Opposing Autocratization Across Regimes

While recent literature on autocratization has introduced the role of opposition actors and their strategies (Gamboa 2022, Cleary and Öztürk 2022), this field of inquiry remains largely unexplored (Tomini, Gibril and Bochev 2022). This manuscript introduces a novel approach to comparing opposition to incumbent-led autocratization across different countries. This approach builds on contentious episodes analysis (Bojar et al. 2021). It focuses on the interactions between government authorities, challengers and third-party actors surrounding specific policy proposals that would contribute to autocratization in key accountability dimensions of democracy if adopted. Central to this study is the comparison of opposition to these autocratic policy proposals within and across different types of regimes. This avoids common challenges in autocratization research, such as the lack of cross-regime comparison (Tomini, Gibril, and Bochev 2023). By considering regimes with differing democratic trajectories, the paper diverges from traditional studies of autocratization, which often focus solely on cases of democratic breakdown (Ginsburg and Huq 2018). Further enhancing the comparative aspect, the study aims to compare countries in Central and Eastern Europe with those in Latin America, providing a broader, more nuanced understanding of how opposition strategies function in different political contexts. The analysis covers four autocratic policy proposals per country case, which aim to alter the media and civil society landscapes, as well as the judicial and electoral systems. The proposals are selected primarily based on the threat they pose to democracy rather than the resistance they provoke. This allows us to avoid selecting based on the dependent variable. Empirically, the analysis builds on actions coded from newspaper articles that typically cover the first two years after an autocratic policy proposal is introduced. The paper provides initial findings from several ‘contentious episodes of autocratization’ in countries from Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America. The manuscript contributes to the study of autocratization and democratic resistance by examining the composition of different groups of actors, the goals they pursue, and the channels they use. Furthermore, it sheds light on the outcomes of these interactions, such as the effectiveness of slowing down or halting legislative attempts at autocratization and the potential for escalation of certain strategies.