Introduction
When I was in high school 70 years ago, I wondered what prevented a democratic polity like ours from choosing to turn autocratic. We now know the answer: very little.
— Richard Abel, How Autocrats Are Held Accountable (Reference Abel2025a, 278)Democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law are in critical decline (Vinjamuri Reference Vinjamuri, Hopgood, Snyder and Vinjamuri2017; World Justice Project 2024; Nord et al. Reference Nord, Angiolillo, God and Lindberg2025; Levitsky and Way, Reference Levitsky and Wayn.d.). Compared with the optimism that preceded and invigorated constitution-building projects in the 1980s and 1990s, friends of democracy are met with justified concern as countries previously recognized as stable—albeit imperfect—democracies begin again to observe heightened levels of political polarization and identity politics: old challenges now augmented by the advent of social media and information manipulation in the online space, all precipitated by a steady decline in public trust (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, n.d.).
In several nations, this democratic decline shows several shared characteristics. Most significant for the purposes of this review essay is the use, non-use, or manipulation of existing law to advance undemocratic and/or illiberal political objectives. Often led by rightfully elected politicians via fair and independent elections, these democracies face “legally clever autocrats, who use constitutionalism and democracy to destroy both” (Scheppele Reference Scheppele2018, 547). Different means of achieving this objective have been deconstructed within the relevant literature, including autocratic legalism, abusive constitutionalism, and authoritarian legality, to name a few.Footnote 1 What these studies share is a recognition that contemporary autocrats and authoritarians rely a great deal on law.
An important dynamic remains ongoing within these declining democracies. For the most part, constitutions and a vast amount of law remain unchanged and intact; emerging leaders instead prefer to operate within the exclusive realms of politics and extraordinary powers, beyond the reach of existing legal constraints that would hinder policy design. Consequently, many of the avenues previously available to extra-institutional actors to challenge government action remain in place; this includes elections (in the best of cases), courtroom challenges or “cause lawyering,” and improving “rights consciousness” or public awareness of legal enforcement mechanisms at their disposal, among other means (Gallagher Reference Gallagher2006; Chua Reference Chua2019; Crout Reference Crout2026). Under this system, the law represents two things to autocrats and authoritarians. It is a shield, framing their leadership in a shared legal language that imitates formal legalism and legitimacy (Liu, Hsu, and Halliday Reference Liu, Hsu and Halliday2019; de Sa e Silva Reference De Sa e Silva2022, 194). And it is a crack in the armor through which legal challenges might erupt and destabilize attempts to undermine democratic values.
To preserve our democracy, it is essential to understand both these functions—how the law might support or undermine autocracy. Richard Abel takes up the subject in his five-volume book series Defending American Democracy. Focusing on the United States under the first Trump administration, Abel offers a comprehensive account of the Trump presidency’s attempted (and successful) subversions of law and legal principles from 2016 to 2020. Building from his own former work on the legal system’s weaknesses exposed during the US War on Terror, this series offers both new insights into the strategies employed by modern autocrats as well as a resonant illustration of the consequences that follow several decades of ever-expanding executive powers (Abel Reference Abel2018a, Reference Abel2018b).
While Abel’s Defending American Democracy series does much to explain how this dramatic democratic decline occurred, it leaves room for reflection on what, exactly, might be done now. Throughout these books, Abel documents several efforts to combat “Trumpism” via both extra- and intra-institutional methods. Politics, grassroots action, economic pressure, and several other methods have been pursued in mobilization efforts against increasingly grand executive actions (Abel Reference Abel2025a). However, these challenges were met with limited effect; despite Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives during his first term in office, and despite several civil actions and criminal prosecutions, he assumed the presidential office for a second term (Queen Reference Queen2025). This begs the question: if some of our most extreme legal and political repudiation measures have not worked, what might?
