A Multidimensional Framework for Analyzing Populist-Led Democratic Backsliding Across Borders

Democratic backsliding under populist leadership poses fundamental challenges to how we theorize democracy. Classical democratic theory has largely focused on democratic founding, consolidation, or catastrophic collapse, leaving the phenomenon of incremental erosion theoretically underspecified. Meanwhile, populism's claim to represent "the people" against corrupt elites creates a theoretical tension: populist leaders invoke democratic legitimacy even as they dismantle the institutional safeguards that democratic theory deems essential. This paradox raises important questions about the nature of democracy itself – questions about whether democracy is fundamentally about popular sovereignty or constitutional constraints, about the relationship between majority rule and minority rights, and about which institutional arrangements are constitutive of democracy versus merely contingent features of particular democratic systems. These theoretical questions have global implications. Democratic backsliding is not confined to any single region or regime type but manifests across diverse political systems, from established Western democracies to newer democracies in the Global South. This global pattern suggests that we need theoretical frameworks capable of identifying what is essential to democracy across different institutional configurations and cultural contexts, while remaining sensitive to how local variations shape the particular forms backsliding takes. Without such frameworks, we risk either imposing parochial conceptions of democracy derived from specific national experiences or falling into relativism that cannot distinguish democratic erosion from legitimate democratic variation. This paper develops the Backsliding Protocol, a theoretically grounded, multidimensional analytical framework for studying populist-led democratic backsliding comparatively. The Protocol operationalizes core democratic principles, including popular sovereignty, constitutional constraints, political equality, and pluralism, into observable institutional domains. By disaggregating democracy into constituent elements (judicial independence, electoral integrity, media freedom, and civil society), the framework enables us to trace how populist leaders systematically undermine the institutional conditions for democratic politics while maintaining popular electoral support. This approach allows us to theorize the mechanisms through which democracy erodes incrementally, addressing a significant gap in democratic theory. We apply this framework through detailed analysis of anti-democratic legislation in Israel during two Knesset terms under populist coalition governments (2015-2019 and 2022-2025), then extend the analysis comparatively to India and Hungary. These cases represent distinct democratic traditions – a conflictual democracy shaped by ongoing territorial disputes, a post-colonial democracy navigating religious pluralism, and a post-communist democracy embedded in transnational institutions. Yet our analysis reveals systematic patterns in how populist leaders across these contexts exploit democratic procedures to concentrate power, marginalize opposition, and reshape the boundaries of legitimate political contestation. This comparative analysis demonstrates that populist-led backsliding, while adapted to local institutional and cultural contexts, exhibits cross-national patterns that can inform democratic theory. These patterns suggest that certain institutional arrangements and normative commitments are not merely preferences but preconditions for sustaining democratic politics. By identifying these patterns, the Backsliding Protocol contributes methodologically to normative democratic theory: it offers a systematic approach to studying how the essential features of democracy -those that distinguish it from electoral authoritarianism – manifest and erode across borders, enabling theorists to ground normative claims about democracy's requirements in rigorous comparative analysis of its actual vulnerabilities.