The Cultural Roots of Democratic Backsliding

Pippa Norris

Early-spring 2025, NY: Oxford University Press.

Synopsis

The early 21st Century has seen warning signals that peoples in every part of the world face clear and present danger from liberal democratic backsliding and authoritarian resurgence. In many countries as diverse as India, Hungary, Venezuela, Turkey, and the United States, rule of law, and liberal democratic institutions, have been gradually undermined by authoritarian forces that stoke affective polarization, trample over conventional norms safe-guarding civil liberties and minority rights, and stealthily eviscerate dissent. Strongman leaders in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia have become more repressive at home and emboldened abroad, illustrated by Putin’s tanks rolling into Ukraine. Alliances binding authoritarian states more closely together to challenge the rule-based liberal world order, and intense polarization at home in America, have reinforced gloomy fears about the future of liberal democracy around the world. This is exemplified by the Biden Administration’s Summit for Democracy and the European Union effort to strengthen rule of law in Hungary and Poland.

Despite intense concern about the risks to liberal democracy, no consensus has yet emerged about the severity of the problem around the globe nor the most important general drivers of these developments. Accounts commonly blame strongman leaders and their acolytes. Others scholars emphasize economic conditions and social inequality. Still other explanations fault extreme party polarization and social media misinformation.

To take a fresh look at these issues, Part I of this book builds on and updates congruence theory, the idea that formal regime institutions are more likely to endure where they reflect the norms and values of its citizens. This classic thesis was popular in the mid-twentieth century and influential in the thinking of seminal scholars like Lipset, Almond and Verba, and Eckstein. The theory predicts that democratic and authoritarian regimes will probably persist over time where formal state institutions fit the predominant cultural values, norms and beliefs in mass society. Alignment is thought to strengthen feelings of legitimacy about governance authorities among citizens, ensuring compliance, and to encourages a broad consensus about the appropriate political norms of behavior among elites. By contrast, regimes are expected to prove less stable in non-congruent cases, and thus vulnerable to backsliding, where cultural values and norms are inconsistent with the formal institutional rules, so that the authorities lack popular legitimacy.

In cases of progressive democratization, authoritarian regimes are conventionally expected to be more vulnerable to challenge from below, and even breakdown, where ordinary citizens mobilize to demand democracy, freedom, and human rights, in cases such as mass protests organized in Iran, Hong Kong, and Mexico.

Cases of democratic backsliding involve reverse types of non-congruent cases, however, including states with formal democratic constitutions, but where informal norms of governance buttressing these institutions have gradually eroded shared among elites and citizens, facilitating elected strongman leaders and elites to engage in executive aggrandizement.

But what is the dynamic sequence which generates incongruence? Historical and journalistic accounts often blame the actions of specific strongman leaders and their enablers for democratic backsliding – Trump for the January 6th insurrection in America, Modi for the erosion of minority rights in India, Netanyahu for weakening the powers of the Supreme Court in Israel, and so on. But contingent narratives remain unsatisfactory to explain a general phenomenon, they fail to explain why ordinary citizens in long-standing democracies voted these leaders into power in the first place, and the direction of causality in this relationship remains unresolved.

This study theorizes that a two-step process is at work. In the first, building upon previous work, the study suggests that deep-rooted and profound cultural changes have provoked a backlash among traditional social conservatives in the electorate. A wide range of conventional moral values and beliefs, once hegemonic, are under threat today in many modern societies. Value shifts are exemplified by secularization eroding the importance of religious practices and teachings, declining respect for the institutions of marriage and the family, and more fluid rather than fixed notions of social identities based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, community ties, and national citizenship. An extensive literature has demonstrated that the ‘silent revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s has gradually led to growing social liberalism, recognizing the principles of diversity, inclusion and equality, including support for issues such as equality for women and men in the home and workforce, recognition of LGBTQ rights, and the importance of strengthening minority rights. Over decades the cumulative effects of cultural, demographic and social structural change has gradually undermined the majority status of traditional social conservatives in society, and threatened conventional moral beliefs.

