Democratic Experience and the Risk of Autocratization – A Macro Level Analysis

Democracy’s contemporary challenges have spurred growing scholarly interest in why some political systems succumb to autocratization while others remain resilient. While existing research has richly documented how incumbents erode democratic institutions and how various actors push back against such erosion, we know far less about the origins of democratic resilience itself. This paper contributes to this emerging research agenda by examining how the accumulation of democratic experience shapes the likelihood that democracies withstand or give way to autocratization challenges. Inspired by recent debates on how to accurately measure democratic decline (see, e.g., Little & Meng, 2024; Knutsen et al., 2024), we build our analysis on a threefold approach to democracy, distinguishing between an electoral, liberal, and social dimension. Originating from the logic of regime legacies, rather than focusing solely on short-term changes in democratic performance, we conceptualize democratic experience as a cumulative and historically embedded source of resilience. By constraining elite behavior and raising the political costs of institutional subversion, cumulative experience may reduce the likelihood that autocratization pressures emerge in the first place. If challenges arise nonetheless, democratic experience may raise the political and institutional costs of escalation, reducing the likelihood that autocratization pressures translate into sustained erosion. Importantly, we argue that these protective effects may vary across democracy dimensions. While electoral experience may leave a legacy of electoral accountability and contestation, liberal democratic experience may be especially consequential for defending constraints on executive power and enabling civil society. Lastly, exposure to social democratic circumstances may protect broader societal inclusion and equality. Empirically, the paper draws on global data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project to reconstruct countries’ long-term democratic trajectories across the three dimensions. We operationalize democratic experience as a stock measure that accumulates past democratic exposure, allowing us to move beyond static regime classifications and event-based approaches to democratic breakdown. Using survival analysis, we assess how different forms of democratic experience affect the risk of autocratization onset. This design enables us to evaluate whether and how historical democratic legacies influence vulnerability to contemporary autocratization. The paper speaks directly to ongoing debates on how democratic erosion should be measured and theorized. By integrating multidimensional cumulative democracy measures, it offers a novel empirical strategy for studying democratic resilience as a long-term, preventive phenomenon rather than a purely reactive one. More broadly, the analysis contributes to regime studies by demonstrating how definitionally grounded measurement choices can improve our understanding of autocratization and democratic resilience.