Polarization versus Democracy

Where would we expect ordinary people to act to check the authoritarian ambitions of elected politicians? An answer to this question is the key to understanding the most important development in the dynamic of democratic survival since the end of the Cold War: the subversion of democracy by elected incumbents and its emergence as the most common form of democratic breakdown. This paper provides an explanation in terms of which political polarization undermines the public's ability to serve as a democratic check: In polarized electorates, voters are willing to trade off democratic principles for partisan interests. It shows such evidence that questions the practical relevance of conventional measures of support for democracy and underlines the importance of understanding the role of ordinary people in democratic backsliding.

When can we realistically expect ordinary people to check the authoritarian ambitions of elected politicians? An answer to this question is central to understanding the most prominent development in the dynamic of democratic survival since the end of the Cold War: the subversion of democracy by democratically elected incumbents and its emergence as the most common form of democratic breakdown.

This exercise shows that democratic breakdowns come in one of two, very different forms-the more common executive takeover and the less common military coup-of the total of 197 downgrades, 88 are executive takeovers-a plurality. Some of the most prominent recent takeovers include the subversions of democracy by Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, by Vladimir Putin in Russia, and by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey. The second type of democratic breakdown, the military coup, accounts for 46 cases. The remaining downgrades correspond either to instances of deliberalization in regimes where the executive was not elected in the first place (15 cases) or to phenomena best characterized not as democratic breakdowns but rather as the deterioration of state authority due to political instability (21 cases) or escalating civil conflict (14 cases).1

Executive takeovers thus constitute the modal form of democratic [End Page 20] breakdown over the past 45 years. Moreover, as Figure 1 on page 22 makes clear, what is most striking is their proliferation after the end of the Cold War. Before the 1990s, executive takeovers were only marginally more frequent than military coups. Yet since the 1990s, the relative frequency of executive takeovers suddenly surged and today accounts for four out of every five democratic breakdowns occurring since the early 2000s.

The growth in the number of executive takeovers presents our understanding of democratic stability with a series of problems. The first is a simple but profound one: unlike those that involved military coups, takeovers are conducted by democratically elected incumbents. These politicians must enjoy-at least initially-sufficient popular support to capture the executive by democratic means. In most cases they also need to amass enough electoral strength to control another branch of government-usually the legislature. This is because the latter's complicity is usually necessary for executing the type of constitutional changes that facilitate the subversion of democracy, such as the abolition of term limits, the political subjugation of the judiciary, and the expansion of executive authority sometimes through constitutional revisions shifting from a parliamentary to a presidential form.

Amazingly, many incumbents command considerable popular support as they proceed to subvert democracy in their countries—and even after they succeed in doing so. Chávez, Hungary's Viktor Orbán, and Erdoğan, for example, enjoyed and (in the latter two cases) continue to enjoy such support. They have been popular in both absolute and relative terms, typically leading their major competitors by double digits in election returns and public-opinion surveys. Apparently this is the case, even when factoring into account probable inflation of these figures due to the misuse of state resources, intimidation of opponents, and manipulation by these respective leaders. The most serious research on this topic comes from Russia: Using list experiments, Timothy Frye and his co-authors find that the level of support for Vladimir Putin at the beginning of 2015 was about 80 percent-and this is excluding perhaps an additional 10 percent that Putin gets in traditional surveys because some respondents do not want to express their disapproval.2 In short, the so-called "authoritarian populists" are actually popular.