(iPoster) Detecting Backsliding: Credible Arbiters and Democratic Norms in Latin America

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Public Opinion 1 & Diverse Perspectives on South Asian Politics
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Abstract

Democratic backsliding rarely arrives as an obvious rupture. It more often proceeds through incremental, legally framed reforms whose democratic meaning is ambiguous and politically contestable (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Przeworski 2019; Waldner and Lust 2018). In this gray zone, democracies can fail before citizens ever choose to punish, if people do not recognize a move as undemocratic (or do not believe others will see it that way), collective resistance is unlikely (Ahlquist et al. 2018; Albertus and Grossman 2021; Helmke and Rath 2025; Krishnarajan 2023). I argue that democratic resilience therefore hinges on a prior problem of recognition and coordination: citizens must share clear boundaries of what democracy forbids and have credible ways to update those boundaries when leaders exploit ambiguity (Fearon 2011; Weingast 1997).

The core mechanism I study is the interaction between horizontal and vertical accountability. Acts of horizontal accountability can expose and contest potential violations, but they only protect democracy when citizens treat these interventions as credible and coordinate around their meaning. Formal accounts often portray backsliding as a strategic chain linking incumbents, institutional restrainers, and electorates, yet they leave under-specified the conditions under which restrainers’ warnings are trusted rather than discounted as partisan obstruction or cheap talk (Grillo et al. 2024; Miller 2021). My contribution is theory-informed empirics: I measure and experimentally vary the recognition and coordination foundations (democratic boundaries, higher-order beliefs, and perceived arbiter credibility) through which restrainers’ signals can activate (or fail to activate) vertical accountability.

I develop and test a two-pathway theory of democratic norm recognition. The first pathway centers on untouchable norms: historically embedded democratic boundaries rooted in authoritarian legacies and transition bargains. When political actions violate these widely internalized limits, citizens can classify the move as undemocratic even in the absence of elite cues (Ahmed 2023; Helmke and Rath 2025). The second pathway centers on credible arbiters: boundary-defining actors who can render ambiguous reforms legible and transform private doubts into shared understandings that a democratic line has been crossed. This pathway is conditional, arbiters’ signals can protect democracy only when these actors are perceived as having standing to speak for democracy across partisan identities (Barari et al. 2024; Bizzarro et al. 2025; Markovits and O’Donohue 2024).

Empirically, I pair measurement and experimental variation in Mexico and Argentina (two countries with distinct democratic transitions and contrasting recent experiences with democratic backsliding). I first field original survey instruments to map 1) democratic norms and their coordination potential—separating first-order judgments (personal unacceptability) from second-order beliefs (perceived social consensus) and behavioral expectations (willingness to sanction and beliefs about others’ sanctioning)—and 2) perceived arbiters of democracy, using open-ended items and batteries that capture salience, cross-cleavage neutrality, and reach. Building on this measurement stage, I implement online survey experiments that jointly vary whether a contested institutional change targets an untouchable versus contestable norm and whether a credible arbiter publicly condemns it. Outcomes capture democratic classification, perceived consensus, and downstream willingness to sanction or withdraw support.

Latin America is a particularly strong setting to study these mechanisms because it combines sharp variation in authoritarian legacies, transition bargains, and contemporary polarization, conditions that shape both which democratic boundaries become focal and who is seen as entitled to define them. Third-wave transitions across the region did not merely introduce elections; they also defined new limits (against repression, military tutelage, and executive domination), yet these limits did not become equally embedded everywhere.

The design speaks directly to prescriptive debates about protecting democracy: it identifies when shared democratic boundaries are sufficient to activate vertical accountability and when democracies instead depend on credible arbiters to sound the alarm and solve coordination problems. By integrating democratic norms with the perceived legitimacy of restrainers signals, the project offers a portable measurement and experimental agenda for studying how societies recognize democratic threats, and when they can coordinate to resist them (Graham and Svolik 2020).

Author

• Martín Gou, Vanderbilt University