From democracy to autocracy through bureaucracy: Behavioural and functional implications of backsliding theories tested ‘in silico’

How to detect, counteract, and possibly prevent the backsliding of democratic polities? The classification of governments as 'autocracies in the making' spurs debate when built on additive gauges of institutional facets that easily yield false positives. However, definitional stalemates can be circumvented by selecting facets with causal import to generative mechanisms. Along these lines, we reason that models of democratic backsliding are less prone to misclassification when they zoom in on the relationship between the executive and the bureaucracy to understand democratic regress as the erosion of the rule of law in administration. In this literature, we identify one institutional enabling condition and two mechanisms of erosion – namely, forbearance and blaming under no administrative transparency – that together can suffice to grow political loyalty by trading the rule of law for clientelist relationships. Last, we apply computational modeling techniques to explore the behavioral and functional implications of our theoretical triplet. This involves rendering the structure of paradigmatic governance arrangements, including the identification of relevant actors alongside system- and individual-level features, as scenarios that draw on and integrate the above generative mechanisms. Using simulation as a method and Agent-Based Modeling as a technique, we develop a testbed for exploring democratic backsliding observed in real-world bureaucracies by using the "artificial society" metaphor. Operationally, this involves reconstructing a generalized structure-behavior nexus through a process-centered perspective on the backsliding mechanisms. Complex interactions are embedded within structurally-mandated behavioral constraints to shed light on the non-linear dynamics that underlie behavioral and, more broadly, normative adaptation processes. This, in turn, enables us to pinpoint factors and behavioral configurations that sustain democratic governance – or tipping points in processes of democratic backsliding from which governments are unable to recover. In this session, we present an overview of dominant positions on democratic backsliding and highlight their relationships before drawing attention to specific phenomena literature is yet challenged to explain. We then sketch a conceptual model that captures central generic features of governance arrangements as relevant for this study and outline the principal operationalization of backsliding processes, followed by presenting initial results and future directions. We conclude with a discussion of challenges and opportunities related to modeling techniques for the study of democratic backsliding specifically (and of bureaucracy more broadly) while inviting critiques on both the theoretical and methodological merit of this approach.