Paths to Defective Democracy and Beyond: A Comparative Study of Trajectories of Democratic Regression

In recent years, various studies have shed light on the trajectories of episodes of democratic regression. While some studies focus more on the temporal sequence of the loss of democratic quality across different dimensions (e.g., Wunsch and Blanchard 2022), other contributions consider starting points and outcomes to build typologies of regression episodes. However, these outcomes are usually operationalized as a function of regime transitions, for example from liberal to electoral democracy or democratic to autocratic regimes (e.g., Maerz et al. 2023). Such an operationalization is not unproblematic as it disregards whether certain dimensions of democracy have been (particularly) damaged over time, while others have remained unaffected, for instance. I conceptualize this aspect as damage profiles and assume that those differ and point in the direction of distinct diminished subtypes of democracy (e.g., delegative, exclusive, or illiberal democracy). In this article, I will test whether such different paths of democratic regression can indeed be identified based on V-Dem data. Finally, the results of this study are reflected against the background of existing typology frameworks.