Federalism and Democratic Backsliding in Comparative Perspective

• In Event: Federalism, Governance, and Accountability

Abstract

A growing number of democracies have been threatened by the election of aspiring autocrats who seek to use the power of their office to subvert liberal democracy. As a wave of backsliding has swept across both new and established democracies, scholars have sought to identify formal and informal institutions that can act as guardrails of democracy, resisting this erosion. But while informal norms, party structures, and formal institutions such as separation of powers have all been singled out as potential bulwarks against democratic backsliding, the literature has had less to say about what role, if any, federalism may play in stopping democracies from sliding into autocracy. While some constitutional designers - from James Madison to the architects of the post-WWII Federal Republic of Germany have emphasized that federalism can help prevent the emergence of a national tyranny, most contemporary research has emphasized the damaging effects federalism can have on democracy and fundamental rights. An extensive literature on "subnational authoritarianism" explains how the dynamics of federalism can enable autocratic enclaves at the state level to survive and thrive within democratic federal unions (Gibson, 2005, 2012; Gervasoni, 2010; Mickey, 2015; Giraudy, 2015; Kelemen, 2020). These state-level authoritarian enclaves can in turn undermine democracy at the federal level (Bateman, Katznelson and Lapinski, 2018). Indeed, rather than seeing states as bulwarks of democracy preventing the emergence of autocracy at the federal level, some scholars have emphasized how states can act as "laboratories of authoritarianism" (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018, p.2) or "laboratories of democratic backsliding" (Grumbach, 2021). Grumbach has been most explicit in this respect, suggesting that state governments have been "leaders in democratic backsliding in the U.S. in recent years" (ibid., p.3), paving the way for broader national backsliding.

In this paper, we seek to reconcile these contrary views about the effects of federalism on democratic backsliding. We argue that federalism can serve as a bulwark against democratic backsliding as Madison had in mind, but only under a very limited - and quite demanding - set of conditions. In other circumstances, it will not act as a bulwark of democracy and can even facilitate backsliding as some contemporary scholars have argued. Two sets of conditions must be in place in order for federalism to have this restraining effect on backsliding. First, state governments retain robust control over key government functions, in particular, the judiciary and election administration. Second, the ability of federalism to act as a bulwark against democratic backsliding will depend on the distribution of partisan control across states. The co-partisans of an aspiring national autocrat are likely to support his authoritarian agenda, rather than to stand up for the autonomy of their state governments. Thus, even if states have control over key government functions that could be used to resist backsliding, these capacities will not be used to resist backsliding if enough of those states are controlled by the party of the aspiring national autocrat. To act as a bulwark against backsliding, a sufficient number of states must be controlled by the democratic opposition so that they can use the resources of state government to impede the autocrat’s efforts to consolidate autocratic rule. While acknowledging the dark side of federalism, our aim is to identify how, to what extent, and under what conditions federalism can help to prevent an aspiring autocrat at the federal level from subverting democracy. We assess our arguments using a combination of quantitative analysis of the relationship between federalism and backsliding across all countries and qualitative analysis of developments in the cases of the United States, India, and Venezuela.

Authors

• Robert R. Kaufman, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

• R. Daniel Kelemen, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

• Burcu Kolcak, Rutgers University