This review essay takes up this question from a comparative perspective. Drawing on Abel’s rich analysis and a typology of resistance, the essay presents examples of contemporary resistance “success stories” from other jurisdictions. It argues that, through engagement with other jurisdictions facing similar challenges—autocratic leadership and other threats to liberal, democratic values—a serious consideration of whether and how these jurisdictions successfully blocked autocrats might productively inform future efforts. In making this point, the essay first provides an overview of the resistance activities analyzed by Abel throughout the course of the first Trump administration and, from these extracts, thematic mobilization actions taken against autocrats in democracies. The essay then takes these themes and illustrates where they have been successfully applied in struggling democracies. “Struggling democracies” in this case refers to democracies that are classified as “electoral democracies” by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Index or governments that “hold de-facto multiparty elections for the chief executive, but … fall short of democratic standards due to significant irregularities, limitations on party competition or other violations” (Lührmann, Tannenberg, and Lindberg Reference Lührmann, Tannenberg and Lindberg2018, 1–2).
The examples in the second part of this review essay will be derived from countries classified as electoral democracies, including Brazil, Poland, and South Africa. These countries are still facing significant institutional problems that prevent the substantive rights protections indicative of robust liberal democracies but have nevertheless shown positive developments that have raised the nations’ “liberal democracy” scores per the V-Dem Index’s measure (Nord et al. Reference Nord, Angiolillo, God and Lindberg2025). Through engaging with mobilization events that led to substantive changes in state policies, this essay seeks to encourage further discussions regarding what we might learn from global efforts to preserve democratic values.
Resistance typology
Abel (Reference Abel2025a, Reference Abel2025b) discusses efforts to hold Trump accountable at the conclusion of his first term in the final two volumes in the series—How Autocrats Subert Elections and How Autocrats Are Held Accountable. Throughout these texts, Abel develops a typology for the different forms of resistance levied against Trump both during and after his tenure. These efforts included politics, social action, economic pressure, media exposure, and prosecution.Footnote 2 Abel does not initially demarcate the conceptual boundaries of these resistance types, but instead illustrates their content through references to examples throughout the series. As revealed through these examples, Abel’s typology is distinct from, yet complementary to, existing theoretical conceptions of resistance against autocracy and authoritarianism. Abel’s resistance types and their corresponding actions are not purely legal in nature, which is the focus of legal mobilization and cause lawyering literature (McCann and Dudas Reference McCann, Dudas, Sarat and Stuart2006; Marshall and Hale Reference Marshall and Crocker Hale2014; Chua Reference Chua2019; McEvoy and Bryson Reference McEvoy and Bryson2022). The typology is also not quite situated within civil society or social movements literature, as Abel contemplates both purely grassroots actions as well as intra-institutional mechanisms of resistance like political impeachments or judicial rulings that impede executive action (Tufekci Reference Tufekci2017; Delmas Reference Delmas2018; Mundt, Ross, and Burnett Reference Mundt, Ross and Burnett2018).
Abel’s approach is flexible in its consideration of what constitutes resistance. This flexibility permits a more expansive view of the different and often creative instrumentalities pursued in challenging state action, though it is likewise complicated by a lack of clear conceptual limitations. This part of the essay takes up Abel’s resistance typologies and examples to indicate common, more generalizable themes of action under each individual type. After determining the scope of these categories, this essay then turns to how like efforts are pursued successfully in other states.
Politics
Abel constructs a compelling narrative that situates institutional, democratic politics as one of the foremost means of holding autocrats accountable. In the United States, acts of Congress represent one of the first areas of contestation, but elections serve as the “ultimate defense,” particularly as applied against Trump and supportive representatives (Abel Reference Abel2025a, 64). Oftentimes, a free and fair election is what initially allows autocrats or authoritarians to assume political office.Footnote 3 In the converse, it may also force an autocrat’s transition from power and prevent further manipulations of the constitutional order.Footnote 4 When removed from power, either through loss of their position or loss of their political majority, autocrats lose their ability to direct or influence political and legal institutions. This, in turn, enables the pursuit of other means of ensuring accountability that might have been more difficult while the autocrat remained in power, presuming the institutions are otherwise sufficiently independent. This might occur through the political sphere but may also take place via formal legal channels—that is, through civil claims and criminal prosecutions.
In addition to forcing a transition of power and enabling other accountability efforts, political procedures can also be applied to weaken or isolate an autocrat’s political hold even absent elections (or while an autocrat remains influential). Abel documents several internal efforts to oust Trump within the halls of Congress, including, among others, multiple impeachment trials; the attempted invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment in light of the January 6, 2021, riots;Footnote 5 internal Republican resignations; and the construction of bipartisan commissions to address alleged presidential misconduct (Abel Reference Abel2025a, 268–76). While these proposals were met with limited effect in practice, the pursuit of these democratic safeguards is evidence of at least two things: a shared faith and reliance on formal legal mechanisms to address political overreach and ongoing political contention, both of which are positive signs for any struggling democracy.
