kept. Haiti’s
freely elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide finally returned in 1994
to complete his term—but only as part of a costly six-month international intervention that reversed the coup.
In each of the other cases, coupmakers did hold elections, but the
lapse of time between coups and balloting varied widely. A vote came
just five months after the 2009 putsch in Honduras, but took more than
six years following the coups in Gambia (1994), Pakistan (1999), and
Fiji (2006). Regardless of their timing, the elections that follow promissory coups turn out to be surprisingly favorable to those who backed
the coups in the first place. Fully half of all the postcoup elections that
Western observers rated acceptable were won either by the actual coup
perpetrators or their favored candidates. Elections are not a reliable
route to democratic reinstatement.
The electoral victories of coupmakers and their allies were not limited to a particular period or region. The May 2000 coup against the
multiracial government of Mahendra Chaudhry in Fiji was followed
by September 2001 elections, but the winner was the civilian politician whom the military had handpicked to head the interim government.
Gambia’s October 2001 elections yielded a victory for Yahya Jammeh,
the military officer who had led the coup against Gambia’s elected government in 1994. Though Jammeh had organized sham elections in 1996
and 1997, he won the 2001 polls with 53 percent of the vote in an election that EU and Commonwealth observers deemed free and fair.
The 2009 elections following the coup that ousted President Manuel
Zelaya in Honduras were questionable since the candidate allied with
Zelaya withdrew while Zelaya himself organized a boycott, but many
still read the poll as a win for the coup coalition. With turnout just 5.4
percentage points below what it had been for Zelaya’s election in 2005,
National Party presidential candidate Porfirio Lobo won nearly 57 percent, while his party gained an absolute legislative majority. The National Party had been a key player in the coup coalition.
Madagascar and Mali both voted in 2013, and these ballotings too were
coupmakers’ triumphs. Madagascar had taken more than four years to
hold elections after its 2009 coup. In the interim, both the coup leader and
the elected president whom he unseated had been banned from running.
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Journal of Democracy
When surrogates took their respective places, the surrogate for the coup
leader won 54 percent in the December 2013 runoff, while his party won
a plurality of seats in Parliament. The presidential elections held after
military officers toppled Mali’s democracy in March 2012 were won by
Ibrahim Boubacar Ke¦ta, a civilian politician whose brief membership in
an anticoup coalition did not eclipse his longtime status as a military favorite. In August 2013, he won the presidency in a runoff landside, while
his party took an overwhelming legislative majority in November.
In a more recent case, Fiji’s 2014 postcoup parliamentary election
was won by Frank Bainimarama, the very officer (and onetime commander of Fiji’s tiny patrol-boat navy) who had headed the 2006 putsch.
Though he ruled by decree for over seven years, his Fiji First party won
59 percent of the vote and 64 percent of the seats in Parliament.
Had coupmakers and their allies fulfilled their promises for improved
democracy, this subtype of backsliding might be said to have an upside.
But an example of democratic deepening after a coupmakers’ victory is
yet to be found. It is too early to know if the new government in Fiji will
be able to claim such an achievement. Regrettably, none of the other
cases mentioned above has even matched (let alone exceeded) the level
of freedom they enjoyed before their coups.8
The promised improvement of democracy has remained elusive even
when coup opponents have won postcoup elections. Promissory coups
in Lesotho (1994), Niger (1996), Pakistan (1999), Thailand (2007), and
Guinea-Bissau (2012) were all followed by elections in which coup opponents proved victorious. Yet in only one case—that of Lesotho—has
a substantial improvement in political and civil rights been recorded. In
2003, Freedom House’s rating system moved Lesotho from Partly Free
to Free, but Guinea-Bissau, Niger, and Pakistan remain Partly Free and
even this status remains precarious.
Freedom House deemed Thailand a Free country before its promissory coup in 2006, but it has since returned to dictatorship. The coup coalition that ousted the freely elected government of Thaksin Shinawatra
made good on its promise to hold free elections (in December 2007) and
even allowed Thaksin allies to regain power through the ballot box. But
tolerance was short-lived. The military seized power again in May 2014,
and, ominously, made no promise of elections at all. Unlike other forms
of backsliding, promissory coups sometimes raise expectations at home
and abroad, but these expectations are nearly always dashed.
Executive aggrandizement. Executive aggrandizement contrasts
with all forms of coupmaking in that it takes place without executive
replacement and at a slower pace. This more common form of backsliding occurs when elected executives weaken checks on executive power
one by one, undertaking a series of institutional changes that hamper
the power of opposition forces to challenge executive preferences. The
Nancy Bermeo
11
disassembling of institutions that might challenge the executive is done
through legal channels, often using newly elected constitutional assemblies or referenda. Existing courts or legislatures may also be used, in
cases where supporters of the executive gain majority control of such
bodies. Indeed, the defining feature of executive aggrandizement is that
institutional change is either put to some sort of vote or legally decreed
by a freely elected official—meaning that the change can be framed as
having resulted from a democratic mandate.
Executive aggrandizement occurs in a broad range of countries.
The career of Turkey’s former premier (now president) Recep Tayyip
Erdo¢gan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) provides an illustrative example. Erdo¢gan led his party to a resounding victory in the
2002 national elections and then attracted increasing shares of the vote
in both 2007 and 2011. The AKP’s strength in parliament provided the
infrastructure for the “quiet revolution” that Erdo¢gan promised his supporters, enabling the passage of a record number of new laws (including
more than five-hundred during his first two years in office).9
Many of these laws undercut institutions of accountability. Media freedoms and judicial autonomy became prime sites for democratic backsliding. In 2004, for example, the government revised the penal code to allow
the criminal prosecution of journalists for discussing any subject deemed
controversial by state authorities. Later came a series of defamation laws,
both civil and criminal, that the state (and Erdo¢gan himself) began using widely to silence critics. Other laws facilitated the blocking of websites and the identification of Internet users, while still others allowed
the Radio and Television Supreme Council to forbid coverage of certain
issues altogether. Because media outlets are so often owned by holding
companies dependent on government contracts, journalists must choose
between free expression and having a job. During the 2013 Gezi Park
protests alone, more than eighty journalists were fired.10
Turkey’s judicial system has been a site for executive aggrandizement
as well. In 2010, Erdo¢gan passed two-dozen constitutional changes via national referendum. The president received power to name fourteen of the
seventeen Constitutional Court judges,11 while decisions about which parties are legal and allowed to field candidates for office were shifted from the
courts to the legislature. In 2014, the government passed legislation giving
the justice minister power to directly appoint members to the High Council
of Judges and to control the inspection board that disciplines judges. Within
six months, more than three-thousand sitting judges had been removed.12
The courts suffered another blow from a law that gave the National Intelligence Organization (headed by a presidential appointee) power to collect
“all information, documents or data from any entity in Turkey” without
having to seek judicial permission or submit to judicial review.13
All these changes were made by democratically elected officials with
a strong popular mandate to rule. Because many of the new measures
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Journal of Democracy
challenged military and civilian elites with less than perfect democratic
credentials of their own, they cut through the old order with what even
critics describe as “a democratizing edge.”14
The same can be said of many of the initiatives taken by President Rafael Correa in Ecuador. Lik…
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