Neglected theoretical tool or conceptual afterthought? The concept of ‘democratic deconsolidation’ revisited

This paper revisits and re-examines the notion of ‘democratic deconsolidation’ as a potential conceptual (re-)addition to current debates about the erosion of (apparently) well-established contemporary democracies. While ‘democratic consolidation’ (or ‘consolidation of democracy’) has been the subject of a huge empirical and conceptual literatures (Schedler 1998; Schneider 2008; Schneider and Schmitter 2015), the notion of ‘democratic deconsolidation’ has been used it a more scattered and fitful way, primarily being deployed to discuss cultural and attitudinal shifts away from democracy-supporting values among mass publics (Inglehart 2016; Foa and Munck 2017; Zilinsky 2019; Wuttke et al 2020) or as a loose synonym for the gradual but serious deterioration of a democratic regimes (Agh 2016; Corbett 2020). The concept may, however, merit revisiting and redeveloping for comparative and empirical use. There are two principal reasons: first because of the sharp deterioration of some Third Wave democracies previously seen as highly consolidated (for example, Hungary and Poland) (Linz and Stepan 1996) and the perception that ‘established’ or ‘advanced’ democracies in Western Europe or North America, assumed to have consolidated democracy at an earlier historical stage, possess similar vulnerabilities (Corbett 2020); and second, because an emerging debate about the variety of paths and mechanisms through which high-level contemporary democracies may decay or be dismantled to the point of experiencing serious damage, disruption or even transition to autocratic rule. Existing paradigms of incumbent-led ‘democratic backsliding’ through populism and power centralisation, it has been suggested, may be too narrow and too teleological (Cianetti and Hanley 2021). This paper reviews and draws together the (scattered) usages of the term, noting that, while rarely explicitly conceptualised, it may be developed into a coherent theoretical proposition by returning to and rethinking earlier work on democratic consolidation. Such rethinking suggests that de-consolidation phenomena should be seen as extend beyond simply shifts mass value orientations to elite strategies; the hollowing out, informal capture and de-stabilisation of institutions (for example, party structures); and patterns of social and economic power. Reflecting on the case United Kingdom and selected states Central and Eastern Europe, the paper argues that as a meaningful term de-consolidation may be better viewed as a set of processes playing out, patchily and intermittently, over the long-term. It concludes that a rebooted notion of ‘democratic deconsolidation’ may primarily be helpful as a means of framing a medium-long term perspective on the evolution of democratic regimes and in posing questions of causal (a)symmetry: whether (or to what extent) threats to (the stability of) democratic regimes should be viewed in terms of the reversal of earlier processes of stabilisation, or as emergence of new disruptive processes. However, it may add limited value in other respects.