Approaches to Democratic Resilience and Resistance Across Political Arenas

Abstract

This panel explores democratic resilience as a multi-arena phenomenon, examining how resistance to democratic erosion unfolds across digital spaces, electoral behaviour, policy domains, and opposition strategies in different regime contexts. The contributions combine experimental methods, discourse and content analysis, and comparative designs to shed light on the actors, motivations, and arenas that condition whether and how democracies withstand the pressure of autocratization. From everyday narratives about Russia on social media, to a reframing and co-optation of “resilience” to challenge climate governance in policy documents, the panel highlights that democratic resilience depends not only on institutional safeguards but also on citizens’ normative commitments, discursive battles over meaning and memory, policy framing in strategic sectors, and the capacity of opposition actors to coordinate across arenas. It underscores the unevenness of resistance and the conditions under which democratic erosion is contested—or enabled—across contemporary political systems.

Title	Details
Electoral Resistance Against Autocratization: Insights from Southeast Europe	View Paper Details
Who Defends Democracy? Normative Commitment and Voter Resistance to Democratic Erosion	View Paper Details
Digital Memory Politics and Strategic Narratives About Russia: A Comparative Study of Czechia and Slovakia	View Paper Details
Opposing Autocratization Across Regimes	View Paper Details
The Resilience-Security Nexus in the EU Periphery: Populist Instrumentalization of Energy Policy and Green Transformation in the Visegrad Four	View Paper Details