How can autonomous apex courts with specific attitudes and role conceptions counter executive aggrandizement? This article theorizes two causal mechanisms through which justices can resist democratic erosion. The first mechanism involves apex courts employing judicial review to neutralize autocratic legalism by blocking strategies such as institutional conversion, replacement, and layering that executives use to expand their power. The second involves apex courts building coalitions within and beyond the judiciary, enabling diverse actors – including judges, political parties, the media, and NGOs – to leverage their unique resources against executive encroachment. I conceptualize these two mechanisms by combining theory-building process tracing with counterfactual analysis of an unlikely case of democratic resilience: Argentina from 2007 to 2015. Drawing on evidence from 125 elite interviews, over a thousand newspaper articles, hundreds of state documents, memoirs, and other primary sources, this article demonstrates how the Supreme Court nullified President Cristina Kirchner’s attempts to undermine freedom of expression and judicial independence, thereby contributing to democratic resilience.

A major focus of the democratic backsliding literature has been on “executive aggrandizement” in electoral, institutional, and civil societal arenas. An influential explanation of the strength of opposition to aggrandizers contends that the more democratic accountability remains despite illiberal stratagems, the stronger the pushback is likely to be. A single-country temporal comparison of three aggrandizing Philippine presidents—Ferdinand Marcos Sr., Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and Rodrigo Duterte—demonstrates that this view not only fails to account for stark variation in opposition, it predicts the reverse of what actually occurred. Despite election fraud, constitutional manipulation, and protest crackdowns, Marcos Sr. and Arroyo confronted stronger pushback. By contrast, opposition against Duterte gained little traction although elections remained competitive, institutions were left largely intact, and there was little repression of peaceful protests. This suggests that opposition efficacy is more dependent on how effectively it can contest democratic legitimation claims used to disguise autocratization.

The COVID-19 pandemic offers a critical opportunity to assess the extent to which Canadians can be considered reliable defenders of democratic norms and institutions. In the face of such a serious threat to their physical and economic well-being, how willing are Canadians to condone the loosening of restraints on the power of the executive? This article addresses this question by drawing on the terror management and threat literatures. Combining a cross-sectional regression analysis with a vignette experiment and a candidate-choice conjoint experiment, it tests two hypotheses: that people experiencing debilitating anxiety about COVID-19 are more likely to favour weakening checks on the executive and that people will be willing to trade off legislative checks for the sake of their preferred lockdown policy. Both hypotheses are confirmed. In the face of an unprecedented health crisis, COVID-related anxiety and a desire for protective policies may trump respect for democratic norms.