This review essay draws from these examples to extrapolate what resistance via politics means as an analytical concept. Through politics, resisters to autocracy and authoritarianism are able to: (1) enforce political transitions through elections or impeachment proceedings; (2) divest autocrats of their political majority; and (3) ameliorate political pressure on state institutions and enable other means of securing accountability.
Social Action
Social action primarily refers to non-institutional or grassroots mobilization efforts made in opposition to autocratic leadership. The United States witnessed “extraordinary” social action early in Trump’s first term (Abel Reference Abel2025a, 269). As Abel writes,
[b]etween 3.3 and 4.6 million people joined the Women’s March on the day after the inauguration—the largest mobilization in US history; demonstrators in Washington were three times the size of Trump’s audience. His first Muslim ban, issued a week later, sparked protests in major cities and airports and an outpouring of lawyers volunteering to represent stranded travelers. There were large demonstrations in support of women’s right to choose and against police killings of Black men. (269; citations omitted)
Social action via protests, demonstrations, online campaigns, and many other means are important components of opposing autocratic leadership. This is especially true when formal institutions for political participation are no longer accessible to citizens and residents, as is the case in advanced authoritarian states like the People’s Republic of China or Singapore (Crout, Reference Croutforthcoming).
In all regime types, social action operates as an important consensus-building channel that is separate from top-down narratives (Habermas Reference Habermas2010; Celikates Reference Celikates2016). Many examples in the world today and in our recent past—including China’s Blank Paper Protests, Iran’s women’s rights demonstrations, and the Civil Rights Movement and anti-war movements in the United States—illustrate the impact of civic action on state governance (Tufekci Reference Tufekci2017; Delmas Reference Delmas2018).
Social action also serves another function—that of affirming truth and facts against false narratives and extremist propaganda that are sometimes disseminated under autocratic and authoritarian leadership (BBC News 2020; Sato and Wiebrecht Reference Sato and Wiebrecht2024). Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, there remained a broad social commitment to expertise despite several misinformation campaigns from the Trump administration and the “subordination of science to political expedience” (Abel Reference Abel2025a, 2). Pharmaceutical companies maintained their reliance on the Food and Drug Administration’s testing protocols in the creation of COVID-19 vaccines, and government experts with civil service protections continued to publicly share the evolving science around the novel virus (Abel Reference Abel2025a, 270).
More generally, misinformation, disinformation, and censorship are well-recognized tools in the modern “authoritarian’s playbook”; in addition to obscuring truth, these programs are also used to incite fear, command support, and divide the public (Huq and Ginsburg Reference Huq and Ginsburg2018). Sergei Guriev and Daniel Triesman (Reference Guriev and Treisman2022, 4) call this development the product of modern-day “spin dictators”:
[Autocrats’] central goal remains the same: to monopolize political power. But today’s strongmen realize that in current conditions violence is not always necessary or even helpful. Instead of terrorizing citizens, a skillful ruler can control them by reshaping their beliefs about the world. He can fool people into compliance and even enthusiastic approval. In place of harsh repression, the new dictators manipulate information. Like spin doctors in a democracy, they spin the news to engineer support. (See also Sato and Wiebrecht Reference Sato and Wiebrecht2024)
Moreover, research indicates that regimes that are more effective in the monopolization of information experience fewer “democratization episodes” (Sato and Wiebrecht Reference Sato and Wiebrecht2024, 1011). The public sharing of truth acts to preserve and to combat measures to undermine it. As Abel acknowledges, the united efforts of civil servants and medical professionals in the United States to critique the Trump administration’s condemnation of COVID-19 treatment methods quite literally saved lives (Abel Reference Abel2024, ch. 2).
Through social action, grassroots actors may: (1) create independent consensus-building channels; (2) challenge false narratives, and (3) influence their government to veer away from problematic or harmful policies. Social action is not always successful, particularly under severe repression, but, with sufficient support, it may force responsiveness from a government that is otherwise isolated from public influence (Heurlin Reference Heurlin2016; Truex Reference Truex2016).
