Mapping Opposition Strategies amid Democratic Backsliding

The world is going through a third global wave of autocratization. Several structural, institutional, cultural and agency-centered explanations have been put forward to explain the roots of democratic backsliding. A number of recent analyses have shifted their attention to understand how strategies adopted by opposition actors affect the success or failure of backsliding (Cleary and Öztürk 2022; Gamboa 2022; Tomini et al. 2023) and whether they induce more or less polarization (Somer et al. 2021). This paper contributes to this growing literature by mapping opposition strategies by political parties and civil society in 34 countries based on synthesizing data from 109 academic studies published between 1990 and 2020. The results show large variations between countries in terms of the employed institutional and extra-institutional opposition strategies as well as variation in terms of the sequence of implementing those strategies. Using qualitative comparative analysis, the paper examines the effects of opposition strategies on the degree of backsliding. The results advance our understanding of whether and how political parties and civil society can provide a safeguard amid democratic backsliding.