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When Does Backsliding Lead to Breakdown? Uncertainty and Opposition Strategies in Democracies at Risk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2020

Matthew R. Cleary Open the ORCID record for Matthew R. Cleary [Opens in a new window]  and
Aykut Öztürk Open the ORCID record for Aykut Öztürk [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

In recent decades, prominent national leaders like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez gained power through democratic institutions, only to undermine those institutions once in office as part of a broader effort to consolidate authoritarian power. Yet attempts at “executive aggrandizement” have failed in other countries, with varying consequences for democratic institutions. We develop an agency-based perspective to enhance the understanding of aggrandizement and to explain when it results in democratic breakdown. Relying on comparative case studies of five countries—Bolivia, Ecuador, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela—our analysis suggests that the contingent decisions of opposition actors during the process of aggrandizement have a significant effect on regime outcomes. Irregular opposition attempts to remove incumbents from office, which are especially likely after electoral defeats, contribute to democratic breakdown. More moderate responses to aggrandizement, on the other hand, help the opposition actors to buy time until the next election, hence offering the possibility for democratic survival.

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Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 205 - 221
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

A list of permanent links to Supplemental Materials provided by the authors precedes the References section

The authors greatly benefited from the constructive feedback of many friends and colleagues, including Gustavo Flores-Macías, Dimitar Gueorguiev, Juan Fernando Ibarra del Cueto, Matthew Ingram, Melis G. Laebens, Dan McDowell, Tom Perreault, Heather Sullivan, Brian Taylor, María Laura Veramendi García, Kari Waters, and Karleen West; participants of the Political Science Research Workshop at Syracuse University; four anonymous reviewers; and the editor of Perspectives on Politics. We also thank the Department of Political Science at Syracuse University for the research grant that made this project possible.

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