Economic pressure
Economic pressure against autocrats may be applied by several different private and public measures. One example is the application of sanctions, including human rights-based or so-called “Magnitsky sanctions” against individual actors (Jia Reference Jia2023). Other means include the withholding of state aid programs or the provision of aid programs contingent upon explicit or implied political allyship (Molenaers, Dellepiane, and Faust Reference Molenaers, Dellepiane and Faust2015). These acts are intended to substantively encourage or force certain state measures, including the establishment of human rights commissions, the cessation of state prosecutions for political crimes, or the expectation of public alignment on important global issues (Dreher and Sturm Reference Dreher and Sturm2012; Molenaers, Dellepiane, and Faust Reference Molenaers, Dellepiane and Faust2015). Mostly, more aggressive sanctions and the withholding of international aid programs are strategies levied by countries with comparatively robust geo-economic power against those that lack sufficient retaliatory grounds (Balî Reference Balî2024). Powerful states that are confronted by these measures are moreover more capable of shrugging off their intended effects and pursuing alternative economic channels. Commensurately, the impact of economic measures applied by the international community against the United States under President Trump was relatively limited.
Domestically, economic pressure in the United States against the first Trump administration was internal, targeted, and tied in part to social action (Abel Reference Abel2025b, 81–84). The most notable efforts arose from the business sector following the January 6 riots (81–84). Following outspoken, bipartisan criticism of Trump’s handling of the US capitol riots, several corporations pulled their campaign donations, including Marriott, JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, GoldmanSachs, and many others (81–84). Other institutions followed suit:
PGA of America and R&A (the British equivalent) boycotted his golf courses. The real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield stopped working with him. Shopify banned his organizations. Lehigh University and Wagner College rescinded his honorary degrees, and Middlebury College rescinded Giuliani’s. New York City considered breaking the Trump company contracts to operate the carousel and two ice-skating rinks in Central Park and the Ferry Point golf course in the Bronx. Signature Bank closed Trump’s personal account. Before the Disciplinary Committee of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists could hold a hearing on Trump for “inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol” and “sustaining a reckless campaign of misinformation aimed at discrediting and ultimately threatening the safety of journalists,” he resigned, declaring contemptuously: “who cares?” (84)
As President Trump was nearing the end of his first term and the United States was preparing for the Biden administration, these acts had limited effect. Elsewhere, however, economic pressure and criticism from an elite business sector have elicited a response from autocrats and authoritarians. The August Episode in Brazil, as discussed below, illustrates this point, and one might also point to the support that certain businesses in China provided to the national Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement in 1989.Footnote 6
While not a complete defense against autocrats, economic pressure may (1) apply punishing sanctions in the international public sphere; (2) facilitate, support, or otherwise contribute to civil society mobilizations at the grassroots level; and (3) if significant enough, force government action or consideration following a withdrawal of financial and political support.
Media exposure
Media engagement incorporates what this review essay refers to as active and passive resistance functions and does so across regime types. In its active form—when the media is intentionally employed in pursuit of specific resistance efforts—it can effectively encourage state action and inform civil society organization (Voltmer Reference Voltmer2013). In a more passive role, independent media organizations are central to countering alternative fact narratives promoted by state actors, and their reporting ensures that the public is able to make informed decisions when participating in the electoral process (Freedom House, n.d.). All media organizations are still vulnerable to sensationalism and state capture, yet have a special utility in pursuing accountability for violations of law through their documentary work (Schiffrin Reference Schiffrin2021).