In the second step, the study theorizes that authoritarian populist forces further stoke fears and exploit grievances among social conservatives. If these political parties manage to gain elected office through becoming the largest party in government, or if their leaders win the presidency, they gain the capacity to dismantle constitutional checks and balances, like rule of law, through processes of piecemeal or wholesale executive aggrandizement. Institutions like the courts, independent legislatures, the media, and opposition parties can prove resilient in deterring these attempts and holding leaders to account. Where they win successive terms in office, however, authoritarian populists can gradually undermine liberal democracy, making the core institutions more vulnerable to breakdown.

This theory is potentially more powerful and comprehensive than many rival explanations, by proposing a general account predicting conditions of democratic and authoritarian statis, and bidirectional processes of regime change worldwide. Disputes continue, however, about the role of culture and leaders in processes of regime change. Are notions of popular legitimacy relevant in authoritarian states? What is the direction of causality linking culture and institutions? And what conditions strengthen any relationship? The book seeks to understand these questions.

Part II of the book describes the evidence and methods. The study uses systematic longitudinal measures of regime stability and change during the twenty-first century, with estimates drawn from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project from 2000-2022. This is matched to trends in public opinion over four decades from 1981-2022, derived from the World Values/European Values Surveys conducted in around 115 societies. Selected cases, including the United States, Hungary, India, and Brazil provide more in-depth insights into the underlying dynamics. Part III presents the analysis of the results. The conclusion in Part IV summarizes the key findings and considers their broader implications.

A power-point talk on The Cultural Roots of Democratic Backsliding, presented at the September 2023 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in LA, discussing some of the ideas and evidence from the book, is available for download.

In Praise of Skepticism: Trust but Verify

Pippa Norris

New York: Oxford University Press. Sept 2022 $29.95 p/b

A culture of trust is usually claimed to have many public benefits, by lubricating markets, managing organizations, legitimating governments, and facilitating collective action. If so, any signs of eroding trust are, and should be, a matter of serious concern.

But the broader perspective developed in this book recognizes that trust has two faces, not one. Confidence in antivax theories has weakened herd immunity. Faith in Q-Anon conspiracy theories triggered violent insurrection. Disasters flow from gullible beliefs in fake Covid-19 cures, Madoff pyramid schemes, Russian claims to de-Nazify Ukraine, and the Big Lie denying President Biden’s legitimate election.

Trustworthiness involves an informal social contract by which principals authorize agents to act on their behalf in the expectation that they will fulfil their responsibilities with competency, integrity and impartiality, despite conditions of risk and uncertainty. Skeptical judgments reflect reasonably accurate and informed predictions about agents’ future actions based on their past performance and guardrails deterring dishonesty, mendacity, and corruption. We should trust but verify. Unfortunately, assessments are commonly flawed. Both cynical beliefs (underestimating performance) and credulous faith (over-estimating performance) involve erroneous judgements reflecting cultural biases, poor cognitive skills, and information echo chambers. These conclusions draw on new evidence from the European Values Survey/World Values Survey conducted among over 650,000 respondents in more than 100 societies over four decades.

In Praise of Skepticism warns that an excess of credulous trust poses serious and hitherto unrecognized risks in a world full of seductive demagogues playing on our insecurities, lying swindlers exploiting our greed, and silver-tongued conspiracy theorists manipulating our darkest fears.

advance Reviews of ‘In Praise of Skepticism’

"Pippa Norris offers a beautifully written, argued, and documented account of what we need to strengthen democracy. She emphasizes the combination of trustworthiness and healthy skepticism derived from considered judgment and critical deliberation. And she details the preconditions: an open society, a lack of strong ideological convictions, and education. In outlining the possible, Norris makes a reinvigorated democracy more probable." -- Margaret Levi, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University

