On Democratic Backsliding and Developmental Narratives of Democracy

The recent wave of autocratisation has given rise to the diagnosis that we live in an age of ‘democratic backsliding’, where hard-fought democratic achievements are being undone by regressive and illiberal political forces. This diagnosis turns upon specific developmental narratives of democracy, which are rarely spelled out in detail but are always there as subtexts. This paper reconstructs and analyses the two most prominent democratic developmental stories available: the Trente Glorieuses-view, according to which the post-World War II-era marked the high point of democratic development, and the End of History-view, according to which democracy peaked in the years after 1989, with the accelerated spread of liberal democracy across the world. The paper argues that both narratives suffer from two fundamental shortcomings. First, they commit analysts to relatively rigid models of democracy that can heavily distort judgments about the evolution of democracy. Second, they set up linear stories of democratic decline from a certain point onwards, implicitly championing an implausibly teleological view of history. Reflecting on these shortcomings, argues the paper, admits a first glimpse into what a better account of democratic progress and regression might look like.