Appeals to the media have also become a shared tactic of legal mobilization or cause lawyering. Through fostering public attention, lawyers have been able to acquire ostensibly better outcomes for their clients or pursue broader institutional changes than they might have without greater public support (Crout, Trubek, and Bordin Rolim Reference Crout, Trubek and Bordin Rolim2025). For example, lawyers for individuals targeted or prosecuted for political crimes in Ukraine would frequently speak with media as a means of “systematizing and exposing police and judicial violations” (Wilson Reference Wilson2017, 277). Likewise, lawyers in China have sought broad publication of the unjust circumstances faced by their clients to elicit public pressure on government actors to take notice of the legal claim.Footnote 7
Under the first Trump administration, independent media coverage remained constant, although counter-narratives and misinformation campaigns likewise proliferated. Abel (Reference Abel2025b, 81) raises an important example of unity from prominent media organizations in the United States that arose following the January 6 riots when columnists and representatives of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post presented a unified front in their coverage of the event as incitement encouraged, if not directed, by President Trump. Media engagement and media organizations as members of civil society serve essential functions, roles that become even more significant as liberal values are challenged by autocratic leadership. Among many other benefits, independent media exposure supports: (1) informed political decision making and democratic participation; (2) challenging false narratives and misinformation campaigns; and (3) the dissemination of fair accounts of state actions that subsequently inform other resistance efforts.
Prosecution
Courtrooms represent “meaningful sites of political contestations” even under autocracy conditions or authoritarianism (Chua Reference Chua2019, 364). Both civil and criminal prosecutions, if achievable under legal and political conditions, offer important remedies for those seeking to preserve democratic values or others who have been affected by abusive state action (Sikkink Reference Sikkink2011). Prosecutions are capable of halting excesses of power and remedying qualified damages that result from the former (Sikkink Reference Sikkink2011). Moreover, in the case of personal criminal liability, they might also prevent future assumptions of power by the responsible parties, either through prolonged detention or via a conviction that triggers constitutional or other legal disqualifications that would block the accused from holding political office. Prosecutions might occur domestically, transnationally, or internationally. Transnational and international prosecutions are rarer but have been successful in some cases when pursued in the aftermath of a democratic transition.Footnote 8 Depending upon the orientation of counsel, these prosecutions may be considered another form of cause lawyering or impact litigation, with the protection of democratic institutions or principles in mind.
Another significant means of prosecution occurs via ethics investigations, particularly within the legal profession. The prosecution and subsequent disbarment of lawyers who assisted the Trump administration’s submission of false election results to Congress in 2020 is a salient example (Cummings Reference Cummings2024; Durkee Reference Durkee2024). While technically taking place outside institutional boundaries, the legal profession’s ethics prosecutions may also enforce democratic norms through the policing of professional ethics and enforced exclusion (disbarment) for proven violations of laws and/or ethics rules (Crout, Reference Croutforthcoming). Abel formally only recognizes “criminal prosecutions” in his typology, but he discusses both criminal and civil challenges against both the Trump administration and the president in his personal capacity. This review essay likewise considers both legal avenues. In another publication on this subject, Abel (Reference Abel2025c, 85) summarizes the success of domestic prosecutions in the following way: “Cases were brought by NGOs [non-governmental organizations] (primarily the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] in immigration challenges), state and local officials, and career prosecutors. And they were largely successful: state elections proceeded according to law, only one major immigration restriction survived judicial scrutiny (the third Muslim ban), most of Trump’s cronies were convicted, and most of the pandemic prevention measures were upheld.”
Abel (Reference Abel2025c) then argues that the success of prosecution must be understood alongside the systematic political challenges that limited the general effect of resistance efforts. However, regardless, it is clear that prosecution can be immensely effective where it is possible to pursue and enforce violations of the law. Generally, prosecutions can (1) reinforce the rule of law through the protection of democratic institutions, laws, and principles against autocratic influence; (2) preserve important legal rights and ensure just redress for civil and criminal wrongs; and (3) potentially limit an autocrat’s or a supporter’s ability to manipulate the legal system following their transition from power.
Resistance typology summary and methodology
This typology—politics, social action, economic pressure, media exposure, and prosecution—offers a useful analytical framework for resistance measures against autocracy. Its flexibility and generality are sufficiently inclusive enough to permit analysis of the diverse, cross-sectoral initiatives observed in struggling democracies, including mass civil society engagement and organized pressure from the business sector. At the same time, this structure would also benefit from further development that would reveal the opportunities, challenges, and limitations of each approach, particularly as they vary between different regime types. One resistance action—for example, prosecution—might have a very different scope and outcome in a democracy facing autocratic leadership than it would in a liberal democracy with well-entrenched checks and balances, for example.
