The Outcomes of Autocratization: Resisters’ Role in the Paths of Democratic Backsliding and Breakdown

The opposite of democratization, autocratization, is the prevalent trend of political regime developments in recent times. It is affecting different, with diverse intensities, political regimes, from consolidated to new democracies, to even authoritarian regimes, across the continents. Scholars are trying to catch up with the mounting decline of democracy worldwide, with conceptual and empirical analyses likewise, on how autocratization starts, unfolds, and can be stopped or prevented. However, we still lack comparative examinations to explain specifically the outcome of autocratization processes. Arguably, if autocratization is spreading globally, traditional forms of regime change, from military coups to auto-golpe, do not show similar growing trends. Moreover, many current autocratization processes are gradual, and happen ‘in stealth’. Therefore, what can explain the completion of an autocratization episode, meaning a change of regime? What, and who, can stop an autocratization process, once started? The paper adopts Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), in order to comparatively study different outcomes of autocratization processes after the end of the Cold War (1991-2022). The units of analysis are the countries during the timespan of an autocratization episode, as defined by the V-Dem Episodes of Regime Transformations (ERT). Autocratization outcomes are defined as the result of an autocratization process or episode and operationalized as a fuzzy membership scoring from complete transition or regime change (1) to the return of the initial level of democracy (0), with continuous scores of democratic downturns in within. In turn, the conditions related to the outcome(s) will be related to those agency-based factors which can counteract autocratization. In fact, we shall argue, even though structural variables (e.g., economic crises, rising inequalities, polarized party systems or electorates, etc.) can explain countries’ propensities to start autocratizing, we posit that institutional, political and social actors can ultimately determine the outcomes of this process. Our conditions will then be clustered under the framework of resistance to autocratization and will be partially based on the Democratic Erosion Events Dataset (DEED, cross-checked with extensive secondary research), as divided into six macro-areas: protests and civic society actions (1), the presence of an outside influence (2), the effectiveness of checks by institutional actors such as the judiciary (3) or the legislature (4), or less institutional ones, in particular the media (5) or political elites (6). As autocratization episodes can last for different time intervals, in order to achieve comparability across cases, we will propose to calibrate these conditions with a mean of resistance events weighted with the different lengths of such episodes – a simple, though elegant way, to integrate time in QCA applications. The empirical analysis will be devoted to explaining the conditions leading to different autocratization outcomes in countries starting as democracies or semi-democracies (as the current version of the DEED exclude autocracies). Further robustness tests or cluster diagnostics, based on the latest developments in QCA-based research, will be applied to detect whether the patterns of the QCA solution formula(s) will be prevalent in specific contexts (such as world regions).