NORMS AND PROCEDURES: COURTS AND DEMOCRATIC BACKSLIDING IN THE UNITED STATES

The quality of American democratic institutions has been in decline, with the US being placed on the list of backsliding democracies for the first time by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in 2021 and falling from 19th to 27th place on the World Justice Project rule of law index between 2015 and 2021. However, the judiciary, particularly lower-level federal and state courts, has resisted some of these trends and served as a bulwark against populist authoritarianism, particularly concerning the Trump campaign's attempts to challenge the results of the 2020 election. The authors argue that procedural rules, which are precise and widely shared across the legal profession and can be reputationally costly to violate, play a crucial role in coordinating a rule-of-law-oriented legal culture and contribute to the stability and resilience of the judiciary. They examine this using the examples of the 2020 court cases involving the Trump campaign and through interviews with judges at various levels of the American judicial system.