Systems of Government and Democratic Backsliding

These are not good times for democracy. Over the past decades, we have witnessed the emergence of a new model of autocratization: democratic backsliding, which refers to the gradual deterioration of institutions driven by elected leaders (Bermeo, 2016; Haggard and Kaufman, 2021b; Przeworski, 2022; Waldner and Lust, 2018). One of the regions most affected by this phenomenon is Latin America, where the rise to power of authoritarian leaders has led to the weakening of horizontal accountability mechanisms and the erosion of basic civil liberties, in some cases—such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, and more recently El Salvador—crossing the threshold into authoritarianism. Democratic backsliding results from the convergence of two factors: on the one hand, the electoral access to power of anti-democratic leaders; on the other, weak institutional configurations that offer little or no resistance to their authoritarian impulses (Carothers and Hartnett, 2024). In this regard, Cianetti and Hanley (2021: 70) argue that “the election of authoritarian politicians does not necessarily lead to backsliding (…) if institutions are robust and checks and balances are sufficiently entrenched.” Consequently, the main threat to democratic survival arises when an authoritarian leader or party reaches a position of presidential hegemony, defined as “the capacity of the executive branch to control the decisions of the legislative and judicial branches” (Pérez-Liñán et al., 2019: 608). Numerous scholars have analyzed the characteristics and strategies employed by authoritarian actors in their assault on democracy (Frantz et al., 2021; Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018; Medzihorsky and Lindberg, 2024; Pappas, 2016; Rhodes-Purdy and Madrid, 2020). By contrast, the study of the political institutions that constrain and/or enable their actions has received comparatively less attention. This stands in contrast to classical works in comparative politics, where institutional factors occupied a central place in explaining political outcomes. From an institutionalist perspective, the rules of the game are assumed to play a fundamental role in shaping political outcomes, either by conditioning actors’ strategic behavior or by favoring the emergence of certain scenarios over others. How, then, do institutional conditions influence processes of democratic backsliding? In this article, I argue that presidentialism displays three characteristics that facilitate its development. First, it lowers the barriers to power for political outsiders. Second, it encourages the emergence of a plebiscitary style of governance based on a direct relationship between the president and the citizenry. Third, it exacerbates the majoritarian features of the political system, resulting in a high concentration of power in the hands of the president. To test these hypotheses, I conduct a comparative analysis of Latin America and Europe using data from V-Dem.