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In political science, democratic backsliding is a gradual decline in the quality of democracy. This decline is caused by the state-led weakening of political institutions that sustain the democratic system. These essential components of democracy can be threatened in different ways. Thus, the concept of democratic backsliding can take various forms. As political scientist Nancy Bermeo claims, there has been a decline in the more blatant forms of democratic backsliding since the end of the Cold War. These blatant forms include classic coups d'état, executive coups (i.e., a freely elected ruler suspends the constitution in order to gain absolute power) and election-day vote fraud. Although the decline in these three varieties of democratic backsliding can certainly be seen as a positive trend, other forms of backsliding compose a continuing threat for democracy. These varieties entail more subtle ways to debilitate democratic institutions from within. These subtle forms of backsliding are especially dangerous when they are legitimized through the very institutions that ought to protect democratic values.

These more common forms of democratic backsliding can occur in the following ways:


 * By a so-called promissory coup. In this scenario, the incumbent (i.e. the elected government of a country) gets disposed by an opponent who claims to defend democracy. The coup-makers promise to hold elections in order to restore democracy and emphasize the temporary and necessary nature of their intervention in order to ensure democracy in the future.
 * Through the process of executive aggrandizement. This process contains a series of institutional changes by the elected executives, impairing the ability of the political opposition to challenge the government and hold it to account. The most important feature of executive aggrandizement is that the institutional changes are made through legal channels, making it seem as if the elected official has a democratic mandate. Some examples of executive aggrandizement are the decline of media freedom and the weakening of the rule of law (i.e., judicial and bureaucratic restraints on the government), such as when judicial autonomy is threatened.
 * By strategic harassment and manipulation during elections. This can mean blocking media access, the disqualification of opposition leaders, harassing opponents et cetera. This form of backsliding is done in such a way that the elections don't seem to be rigged and it rarely involves any apparent violations of the law, making it difficult for international election monitoring organizations to observe or criticize these misconducts. And even though this form of democratic backsliding might appear to be somewhat legitimate, it nevertheless degrades the principle of free and fair elections.

As illustrated, democratic backsliding is increasingly occurring because of the actions of democratically elected leaders and the tactics used nowadays are incremental rather than revolutionary. This also makes it harder to pinpoint when a democracy breaks down, because as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt pointed out, this happens "slowly, in barely visible steps".

Causes of democratic backsliding
Multiple scholars, including Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg, have acknowledged that some seemingly-stable democracies have recently faced a decline in the quality of their democracy. The U.S.-based research group Freedom House supports this claim in their 2019 report called 'Democracy in Retreat', in which they argue that global freedom is in decline. Democratic backsliding occurs in a variety of regions across the world, including for example Hungary and Poland in Europe, Turkey in the Middle East, Venezuela in Latin America and the United States in North America. In this section, some of the possible explanations for democratic backsliding will be discussed.

Populism
Pippa Norris of the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Sydney argues that the two so-called 'twin forces', namely terrorist attacks and populist-authoritarian forces, pose the largest threat to Western liberal democracies. Firstly, terrorist attacks on domestic soil create a sense of insecurity, damage the public confidence and destabilize societies. According to Norris, the reinforcement of these insecurities has led to more support for populist-authoritarian leaders. Also, Norris argues that this latter risk is especially pronounced in the United States during the presidency of Donald Trump. For example, she claims that president Trump has benefited from the mistrust of 'the establishment' and that he continuously seeks to undermine faith in the legitimacy of the media and the independence of the court.

Also, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change recently published a report stating that populist rule, whether left- or right-wing, leads to a significant risk of democratic backsliding. The authors examine the effect of populism on three major aspects of democracy: the quality of democracy in general, checks and balances on executive power and citizens' right to politically participate in a meaningful way. They conclude that populist governments are four times more likely to cause harm to democratic institutions than non-populist governments. Also, more than half of populist leaders have amended or rewritten the countries' constitution, which frequently erodes checks and balances on executive power. Lastly, populists attack individual rights such as freedom of press, civil liberties and political rights.

Socio-economic factors
Many political economy scholars, such as but not limited to Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, have investigated the effect of income inequality on democratic breakdown. Studies of democratic collapse show that economic inequality is significantly higher in countries that eventually move towards a more authoritarian model. Hungary is an example of a country where a large group of unemployed, low-educated people were dissatisfied with the high levels of inequality, especially after the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Viktor Orbán used this dissatisfaction of a relatively large segment of the population in his advantage, winning popular support by using national-populist rhetoric.