Perspective: Democracy backslidingPolarization versus Democracy

When can we realistically expect ordinary people to check the authoritarian ambitions of elected politicians? An answer to this question is key to understanding the most prominent development in the dynamic of democratic survival since the end of the Cold War: the subversion of democracy by elected incumbents and its emergence as the most common form of democratic breakdown.

Milan W. Svolik, writing in the Journal of Democracy, proposes an explanation according to which political polarization undermines the public’s ability to serve as a democratic check: In polarized electorates, voters are willing to trade off democratic principles for partisan interests.

Many incumbents command significant popular support as they proceed to subvert democracy in their countries—and even after they succeed in doing so. Venezuela’s Chávez, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Turkey’s Erdoğan, for instance, enjoyed and (in the latter two cases) continue to enjoy such support. They have been popular in both absolute and relative terms, typically leading their major competitors by double digits in election returns and public-opinion surveys. This seems to be the case even after accounting for the possible inflation of such figures due to these leaders’ misuse of state resources, intimidation of their opponents, and other forms of manipulation.

The solution to this puzzle, Svolik proposes, lies in a vulnerability that is inherent to democratic politics. Electoral competition often confronts voters with a choice between two valid but potentially conflicting concerns: democratic principles and partisan interests. The likes of Chávez, Orbán, and Erdoğan excel at exploiting precisely this dilemma. Each has succeeded in transforming his country’s latent social tensions into axes of acute political conflict and then presented his supporters with a choice: Vote for a more redistributive Venezuela, a migrant-free Hungary, a conservative Turkey—along with my increasingly authoritarian leadership—or vote for the opposition, which claims to be more democratic but offers less appealing policies and leadership.

The deeper a society’s political divisions along those lines, the easier it is for a Chávez, an Orbán, or an Erdoğan to exploit these divisions to his advantage. Incumbents such as these understand that most of their supporters would rather tolerate their authoritarian tendencies than back politicians whose platform these supporters abhor. This is because their countries’ acute society-wide political conflicts raise the stakes in elections and, in turn, the price their supporters have to pay for putting democratic principles above partisan interests. In polarized societies, ordinary people become pro- or anti-Chávez, Orbán, or Erdoğan first, and democrats only second.

Svolik concludes:

As Chávez, Putin, and Erdoğan have eroded democracy in their countries, they have done so with the tacit and sometimes explicit consent of significant portions—sometimes majorities—of their electorates. To be clear, this is not to exculpate autocrats. Only in rare instances have ordinary people actually demanded dictatorship, and even in those cases, these were small fractions of the public, as Nancy Bermeo has documented [Nancy Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)]. But because democratic backsliding is a process that starts from a democratic status quo, ordinary people play a central role in it. They are indispensable, even if reluctant, accomplices. Aspiring autocrats succeed in subverting democracy only when given the opportunity by a factious public.