Going, Going, Gone…Dismantling the Fragile Democracy and New Wave of Autocratization in Southeast Europe

Following a period of democratic success in former post-Communist countries, political developments in the region have started to stagnate and even experienced regression. This new wave of autocratization differs from past practices. Democratic institutions and practices are slowly eroded, ruining the already fragile state of democratic progress. Governments expand their political power and significantly overshadow the legislative or the judiciary oversight by adopting illiberal laws to expand their powers. Although countries from the Central and Eastern Europe receive substantial attention, with prime examples of democratic dismantling in Hungary and Poland, the countries from Southeast Europe are not immune to this process. After a brief period of democratization in the early and mid 2000s, when democracy could barely take roots, progressive governments in the region have started to apply more and more illiberal practices that slowly eroded the minor progress achieved in the preceding period. What is surprising that these autocratization episodes came during period of increased integration to the European Union. This is in stark contrast to the countries from Central and Eastern Europe that rapidly democratized in the 1990s and early 2000s during the same integration stages. Considering that it is a process, rather than a one-time event, new approaches to the study of these phenomena aim to identify autocratization episodes. As authoritarianism continues to be on the rise our paper aims to explain why some countries have democratically regressed, despite the advancement of the integration process? What are the modes of autocratization in the region? What is the new form of authoritarianism that has emerged? Borrowing from both, theories of democratization and autocratization, we identify five conditions (government effectiveness, democracy aid, EU conditionality, illiberal practices, and opposition strength) that can cause our outcome of interest, autocratization. We will employ qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) in order to capture the complex nature of the problem. We use data from the World Bank, V-Dem and combining it with own dataset on democracy aid and EU conditionality in order to identify which combination of factors offers explanation to autocratization in region. Furthermore, in order to capture the different episodes of autocratization, we split our seven Western Balkans countries into different periods based on the party in power. If a party is re-elected to serve an additional government turn it will be considered as the same episode. The article aims to provide cross-country analysis of autocratization episodes in Southeast Europe, by integrating international and domestic factors. Furthermore, we will use QCA to overcome some of the problems that recent studies face, mostly focusing on few case studies. Conversely, by focusing on government periods instead of country-year as a unit of analysis, we can also overcome some of the problems that the large-N analyses face, that is autocratization episodes that last for longer period.