Article A / 2024
Measuring Democratic Backsliding
The study records mostly stable aggregate electoral outcomes and argues that substantial successful entrenchment should ordinarily appear there. It favors a changing-judgment account for part of the discrepancy, without directly estimating that contribution. Coverage, performance, timing and the country-score restriction matter.
Explanation, evidence, and limits
In everyday terms: Little and Meng ask whether recent worldwide declines in democracy also appear in relatively easy-to-check election outcomes. Entrenchment means leaders making it harder to remove them from office. Keep their worldwide question separate from judging one country.
Democratic backsliding means weakening institutions or protections associated with democracy. It need not mean an immediate switch to dictatorship. Little and Meng ask whether the world as a whole experienced the large recent decline often described in public discussion. Their question concerns a cross-country trend, rather than whether a particular country has a serious problem.
Measuring a broad idea requires indicators: recorded signs of the thing we want to understand. An indicator such as whether the governing party lost an election is relatively easy to verify. Judging whether an entire election was free and fair requires weighing campaign access, intimidation, counting, and other conditions. The authors call the first kind more objective and the second more subjective; they argue that expert judgment offers wider coverage but can introduce bias.
Their main reasoning starts with electoral competition. Leaders weakening democracy often want to stay in office. If such efforts have become substantially more successful worldwide, we should expect governments to lose less often or winners to dominate more strongly. The authors therefore adopt a relatively narrow starting point centered on meaningful elections and acceptance of defeat. They also recognize that democracy requires rights, media freedom, and checks on executive power.
Study details · four evidence anchors
The study in four receipts
- What should appear if entrenchment grows?
- The proposed reasoning predicts less frequent electoral defeat or stronger incumbent dominance. Stable turnover is relevant evidence against that particular global pattern, even when it cannot capture every democratic protection.
- What was actually observed?
- Most electoral indicators do not show a clear recent global decline. The press indicators point in different directions. This is a collection of findings, rather than evidence that all institutions everywhere remained unchanged.
- Was coder bias proven?
- No direct estimate proves how much of the discrepancy is caused by changing expert judgment. The paper models and discusses that possibility alongside subtler undemocratic strategies.
- Can the summary index diagnose one country?
- No. The authors say their simple combined index is for summarizing aggregate trends, not an appropriate substitute for country-year democracy indices.
Sources include National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA), the Database of Political Institutions, expanded constitutional-constraint data, Versteeg and colleagues’ term-limit data, and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Coverage varies by measure; do not claim a single balanced sample size for every graph.
The 12-component summary index normalizes available indicators to 0–1 and averages them. Journalist killings and imprisonments are excluded from that index because coverage is shorter and most country-years have zero counts. Its numeric level has no substantive country-democracy interpretation.
The term-limit source identifies 234 end-of-term instances in 2000–2018; 60 serious evasion attempts and 34 successes. These are eligible-leader opportunities, not 234 countries or elections. The study finds no clear trend in evasion rates.
Population-weighted trends are more pessimistic and sensitive to the largest countries. Formal models explore a common change in coder information or standards and a leader’s choice between subtle and blatant violations. Models establish possible mechanisms, not the measured prevalence of those mechanisms.
How the researchers studied it
The study examines records from several sources: election outcomes and competition, constitutional constraints on leaders, attempts to evade term limits, and journalists jailed or killed. The unit is often a country-year: one country observed in one year. To avoid comparing only whichever countries held an election that year, some graphs carry forward a country’s most recent election if it occurred within six years.
Most main comparisons give each country equal weight. This answers a question about the average country, not the conditions experienced by the average person. The authors also examine population weighting, separate regime groups, and changes over longer periods. These are descriptive comparisons; countries and leaders were not randomly assigned to different democratic conditions.
What they found
Rates of ruling-party and leader turnover are broadly stable after the late 1990s. Winners’ vote or seat shares do not generally rise, and basic multiparty competition does not show the expected global decline. Constitutional constraints are largely stable or increasing. The press evidence is mixed: journalists jailed increase while murders decrease.
The authors regard time-varying expert judgment as a likely explanation for at least part of the discrepancy with more pessimistic indices. They model changing information or standards and discuss a shift toward subtle attacks. The descriptive comparisons do not directly estimate how much of the discrepancy is bias. Their official reply restates that restriction while insisting that the stable electoral patterns still require explanation.
Where the claim stops
Stable electoral indicators support a claim with clear limits about those indicators. They do not establish that every democratic protection stayed intact or that each country is safe. The authors explicitly accept backsliding in some countries. Election performance also reflects popularity and governing performance, so turnover is not a direct measure of every democratic condition.
Their simple combined index summarizes aggregate trends; they explicitly warn against using it as a country-year democracy score. Do not convert its numeric level into a valid diagnosis of one country. A local audit can expose an indicator’s limit without establishing the direction or size of a global trend.
Read What We Do; The Search for More Objective Measures; Taking Stock; Making Sense of the Data; and Conclusion.
Read first: Start with the explanation on this screen. Then check what was compared, what was found, and what remains uncertain. The journal article link is optional.
Open-access complete publisher text · CC BY.
