For the last six years, the American public has been subject to regular warnings and ominous projections about the state and health of our democratic political regime. Each election cycle now sees a regular bundle of essays and commentary that proclaim the death of American democracy. Indeed, for some social scientists, policy wonks, and political observers, negative assessments of democracy are front and center in practically all political discussions today.
While concern for a healthy polity is always welcome, especially as the general political legitimacy crisis besetting American society continues to rumble through our society, not all expressions of impending democratic doom are similarly healthy. Indeed, while it is surely good to be aware of real threats to our republic, at this point most of the more sophisticated arguments counseling vigilance have already been aired. Furthermore, in general, their dire predictions have not come to pass. Thus, by 2022, a politically interested reader is more likely to encounter hyperbole and hyperventilation than anything else.
Most commentators focus on the perceived threat of democracy’s gradual decline – termed in the political science literature variably as “democratic backsliding,” “democratic decay,” or “autocratization.” This focus on a gradual approach usually emphasizes procedural tricks, slow institutional capture, and distorted electoral outcomes. It is informed primarily by the experience of certain European and Eurasian countries -- Hungary, Serbia, Russia, and Turkey are most commonly cited -- over the last two decades.
According to this backsliding framework, commentators claim that the United States is in imminent danger of falling into a form of authoritarian “Orbánism” or “Putinism” by way of dirty tricks played by the Republican Party. Yet working through any convincing account of a gradual slide into electoral authoritarianism requires considerable leaps well beyond tinkering around the electoral margins by way of House gerrymandering, Senate malapportionment, or the Electoral College.
Indeed, I explore this question in a recent article at American Affairs, where I point out the high bar required for any substantial regime evolution by this path. It is not enough to win one election at the margins and suddenly dismantle democracy in an instant. As I note there,
One must be able to control a large set of political and economic organizations: the national-level political institutions, the state‑level political institutions, the judiciary, the military apparatus, the media, the wealthy elite, the socially and politically relevant corporations, and significant segments of the population … The United States is a country of 330 million people, spread across an entire continent, containing a smorgasbord of overlapping racial, ethnic, and class segments, divided into a multitude of powerful state governments whose legitimacy and political authority are centuries old and practically meaningful to the lives of their respective citizens, in one of the oldest democracies in the world … There is no “seize the radio tower, seize the country” moment for the United States, no more than there is a scenario in which a leadership whose popularity barely crests 50 percent (of 330 million!) can so heavily bear down on institutions and society. To say it would be hard to institutionalize and consolidate genuine authoritarianism in America is an understatement.
Most of the concerns that observers interested in the backsliding framework involve putting slight weights on the electoral scales that are believed to tip a close electoral outcome, from gerrymandering to election procedures to ballot certification. But this is not in fact how any of the exemplar cases of electoral authoritarianism in Europe and Eurasia actually came to be.
In all cases, a combination of a personally popular, charismatic leader and a cohesive, dominant political party had to first win elections – and win them very convincingly.
Vladimir Putin won the 2000 election in Russia with an outright majority – and by 18 million more votes than the next most popular candidate. In 2004 he beat his opponent by 40 million (and over 70% of the total vote). Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán both won resounding parliamentary elections that left them with solid, constitutional majorities over multiple elections – only then ultimately allowing them to further stack the institutional deck and intervene powerfully in the media and civil society spheres. Meanwhile, in Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić first built up a sustained majority political coalition over multiple elections, increasing his (and his political coalition’s) vote share with every election.
This poses a major problem for any backsliding account of the United States. Even with the current presidential administration completely underwater in polling, the generic ballot shows a race that is lopsided but one that will at most produce a firmly opposition House and a slightly opposition Senate. This does not an authoritarian regime make. Backsliding proponents like to emphasize that electoral victories can snowball into malign efforts to completely skew political institutions. Yet they sometimes fail to appreciate just how hated the political opposition usually is during the critical elections that usually bring autocratizing parties to power.
For example, the ruling coalition that Erdoğan’s AK Party ran against in 2002 was so unpopular that none of the three government parties won a single seat in the subsequent election. Only through complete collapse of his political opponents did Erdoğan find himself with a constitutional majority and the unchecked reins of government. Meanwhile, the election that swept Orban’s Fidesz party into power was reacting to the previous government, which had blown up the economy and was mired in corruption scandals. For all the discontent with the modern Democratic Party, there is no such total collapse of support nor would it be felt across the country in a wave election. Many states would still be firmly blue, and political competition at the federal level would hardly be ended.
We should always be aware of genuine threats to American democracy, and there is no reason why a measured approach cannot both eschew the more hyperbolic doomsayers while still keeping an eye on shoring up trust in our political institutions. Democratic backsliding could, in principle, be a concern for American politics in the future. Yet our political ecosystem is quite far from countries that have experienced this sort of regime trajectory. We should be very grateful for that.
Julian G. Waller holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from George Washington University. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) and a Non-Resident Fellow with the Illiberalism Studies Program hosted at the Elliott School of International Affairs. He is affiliated with the Jack Miller Center. All views are his own and do not represent his employers or affiliated organizations.