"This is a landmark study in the discussion of trust as a major concept in political research. Norris differentiates the general concept by introducing cynicism and credulity, allowing a focus on prudence skepticism. Norris shows that there is no evidence for a simple claim of a steady erosion of trust. Rather, skeptical and informed judgments mostly support her trust-as-performance thesis. This book is fun to read and it addresses a wide audience. Political science as a profession will be theoretically enriched. Decision makers and the general public interested in evidence will find many empirical treasures. It is a must-read for all." -- Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Professor Emeritus, WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Freie Universitaet Berlin

"For too long, the scholarly mainstream treated political trust as the quintessential source of democratic legitimacy. Yet, a revisionist view using terms like 'critical' and 'assertive' citizens has challenged the mainstream, arguing that the complacency element in political trust actually undermines democracy. Pippa Norris' In Praise of Skepticism provides to date the firmest conceptual foundation and empirical confirmation of the revisionist camp in political culture research." -- Christian Welzel, Political Culture Research Professor, Leuphana University of Lüneburg

THE CulturAL ROOTS OF democratic backsliding

Pippa Norris

Under development for publication in Fall 2023

The early 21st Century has seen warning signals that peoples in every world region face clear and present danger from democratic backsliding and authoritarian resurgence. In numerous cases, democratic institutions like elections and rule of law have been undermined by those that stoke polarization, trample over conventional norms safe-guarding basic civil liberties and minority rights, and stealthily eviscerate legal boundaries on the abuse of executive power. Authoritarian dictators have become even more repressive and emboldened.

Despite intense concern about these developments, no consensus has emerged about their most important drivers. Today more is known about ‘how’ democracies die than the underlying puzzle of ‘why’ this occurs -- still less what can reverse this reversal.

Alternative perspectives arouse heated debate.

Structural theories by econometricians compare societal conditions worldwide associated with centuries-long progressive processes of democratization -- like the role of physical geography, colonial legacies, human development, natural resources, or religious traditions. But fixed and stable conditions alone cannot account for sudden reversals to democracy during the last decade.

Alternative cultural accounts in survey research explain third wave democracies by long-term processes of societal modernization, human development, and generational shifts strengthening the public’s demands for freedom and rights. Yet the first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen progress in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, lifting millions out of extreme poverty and expanding access to literacy, education, and health care, at least prior to the 2020 Covid outbreak. It is unclear how advances in human development and societal modernization can explain an era of democratic reversals (such as in India) and authoritarian resurgence (such as in China). And some democratic backsliding, like the rise of authoritarian-populist parties and violent hate groups, has occurred in some of the world’s most affluent post-industrial societies in Western Europe.

Institutional accounts in comparative politics generate more plausible claims– such as those highlighting the risks of democratic instability and the rise of strongman leaders arising from winner-take-all constitutional arrangements, like polarized two-party systems and presidential executives in deeply-divided societies. But the evidence is often circular: the performance of formal institutions like free and fair elections, rule of law, and freedom of the press are baked into standard cross-national measures of the performance of democracy. Nor is it clear how democratic erosion can be explained adequately by stable institutional arrangements alone; after all, America has had a two-party system for centuries.

Agency-based accounts are case-studies by insiders and journalists, like the shelves weighed down by tell-all inside-the-beltway books on President Trump, describing a narrative of chronological events, contingent decisions, and particular actions by individual leaders and their inner circle of elite backers. Providing the first draft of contemporary history, these gain intuitive plausibility from granular details and fly-on-the-wall insights from former officials. But they are unable to explain satisfactorily why similar strongman and extremist political parties have suddenly risen to power across diverse societies and world regions, even in long-established democratic states.

These reflections deepen the puzzle of democratic backsliding and authoritarian resurgence around the world.

