Pathways of Democratic Backsliding and the Role of State Capacity

How does contemporary democratic backsliding unfold? Scholars have identified several key features such as executive aggrandisement, strategic election manipulation, and the curtailment of independent media. Yet most of the literature has overlooked the role of the state in enabling or constraining these processes. My paper offers a new theoretical framework to better understand how contemporary democratic backsliding evolves by bringing in the state into the analysis. Using a global sample of countries and combining sequence analysis with dynamic panel data regressions, I examine how different aspects of state capacity, from a strong state bureaucracy to the informational resources states have about their populations, interact with more frequently identified features of democratic backsliding over time. My results highlight that state capacity—and especially its administrative dimension—must be considered as a crucial factor that can both accelerate democratic backsliding and serve as a source of democratic resilience, depending on the institutional context.