Despite extensive and intensive democracy promotion A number of countries set on an initial path of democratization have either fallen back into authoritarianism or stagnated in between democracy and autocracy. However, scarce literature is available on the factors leading to a setback into authoritarianism or democratic stagnation. Thus, this paper examines cases of setbacks into authoritarianism or democratic stagnations with the aim of identifying the critical junctures that may have induced the setback and promoters’ interaction with them. Due to their currently unmatched economic and political leverage and breadth of activities within democracy promotion, this paper examines democracy promotion by the European Union (US) and the United States (US).
Since the dividing lines between democratic progress and stagnation may be blurred, the paper, starts with defining setback into authoritarianism and democratization stagnation on a single continuum. These definitions are further applied to countries discussed within democracy indices starting from the collapse of the Soviet Union. The paper proceeds with choosing two cases of setbacks into authoritarianism and two cases of stagnation. Through in-depth qualitative analysis and the application of process tracing, within case comparison, and to some extent cross-case comparison of the chosen cases, the study identifies the values of critical junctures considered to influence democratization. It is argued that stagnation and setback into authoritarianism are likely to be caused by the emergence or disappearance of certain factors that had different values at the initial stages of democratization and might have been boosted by promoters or local stakeholders. Further applying findings of the in-depth analysis to the initially eliminated cases by utilizing a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, this paper also discusses which of the discussed critical junctures are likely to influence the course of democracy promotion and democratization leading to stagnation or setback into authoritarianism.