Congruency theory

To understand this development, this book presents a revised and updated version of congruence theory, first proposed by a range of seminal thinkers in early political sociology during the mid-twentieth century. Figure 1 illustrates the simple typology. In 1963, Almond and Verba’s classic The Civic Culture predicted that democratic and authoritarian regimes will prove most stable and durable over time where state institutions fit cultural values, norms and beliefs in mass society. Alignment is thought to strengthen feelings of legitimacy, expanding state capacity to govern effectively by making it more likely that the authorities will be obeyed voluntarily, laws followed, and taxes paid.

By contrast, regimes are expected to less sustainable in non-congruent cases where informal cultural norms clash with the formal rules. Democratic constitutions, free and fair elections, and human rights are believed most at risk of backsliding as they are built on foundations of sand where authoritarian values and practices are deeply entrenched in society, providing popular support for authoritarian leaders, parties, and groups, such as in Afghanistan, Turkey, and Russia. And likewise, authoritarian regimes are thought more vulnerable to challenge from below where ordinary citizens demand democracy and human rights, mobilizing support for pro-democracy parties and movements such as during the color revolutions in post-Communist Europe, Myanmar, and Hong Kong. Congruence can be understood as asymmetrical, however; compared with democracies, ruthless autocracies are more willing to use alternative mechanisms of repression by security forces and clientelism in the distribution of state-controlled resources to maintain their grip on power, relying less on popular legitimacy to ensure voluntary compliance.

Therefore, what matters for regime stability and transitions, according to the revised version of congruence theory presented at the heart of this book, is neither the parchment constitutional laws alone, nor the predominant type of cultural values embedded in society, but rather the interactive relationship between the two. Radical changes in either can produce misalignment and regime instability. Most importantly, this comprehensive account seeks to illuminate cases of progressive democratization, as well as the persistence of stable regimes, and also cases of reverse transitions back towards autocracy. Tensions are expected to arise most sharply, leading to the rise of more extremist parties, strongman leaders, and backsliding, where rapid cultural change leads to societal polarization in ill-suited majoritarian democracies. Or where radical institutional changes, like the adoption of new democratic constitutions and multiparty elections, are imposed by the international community or by liberal leadership elites in societies with authoritarian mass cultures which fail to endorse democratic values and practices.

Methodological and empirical challenges

Is there systematic and rigorous evidence to support congruency theory? Tests of these claims requires data on both trends over time and also comparisons across a broad range of democratic and autocratic regimes around the world. Ideally, the cultural and institutional data should be derived from independent sources. Accordingly, to monitor political culture, the book draws upon the European Values Survey/ World Values Survey conducted in over 100 societies around the globe, in some countries over four decades from the early-1980s to 2022. This includes a wide range of states governed by authoritarian regimes, including Russia and China, as well as diverse cases such as Venezuela, Iran, Hungary, Nicaragua, Egypt, Turkey, Myanmar, and Thailand. Cultural attitudes are compared at three levels: support for regime principles and values, for regime institutions, and for the regime authorities and practices. List experiments are used to monitor the reliability of the survey data. Party positions towards democratic governance are classified from the Global Party Survey. To operationalize the typology, regime stability and change for societies contained in the survey are classified from the Varieties of Democracy project. The results are presented using standard econometric techniques, data visualizations, and selected historical case studies describing progressive and regressive democratic regime transitions.

The conclusion summarizes the key findings from the evidence to throw new light on processes of regime stability and change, considers the next steps in the research agenda, and discusses the broader policy implications for what can be done to reverse the risks of democratic backsliding around the world.

Contents

Preface and acknowledgments

List of tables and figures

I: Introduction

1. Understanding democratic backsliding and authoritarian resurgence

2. Congruency theories of regime change

2. Classifying regimes

3. Measuring political culture

II: Evidence

4. Congruent cases: Cultural anchors and regime stability

5. Progressive democratization

6. Democratic backsliding

IV: Conclusions

7. Conclusions: Legitimacy in Authoritarian Regimes