Research

Published Journal Articles

  • Walz, Kevin. 2025. What is anti-pluralism? Outlines, varieties, and application contexts of a (re)emerged concept. Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft: 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-024-00622-x

  • Walz, Kevin, Lion Merten, Matthias Rosenthal, Jana Niedringhaus und Johannes Helgest. 2025. From latest buzzword to conceptual framework: Unraveling the complexities of democratic resilience. Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft: 1–30.https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-024-00618-7

Work in Progress

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.

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.