Domestic Responses to Democratic Backsliding: Citizens, Civil Society, and Parties

Democratic backsliding – the gradual dismantling of domestic checks and balances – has become a major challenge to contemporary democracies in Europe and beyond (Bermeo 2016; Waldner & Lust 2018; Diamond 2020; Haggard & Kaufman 2021). Its emergence is particularly striking in the post-communist members of the European Union (EU), long hailed as poster children of successful democratisation (Greskovits 2015; Buštíková & Guasti 2017). Studies have chronicled how ruling parties accomplish backsliding: by manipulating elections, violating civil liberties, creating an uneven playing field for the opposition, reducing institutional constraints on the executive (Dresden & Howard 2016; Lührmann & Lindberg 2019). Individual and comparative case studies show how incumbents vary in their use of the backsliding toolbox, among others in Hungary (Buzogány 2017; Bogaards 2018; Kornai 2015), Poland (Sadurski 2018; Fomina 2019; Pirro & Stanley 2021), the Czech Republic (Hanley & Vachudova 2018), and the Western Balkans (Bieber 2018, 2020). Similar developments have been observed beyond Europe, from the United States (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018) to Venezuela (Svolik 2020), Indonesia (Aspinall et al. 2020) or Brazil (Pérez-Liñán 2018). Against the backdrop of the increasing spread of democratic backsliding, scholars have begun to investigate strategies of resistance to illiberal trends and building democratic resilience (Lührmann 2021; Somer et al. 2021). In Europe, studies examining responses to democratic backsliding have tended to focus on top-down interventions by the EU seeking to tackle illiberal trends among member states and candidate countries (Sedelmeier 2014; Kelemen 2017; Sedelmeier 2017; Kelemen 2020; Richter & Wunsch 2020; Herman et al. 2021). However, such external responses have faced fundamental challenges on normative grounds, as well as regarding the risk of potential domestic backlash effects. Our proposed workshop adopts a different perspective, focusing on domestic responses to backsliding. Democratic backsliding occurs as a gradual process that not only leads to a decline in democratic quality, but also successively reduces the power of domestic actors to hold a government accountable. In many cases, explicit harassment against the opposition or restrictions on civil society pose existential threats to these actors. At the same time, domestic responses by citizens, as well as parties and civil groups, are crucial for overcoming or at least mitigating democratic backsliding, be it by pressuring incumbents to change course or by replacing a government engaged in backsliding. Hence, the workshop seeks to explain domestic responses to democratic backsliding, as well as to gauge the relative success or failure of these responses. Bringing together comparative politics approaches with political behaviour research, the workshop seeks to further both our theoretical and empirical understanding of the role and impact of different domestic actors in ongoing processes of democratic backsliding. This includes questions such as: • Under which conditions do voters hold incumbents accountable for democratic backsliding? • What determines whether citizens engage in protest against democratic backsliding? • How can civil society counter democratic backsliding, when it might itself be under threat? • How do (opposition) parties respond to democratic backsliding at different stages of the process?