Something for the Optimists and Something for the Pessimists: Democratic Oscillation in Slovakia

These are challenging times for democracies. Much scholarship has sought to explain the fate of democracy by looking through the lenses of democratic backsliding/autocratization and democratic resilience. Although this literature has enhanced our understanding of the fate of democracy, it tends to use comparative frames, is frequently presentist and fails to grasp the processes at work. The story of resilience and backsliding tends to be couched in accounts suggesting the presence or absence of one of these directions of travel. But the reality for many countries is one of oscillation: where periods of backsliding are followed by periods of resilience and then further periods of backsliding. Why do countries experience democratic oscillation and what lessons can be learnt to build stronger and more robust democracies? Given its zigzag path of political development since the 1989 revolution Slovakia provides an exemplary case to examine the drivers and breaks of backsliding and resilience. To explain such oscillating paths requires the careful mapping of the processes and identification of the mechanisms, both at the elite level and in the electorate, and how those two levels interact. This paper seeks to test out two arguments and examine the relationship between the two. Firstly, that the oscillation has been driven by the politics of revenge where incumbents who lose power are subjected to “punishment” by those who replace them providing both a rationale for wanting to return and a motivation to enact revenge when they do return. Secondly, that at the mass level oscillation is driven by the politics of delivery and the increasing difficulty of governing in the 21st century given both the technological and informational environment and more challenging economic conditions.