The world currently has been in the throes of a twin process of ‘democratic backsliding’ and ‘democratic backlash’. How would you explain this paradox? (2025, 20 Marks)
Nancy Bermeo (“On Democratic Backsliding”, 2016) defined democratic backsliding as the state-led weakening or elimination of the institutions that sustain an existing democracy. Democratic backlash is the reaction it provokes, and the term carries two opposite meanings. Both processes are surging at once. The paradox dissolves once we separate who acts, against what, and in which arena.
Backsliding: decline from inside the state
- Bermeo shows that coups and ballot-stuffing have given way to executive aggrandisement and strategic electoral manipulation: incremental, legal, each step defensible.
- Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die, 2018) trace the sequence: capture the referees, sideline opponents, rewrite the rules, while norms of mutual toleration and forbearance decay. Kim Lane Scheppele calls the technique autocratic legalism.
- The V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 puts democracy for the average person back at its 1978 level, counts 44 countries autocratising against 18 democratising, downgrades the United States to an electoral democracy and still classes India as an electoral autocracy.
Backlash: two meanings
- Backlash against liberal democracy. A majoritarian revolt targets democracy’s liberal component: minority rights, judicial review, supranational authority. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (Cultural Backlash, 2019) tie it to older, less-educated voters’ sense of cultural displacement, sharpened by deindustrialisation and migration. In the developing world, democracy that failed to deliver loses ground to authoritarian performance legitimacy and to the Sahel coups of 2020–23, which crowds cheered.
- Backlash against backsliding. Voters, courts, oppositions and civil society resist.
| Backsliding | Backlash against it | |
|---|---|---|
| Agent | Elected executives | Voters, courts, civil society |
| Method | Legal, gradual erosion | Elections, litigation, protest |
| Arena | State institutions | Ballot box and street |
Explaining the paradox
- Different agents, different levels. Backsliding is elite and institutional; backlash is mass and mobilisational. One executive concentrating power while its public resists is contested politics, not contradiction.
- Abstract support, concrete trade-offs. Amartya Sen (“Democracy as a Universal Value”, 1999) explains why the demand for democracy persists everywhere. Yet Milan W. Svolik (2019) shows polarised voters trading democratic principles for partisan gain. Backsliders therefore win elections in societies that say they value democracy.
- Elections serve both sides. The ballot that legitimates aggrandisers also removes them: Brazil (2022), Poland (2023), Senegal (2024) and, most strikingly, Hungary, where Péter Magyar’s Tisza won a two-thirds majority on 12 April 2026 and ended Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year rule. South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in December 2024, was impeached that month and was removed in April 2025. V-Dem researchers find that in the last three decades democracy was restored through such “U-turns” in about half of all breakdowns. India’s 2024 verdict, which denied the ruling party a single-party majority, showed similar competitiveness.
- The street as a second channel. Where elections stop working, youth revolt follows: Bangladesh (2024) and Nepal (September 2025), whose uprising led to fresh elections in March 2026.
- A feedback loop. Illiberal rule provokes mobilisation; incumbents brand it as elite obstruction of the popular will, which feeds the majoritarian backlash. The stable outcome is polarisation.
Conclusion
Backsliding and backlash are two halves of one process. Erosion is gradual and legal precisely because resistance is real. The struggle is over democracy’s meaning, majoritarian versus liberal, the tension Fareed Zakaria named illiberal democracy, and regime variants multiply as democracies are reshaped to fit their societies. Its outcome turns on whether courts, electoral bodies and oppositions keep their capacity to act, and whether elections stay competitive enough to be lost.