Liberal Democracies Under Pressure in a Changing Political Landscapes

Abstract

Liberal democracies in the mid-2020s face a wide range of interrelated challenges, combining novel pressures with transformed versions of longstanding threats. Democratic backsliding increasingly unfolds within formally democratic systems and is often gradual, uneven, and contested. While the specific drivers of democratic erosion vary across contexts, they are embedded in broader global trends, including the rise of illiberal conservatism, cultural backlash, and anti-liberal mobilization. These dynamics manifest through diverse channels: institutional power struggles, elite strategies, moral and cultural conflicts, and societal resistance to liberal-democratic norms. This panel brings together comparative case studies that examine how democratic decline, resilience, and resistance emerge across different institutional and cultural settings. The contributions highlight both elite-driven and bottom-up processes, exploring how illiberal agendas may succeed, stall, or transform when confronted with institutional constraints, public contestation, or strategic adaptation. Some cases illustrate how authoritarian ambitions are constrained by institutional safeguards and political timing, while others show how cultural and moral conflicts challenge liberal democracy from within civil society without necessarily producing immediate institutional breakdown. Additional contributions focus on contexts marked by sustained illiberal influence, examining how opposition actors navigate restricted political space and how symbolic confrontation may substitute for substantive democratic transformation. Taken together, the panel advances a nuanced understanding of democratic backsliding as a non-linear and context-dependent process shaped by political agency, institutional capacity, and cultural conflict. By integrating institutional, discursive, and societal perspectives, the panel sheds light on the conditions under which democratic erosion progresses, is contained, or provokes resilience, and what this implies for the future trajectories of liberal democracy.

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