QoG lunch seminar with Jan Teorell and Per Andersson
Society and economy
It’s the state, stupid! Explaining democratic erosion in the 21st century
Seminar
It’s the state, stupid! Explaining democratic erosion in the 21st century
Abstract: After three waves of democratization since the 19th century, the world has over the course of the last decade, according to most observers, undergone a process of democratic erosion (aka ''backsliding''). While numerous theories have been proposed for what explains this recent trend -- ranging from financial crises, declining popular support for democracy and growing socio-economic inequality, to the rise of China and an ''authoritarian international'' -- surprisingly few attempts have actually been made to put these proposals to the test. This is the purpose of this paper. Out of a large set of suspected causes that can be divined from the extant literature and tested in cross-country regressions, we only find evidence for two statistically significant predictors of democratic decline between 2012--2022: country size and corruption. Whereas the former does not offer much of an explanation in itself, the latter is robust to a host of controls and alternative measurement. Our interpretation is that the main driver of democratic erosion in the 21st century is a performance crisis of the modern state.