![]() The latter’s complicity is usually essential in carrying out the kind of constitutional changes that facilitate the subversion of democracy: the abolition of term limits, the political subjugation of the judiciary, and the expansion of executive authority (sometimes by a constitutional shift from a parliamentary toward a presidential system). In most cases, they also need to muster enough electoral strength to control another branch of government, typically the legislature. These politicians must enjoy-at least initially-sufficient popular support to capture the executive by democratic means. The first stems from the fact that, unlike military coups, takeovers are conducted by democratically elected incumbents. The rise in executive takeovers presents several challenges for our understanding of democratic stability. After the 1990s, however, the relative frequency of executive takeovers surged, and they have accounted for four out every five democratic breakdowns since the 2000s. Before the 1990s, executive takeovers were only marginally more frequent than military coups. Moreover, as Figure 1 on page 22 makes clear, what is most striking is their proliferation after the end of the Cold War. 1Įxecutive takeovers thus constitute the modal form of democratic breakdown over the past 45 years. 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). The second category of democratic breakdown, the military coup, accounts for 46 cases. Some of the 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. Of the total of 197 downgrades, executive takeovers account for 88 cases-a plurality. This exercise reveals that democratic breakdowns almost always come in one of two, very different forms: executive takeovers and military coups. I constructed this plot by first identifying all instances in which Freedom House downgraded a country from the status of Free or Partly Free in its annual survey of democracy, and then categorizing these downgrades according to the nature of the events they represent. At five-year intervals, it shows the percentage of executive takeovers-my shorthand for incumbent-driven subversions of democracy-as a share of democratic breakdowns over the period 1973–2018. The Figure on page 22 summarizes this troubling trend. His current research examines why ordinary people support politicians who undermine democracy. Svolik is professor of political science at Yale University and the author of The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (2012).
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