Old Autocracy or Something New?: Measuring Democratic Erosion and Near Misses

• In Event: Innovative Approaches to Studying Democratic Backsliding and Resilience

Abstract

Scholars largely agree that the current wave of autocratization is a product of a new form of democratic reversion, which is frequently called democratic erosion: the incremental subversion of democracy from within by elected governments. Growing theoretical and case-based research have identified and conceptualized the main qualitative processes that make up democratic erosion. However, it has posed a challenge to operationalize and measure democratic erosion and its near misses and reversals in large-N empirical studies. We argue that a main reason for this is that existing measurements do not necessarily factor the gradual nature of democratic erosion into measuring it and they do not necessarily distinguish between precipitous and incremental episodes of autocratization. We review existing measurements of democratic erosion in terms of their methodologies and compare how they identify country episodes of democratic erosion as well as avoiding (near misses) and recovering from democratic erosion. In return, we develop several criteria and hypotheses that factor in the gradual nature of democratic erosion under elected governments who do not necessarily undermine electoral aspects of democracy in early phases and test them with different available data sets of regime type and liberal and electoral aspects of democracy. We identify country episodes of occurrence, near miss and reversal of democratic erosion and compare them with alternative findings in extant research. We discuss new cases of occurrence, avoidance and reversal of democratic erosion overlooked by current research and which cases are not really cases of erosion but those of precipitous autocratization.

Authors

• Murat Somer, Ozyegin University Istanbul

• Alper Yılmaz, Koç University