Regime Change and the Authoritarian Drift

To the question “How do democracies die?” Levizki and Ziblatt answer – slowly. Gradual changes, deviations of relations between authorities, accumulation of constitutional changes, hype of conspiracy theories about election bias, etc. The study of the struggle for democracy over the last two decades manifested itself through the prism of democratic decline (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. 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 liberal democracies, there is a 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, induced by democratic backsliding, occur in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes characterized by the rise of a leader who cannot be removed from office by legal means, the collapse of the rule of law, the concentration of power, and the severe suppression of the opposition – by imprisoning them, physically or otherwise harming them, or murdering them. My theoretical argument is that analyzing regime change from liberal democracies to authoritarianism under the heading of democratic backsliding (notwithstanding this is the common practice) in fact misses the main road of regime change: using an authoritarian protocol by which government aggrandizement, concentration of powers in the hands of the executive, dismantling the checks and balances, turning liberalism into the enemy of the people, politicization of the civil service and the deliberate delegitimization of the rule of law, 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. At the heart of this concept is a double emphasis: structural changes and ideological transformation. 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 autocracy. This in turn may provide tools to resist the process in time to halt the regime change and perhaps become a near-miss democracy.