Research

Anti-Pluralists, Democratic Erosion, and the Breakdown Resilience of Democratic Regimes

(Dissertation Book Project)

Democracy is massively under pressure as a “third wave of autocratization” (Lührmann & Lindberg 2019) is still rolling worldwide. Focussing contemporary Episodes of Autocratization, Scholars lately postulated the emergence of a new dominant pattern of how democracies decay and die.According to their findings, democratic regimes nowadays rarely collapse within short periods but seem to die slowly in gradual processes eroding fundamental democratic institutions and principles more often. There is evidence, that in many cases, Democratic Erosion is mainly driven by anti-pluralist actors who got voted into office and therefore, feature a minimum degree of democratic legitimacy. In most cases, Anti-Pluralists successfully change the rules of the game and transform the democratic system into an autocratic one. Only in extremely rare cases do they fail, and Democracy survives.This study examines under which circumstances the ‘Defenders of Democracy’ successfully stop Democratic Erosion, and what we can learn from this about the “breakdown resilience” (Boese et al. 2021) of democratic regimes.

What is Anti-Pluralism? Outlines, Varieties, and Application Contexts of a (re)emerged Concept

(Accepted, Journal of German Comparative Politics)

In recent years, the issue of possible early warning signs for democratic regression has become increasingly relevant. In this regard, the focus is often on how democracy- threatening actors can be identified as early as possible. Within this debate, one term has recently emerged again, as various contributions suggest that anti-pluralist actors are in the driver’s seat of democratic backsliding. However, anti-pluralism in this literature usually remains completely undefined, or at least undertheorized. This study intends to contribute to clarifying the theoretical dimension of these issues by specifying anti-pluralism as a concept and discussing its relationships to competing concepts for identifying actors threatening democracy. The conceptual analysis shows that anti-pluralism is best understood as the negation of the benefits of societal diversity and thereby also the functional and normative necessity, purpose, and merit of pluralism as a structure principle. Furthermore, it can be shown that anti-pluralism is a feature of various other isms that are commonly used as indicators to identify actors threatening democracy. I conclude that while anti-pluralism is not necessary for actors to threaten democracy, it is sufficient to identify potentially threatening actors and has advantages over competing markers such as populism and extremism.

From Latest Buzzword to Conceptual Framework: Unraveling the Complexities of Democratic Resilience

with Johannes Helgest, Lion Merten, Jana Niedringhaus, and Matthias Rosenthal

(Published in Journal of German Comparative Politics, Link)

Resilience makes its debut in an increasing number of research areas, most recently also in democracy research. Even though progress has been made in conceptualizing democratic resilience, the concept still appears to be rather diffuse and underdeveloped. We address these shortcomings by (re-)conceptualizing democratic resilience through the lens of Gerring and Christensons’s criteria of conceptual goodness with a special focus on resonance, internal coherence, external differentiation, and theoretical utility. We argue that democratic resilience is best understood as a capacity that stems from various resources at different system levels. Drawing on these resources, the resilience capacity provides the democratic system with certain abilities that enable democratic actors to apply concrete strategies to deal with stressors. In doing so, the resilience capacity ultimately operates as a moderator in the stressors-processing that make certain outcomes more or less likely. We contribute to the existing literature by systematically strengthening the concept of democratic resilience and distinguishing it from neighbouring concepts like consolidation. We conclude with a brief outlook on how the developed conceptualization of democratic resilience could contribute to systemizing and advancing empirical research on the decline and survival of democracies in the future.

A three-dimensional Conceptualization of Autocratization – How it started, how its going, and how we can systemize Research on Democratic Breakdown and Survival

(Working Paper; see this blogpostfor a brief summary)

The so-called “third wave of autocratization” is characterized by the slow death of democratic institutions and regimes. Those processes are mostly not contingent but the result of deliberate actions by democratically elected government. Consequently, the term democratic backsliding became the buzzword in democracy research to capture those processes conceptually and is utilized in numerous empirical studies. Nonetheless,at least two crucial questions have not been (sufficiently) addressed so far: First, we lack theoretically as well as empirically sound yardsticks to dinstiguish between disruptive and gradual Episodes. Second, we are missing elaborated frameworks to distinguish and analyze those Episodes systematically. This contribution aims to gain new insights into the specifics of the slow and fast democratic decline ending up in a precise typologization of Episodes of democratic regression. I plea for a three-dimensional conceptualization that takes into account the point of departure, time and outcome of autocratization episodes. Based on this, referring to the Episodes of Regime Transformation Dataset (ERT) I prove the empirical evidence of this conceptualization and validate initial anchors for differentiating between rather fast and rather slow forms of democratic regression. Furthermore, I demonstrate the ulitility of the conceptualization for empirical analysis using the example of the debate on ‘autocratization changing its nature’. Finally, I venture an outlook on how the three-dimensional conceptualization of autocratization can be used profitably for future research on democratic regression and its causal conditions as well as mechanisms of democratic breakdown resilience.