Democratic backsliding — the gradual erosion of democratic norms and institutions by leaders who arrived in power through democratic elections — presents a challenge that liberal democratic theory was not designed to address. Classical theories of democratic collapse imagined it as a coup: a sudden seizure of power by the military or a revolutionary vanguard. The contemporary form is different. The backsliding leader does not abolish elections. They make elections less competitive by controlling the media, weakening the judiciary, changing electoral rules, and stigmatising the opposition. The process is legal, gradual, and often endorsed at each step by electoral majorities.
This creates a particular paradox: the instruments of democracy — the legislature, the amendment process, the electoral mandate — are used to erode democracy's substance. Constitutional courts, when they have not already been packed or intimidated, are the last institutional check. Civil society and a free press serve as non-institutional checks. But these are slow, uncertain, and depend on a population that has not yet been sufficiently demobilised by the erosion of information quality.
The question this raises for constitutional design is difficult: if democratic backsliding proceeds through formal legality, how can a constitution protect democracy from the democratic majority that chooses to erode it? No answer has proven adequate. Provisions designed to protect minority rights can be characterised as counter-majoritarian impositions. Independent institutions can be described as unaccountable elites. The very language of constitutional protection can be weaponised by the forces it was designed to constrain.
