REVIEW
Democracy’s backsliding in the international environment
Susan D. Hyde
If the end of the 20th century was defined by the relatively widespread acceptance of democracy, the second
decade of the 21st century is marked by concerns about backsliding in new and established democracies
alike and by a notable decline in foreign support for democracy around the world. As democracy’sglobal
tailwinds shift to headwinds, scholars have an opportunity to better understand how experience with even
superficial forms of democratic institutions across a diverse set of contexts influences citizen behavior when
formal democratic institutions erode or disappear. This shift also provides the opportunity to examine whether
citizen movements alone—absent external support—are sufficient to check newly emboldened autocrats.
I
nitiated with the 1974 Carnation Revo-
lution in Portugal, the most recent global
wave of democratization has been filled
with images of exuberant citizens march-
ing to demand democracy from vicious
tyrants, individuals taking sledgehammers
to the Berlin Wall, and new voters proudly
displaying indelibly inked fingers on election
day. In many narratives, the picture is one of
bottom-up demand for democratic governance.
Although domestic factors, including citizen
movements, are undeniably important, a com-
plete picture of the worldwide diffusion of de-
mocracy also includes the often-overlooked
roles of international pressure on leaders to
democratize and transnational support for
prodemocracy movements ( 1 – 7 ). In the late
1990s, Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya
Sen called the rise of democracy, as a“universal
value,”the most important event of the 20th
century. As he wrote,“[w]hile democracy is not
yet universally practiced, nor indeed uniformly
accepted, in the general climate of world opi-
nion, democratic governance has now achieved
the status of being taken to be generally right”
( 8 ). The empirical patterns are pronounced; as
democracy grew in global prominence, nearly
all sovereign states in the world introduced
direct national elections and allowed multi-
ple political parties to compete, if not win
( 9 ). At the peak of this trend, all but seven
countries held national elections, 95% of which
allowed for the possibility of multiparty com-
petition (Fig. 1). Countries that held no na-
tional elections between 2010 and 2018 were
Brunei, China, Eritrea (postponed), Qatar (sched-
uled, canceled), Saudi Arabia, Somalia (post-
poned), South Sudan (postponed), and the
United Arab Emirates.
However, after decades of near-global dom-
inance in which even powerful autocracies
like China have claimed to be moving toward
democracy, the second decade of the 21st cen-
tury has been marked by concerns about demo-
cratic backsliding—also called democratic erosion
or autocratization. Such concerns are present
in many countries around the world including
some long-standing democracies like India and
the United States, which were previously thought
to be well insulated from such change ( 10 – 14 ).
Democratic backsliding research is relatively
new, and, although there are some definitional
debates, it involves incremental changes away
from representative democracy and toward
authoritarianism.“Backsliding makes elections
less competitive without entirely undermining
the electoral mechanism; it restricts participa-
tion without explicitly abolishing norms of
universal franchise seen as constitutive of con-
temporary democracy; and it loosens con-
straints of accountability...”( 12 ).
Concerns about democratic backsliding
are now prominent in dozens of countries:
Populism, nationalist movements, declining
trust in institutions, rising income inequal-
ity, and the U.S. abandonment of its global
leadership role threaten what had been reason-
ably widespread popularity and legitimacy of
democratic governance ( 15 ). Influential sub-
sets of political parties around the world have
embraced antidemocratic sentiment within
their ranks( 11 , 15 ). In foreign policy, a decline
in democracy promotion by powerful Western
actors and overt challenges to international
norms that privilege democracy and human
rights present a related trend ( 16 – 18 ).
As democracy’s global tailwinds shift to
headwinds, what are the consequences? Al-
though scholars have long acknowledged that
international dimensions matter in the study
of domestic politics ( 19 ), it is also the case that
international norms and Western support
for democracy have declined more in the past
4 years than in the prior 40. This shock to the
international environment, which may be
lamentable from a normative perspective, also
represents an opportunity for researchers to
better understand international factors in the
most recent wave of democratization ( 20 )and
how international pressure and transnational
diffusion now condition democratic backslid-
ing. A lack of sufficient variation over time in
Western support for democracy since the late
1970s has made studying its consequences
more difficult. The precipitous decline in inter-national support for democracy should provide
new insights into several areas: (i) which leaders
were more responsive to international con-
straints on their repressive tendencies ( 21 ),
(ii) in which countries international support
for democracy played a less important role,
and, more generally, (iii) which cases that had
previously been interpreted as democratiza-
tion were illusory to begin with. Scholars now
have a singular opportunity to evaluate how
experience with even superficial forms of dem-
ocratic institutions across a diverse set of con-
texts influence citizen behavior when those
institutions erode or disappear, and they can
also explore whether citizen movements alone,
absent external support, are sufficient to check
newly emboldened autocrats.The prodemocracy international environment
and pseudodemocracy
For decades, would-be autocrats inhabited an
international system that clearly favored demo-
cracy ( 2 , 6 , 17 ), including explicit democracy
assistance programs, rhetorical support for
democracy from the world’s most powerful
leaders, changes in international organizations
that committed member states to democracy
( 7 ), the idea that democracies made better
international partners, and even a perception
among foreign investors that democracies
have less political risk [see ( 22 )forasummary
of this literature]. Western democracy promo-
tion has always been partially undermined by
geopolitical ( 23 ) or partisan objectives ( 24 , 25 )
andopentocritiqueonmanydimensions( 17 , 26 ).
Even so, the combination of direct democracy
assistance and international norms favoring
democracy operated in most regions of the
world both at the elite level—constraining
leaders who would otherwise engage in more
overtly authoritarian behaviors ( 21 , 27 )—and at
the citizen level—by aiding prodemocracy citi-
zen movements and supporting civil society ( 28 ).
Under this prodemocracy international
environment, blatant antidemocratic behavior
became more costly for autocratic leaders ( 3 , 6 ),
the consequences of transparently stealing
elections increased ( 1 , 3 ), and the costs of
being excluded from the democratic club grew
( 3 , 15 ). For citizens and opposition parties, the
global prodemocracy turn carried with it not
only increased constraints on authoritarian
governments but also powerful ideas about
universal rights for individuals, self-determination,
and popular sovereignty ( 29 ). These ideas included
arguments against the discriminatory idea that
only some peoples were“fit for democracy”( 8 ),
access to networks of prodemocracy movements
in other countries ( 28 ), concrete strategies of
resistance ( 16 , 30 ), and, in many cases, substan-
tial Western support for civil society, including
support for democracy-building activities ( 5 ).
Suggestiveempirical analyses have docu-
mented both spatial and temporal clustersDEMOCRACY IN THE BALANCEHyde,Science 369 , 1192–1196 (2020) 4 September 2020 1of5
Travers Department of Political Science, University of California,
Berkeley, CA, USA.Email: [email protected]