Democratic Backsliding or Intermediate Democratic Syndromes? Bridging the East-West Comparative Divide in the Study of European Democracies

The notion that many European democracies are undergoing a gradual process of ‘democratic backsliding’ is becoming increasing influential in both debates on global democratisation and assessments of European politics. This perspective, framed in terms of (the risk of) a slow descent into hybrid regime via executive aggrandisement, an illiberal turn in values and public culture and hollowing out of traditional representative institutions now extended not only to new democracies but even to established ones. This is illustrated most starkly by widespread fears for the integrity of the 2020 presidential US elections, but also in concerns that some West European democracies might be destabilised (“deconsolidated”) to such an extent that they too are at risk of democratic backsliding. The likely drivers of such a process are illiberal populisms and various forms of “emergency politics” in the wake of the 2008-9 recession, strains in the Eurozone, the European “refugee crisis” and Corona virus. However, we argue that, even in East Central Europe, the concept has been overused gelling into a “backsliding paradigm”, which obscures complex trajectories of troubled democracies beyond a politics of democratic consolidation or democratic politics as usual, but falling short of a sustained slide into an illiberal hybrid regime. In many respects, and certainly as applied to West European cases, “backsliding” bears all the classical hallmarks of concept stretching. But it also throws in sharp relief an issue that has continued to bedevil European comparative politics since the fall of communism: that comparisons taking in established West European and newer ECE democracies often rapidly flounder because of the stark differences between the core and post-communist EU states, typically resulting in un-insightful conclusions which amount to little more than registering an East-West contrast. In this paper, working from the example of East Central Europe, where democratic backsliding is said to be prevalent, we suggest a focus on two intermediate syndromes closer to real life outcomes and we sketch two dynamics which defy easy conventional categorisation in terms of democratic progress or regression: democratic careening and stabilisation at the cost of ethnic and/or social exclusion. These we believe offer a better guide for researchers and policy- makers seeking to understand the many democracies that are neither clearly consolidating nor (in the early stages of) backsliding. However, they also offer the promise of a new and nuanced framework for meaningful comparison of (un)democratic developments in states in West European EU core and its East Central and Southern European peripheries.