Who cares? Party political debates on democratic backsliding and EU counter-actions in six EU member states.

This paper analyzes to what extent democratic backsliding in general and EU counter-actions in particular have become salient issues in domestic parliamentary debates. Public political attention to democratic backsliding, as facilitated by parliamentary debates, is, we argue, a precondition for the EU to gain political leverage in preventing or reversing processes of democratic deterioration. Our comparative analysis covers three (at least temporarily) backsliding countries (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) and three (so far) non-backsliding countries (Austria, Germany, Netherlands). To account for variation of the relative salience of (EU actions against) democratic backsliding within and across member states, we rely on variables accounting for MPs party affiliation, their government or opposition status, (hard and soft) EU counter-actions and a country’s (non-)backsliding status. The paper contributes to the burgeoning research on the domestic and multilevel politics of democratic backsliding in the EU.