Regime Change and the Authoritarian Drift

To the question “How do democracies die?” Levizki and Ziblatt (2019) answer – slowly. The study of the struggle for democracy over the last two decades manifested itself through the prism of democratic decline (Bermeo, 2016, Diamond 2021). Appelbaum (2021) also warned that the 21st century is rolling back the achievements of democracy in the face of collectivist and totalitarian regimes. The democratic recession has deepened through the strengthening of the power of the government, the weakening of the judicial system and the opposition, the violation of human rights and minorities – in short, a democratic decline. In Ginzburg and Huk’s (2018) study of nearly failed democracies, there are only three cases – Finland (1930s), Colombia (2010) and Sri Lanka (2015). A very poor harvest considering that the indicators of democratic retreat show that many countries are undergoing democratic retreat from democratic renewal. Parallel with the decline of democracy in liberal or established democratic countries, there is a complementary process of the decline of soft-authoritarian or hybrid regimes towards a full-fledged dictatorial regime. This phenomenon was diagnosed by Ekiert and Dasanaiche (2024) as dictatorial drift. Dictatorial drift occurs – under the influence of democratic deterioration in liberal regimes – precisely in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. It means the weakening of all means of control – the rise of a leader who cannot be removed from office by legal means, the collapse of the rule of law, the concentration of powers in the hands of the leader and the government, and the severe suppression of the opposition. My argument is that analyzing this regime change under the heading of democratic backsliding in fact misses the main phenomenon: using an authoritarian protocol by which government aggrandizement, dismantling the checks and balances, turning liberalism into the enemy of the people, politicization of the civil service and the delegitimization of the judicial system, the media, academia, and civil society occur according to a masterplan. In other words, not just a random, serendipitous, rolling process of democratic decline, but an orderly plan of action of regime change. In this research, I take Akiert and Dasanjic’s key insight and translate it into a central concept for democratic decline: authoritarian drift. I ask how do we recognize when democratic decline is so rapid so that it could effectively end in an authoritarian regime? Taking the case of regime change – from liberal democracy to authoritarian regime – though changes imposed from the once-upon-a-time moderate ruling rightwing party and its leader (Urbinati, 2019), I focus on a group of states – Hungary, Poland, Turkey, USA, Brazil, India and Israel – which have undergone a rapid regime change under specific leader. I therewith wish to shed light on how we identify democratic vs. authoritarian regimes, how we define them and how to identify transformation using the authoritarian protocol employed to move from democracy to authocracy. This in turn may provide tools to resist the process in time to halt the regime change and perhaps become a near-miss democracy.