What’s Really Wrong with (CEE) Democracies? Reassessing the Democratic Backsliding Debate

Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) stood out for speed and process of democratisation, but is now at the centre of debate on populist and nativist political transformations that call into question the previous narrative of democratic success, sometimes suggesting that states in the region have slipped – or risk slipping – into hybrid regimes. Despite the volume and range of scholarship on democracy in Eastern Europe, the debate on ‘democratic backsliding’ in the region has remained oddly limited: ‘backsliding’ (and many cognate concepts) tend to see the region in terms of a ‘reverse transition paradigm’ allowing for progress (consolidation), stagnation, or reversal (regression); comparative frameworks are disproportionately influenced by cases of sharp democratic decline (such as Hungary and Poland), with limited attention paid to instances of democratic resilience or more intermediate, ambiguous patterns of democratic development; and earlier work on democratic consolidation and problems of democratic quality in CEE – while noted as over-optimistic - is not systematically integrated. This paper seeks to rethink the relationships between different dimensions of the current democratic malaise (and democratic counter-reactions) and to present a preliminary, empirically-based typology based on 10 CEE national cases. It takes as its point of departure the distinction between backsliding and hollowing proposed by Greskovits (2015), which related issues of issues of low democratic quality and popular engagement to regression in the direction of hybrid regimes. Here it argues that hollow(ing) democracy can be more expansively conceived in terms of three overlapping conditions: the social embeddedness of democratic institutions; socio-cultural (identity) divisions; and the accountability of state elites and institutions. It additionally argues for a clearer distinction between people-led and elite-led processes of both backsliding and hollowing. Moving to a more empirical phase, the paper then proposes drawing a distinction between more static features of democratic regimes and dynamic processes to clarify the baseline against which combined processes of backsliding and hollowing can be assessed. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the patterns, combinations and sequences that emerge cross-nationally and how these impact on our understanding of CEE’s trajectories (un)democratic developments and the type of research agendas appropriate to them.