The democratic backsliding crisis poses a serious contemporary challenge to the European Union. According to Lührmann and Lindberg, the world experiences currently the third wave of autocratisation, which is different from preceding waves in three ways: it is more gradual, it is not violent, and hence much more difficult to detect. Even though scholars have tried to analyse in great details the episodic events, which lead to successful democratisation – including the sequence of liberalisation and the creation democratic institutions – explaining the opposite mechanism has not been attempted yet. How do illiberal democracies emerge in Europe? What explains prolonged democratic backsliding? How does the order of de-democratisation affect the extent of backsliding? This paper is a direct response to a V-dem project, which aims at establishing the most successful path of democratisation. This article restricts its empirical focus to Central Eastern Europe, where once consolidated democracies started to deteriorate. The first part offers a quantitative domination analysis, using V-dem indicators to identify the most advanced cases of democratic backsliding, and to establish the sequence of de-democratisation. Meanwhile, the second part focuses on qualitatively process tracing the Hungarian and the Polish cases, where democratic backsliding is structurally embedded. The components of an illiberal democracy have been analysed in the past, but a systematic, sequential account of the most recent wave of de-democratisation has not been established yet. This paper contributes to understanding the fundamental features and the first warning signs of democratic backsliding in Central Eastern European. Furthermore, it also proposes a typology of backsliding based on the ensemble of different components and extent of de-democratisation.