The next section takes up this framework in relation to three electoral democracies that have shown recent improvements in their governance features that have resulted in more liberal democracy scores—Brazil, Poland, and South Africa. Their recent scores are illustrated in Figure 1, which indicates how the scores have fluctuated since 2000. Each of the selected countries experienced certain conditions or challenges that resulted in a lower, rapidly declining liberal democracy score, commencing generally on or around 2015. Since then, this score has changed and now reflects an upward trajectory. This review essay seeks out examples of action that took place prior to, during, or just after the notable improvement that may have contributed to this reversal and/or secured or protected important liberal values. In including demonstrably successful examples of resistance from electoral democracies under stress, this essay seeks to enhance Abel’s approach and contribute to ongoing debates regarding the durability of legalistic autocracy and specifically how backsliding democracies can productively resist further degradation of legal protections.
Tracking Brazil, Poland, and South Africa’s liberal democracy scores from 2000 to 2025
Source: “Variable Graph – V-Dem,” https://v-dem.net/data_analysis/VariableGraph/ (accessed October 27, 2025).
Figure 1 Long description
The line graph tracks the liberal democracy scores of Brazil, Poland, and South Africa from 2000 to 2025. The x-axis represents the years from 2000 to 2025, while the y-axis represents the codebook category ranging from 0 to 1. Brazil is represented by a blue line, Poland by a red line, and South Africa by a green line. All values are approximated.
Before proceeding, it is important to clarify that the argument made in this essay is not that the resistance efforts catalogued here were the sole causes or necessarily largely influential factors in the subsequent improvements to the specific country’s V-Dem Index liberal democracy score. Moreover, there is no attempt to draw generalizations on the “optimal” means of resisting autocracy for this reason; that question is dependent in large part on the legal and political conditions of each state. Instead, the essay offers a nuanced comparative insight into a potential “resistance playbook,” where resistance efforts in some way improved democratic functions of the state or preserved important rights or values, even among very differently situated states.
Resistance in electoral democracies
Electoral democracies are very similar in form to liberal democracies but experience significant limitations in their legal and political processes that can obstruct fairness or inhibit political participation. Generally, their conditions are such that they observe de jure elections and can secure “a sufficient level of institutional guarantees of democracy such as freedom of association, suffrage, clean elections, [and] an elected executive, and freedom of expression” (Lührmann, Tannenberg, and Lindberg Reference Lührmann, Tannenberg and Lindberg2018, 61, 67). In practice, some government conditions prohibit complete realization of these and other important rule-of-law features (63). For example, Poland lost its status as a liberal democracy in 2013 when law enforcement mechanisms became less transparent, but the government nevertheless maintained its commitments in other areas for a time (66).
While there are diverse national conditions in different electoral democracies, comparisons may nevertheless be drawn from systemic problems that undermine a complete transition to a liberal democracy. To establish the basis of this study and to provide a foundational understanding of the governance features of the states discussed here, what follows is an abbreviated overview of modern legal and political developments as they relate to autocracy and democratic decline in three electoral democracies.
Background
Brazil
In recent years, Brazil has observed several political crises that have negatively influenced its institutional stability. One of the more prominent examples arose from an anti-corruption campaign referred to as Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava Jato or Lava Jato), which revealed widespread, long-term, and systemic corruption trends in Brazil’s government and resulted in the extraordinary prosecution of many prominent figures, ranging from ordinary political actors to current and former presidents (Vilhena Vieira Reference Vilhena Vieira2021). While the campaign itself initially represented a positive development in the pursuit of government transparency, analysists argue its results were unduly politicized and that corruption laws were inconsistently enforced along party lines (Vilhena Vieira Reference Vilhena Vieira2025, 149–50; see also Yale Law School 2019).
One consequence of Operation Car Wash was the prosecution, impeachment, and imprisonment of then President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva under charges of corruption and his subsequent disqualification from the 2018 presidential race. With Lula da Silva disqualified, far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro quickly assumed prominence in opinion polls and was subsequently elected.Footnote 9 Bolsonaro’s presidency in turn fostered “political and social polarization, [attacks against] the fundamental rights of vulnerable groups, [the incitement of] the military against the constitutional powers, with the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) as their privileged target” (Vilhena Vieira Reference Vilhena Vieira2025, 137). Bolsonaro’s presidency generated a precipitous decline in both liberal democracy and rule-of-law metrics, which have since recovered in the years following his departure from office.
Poland
In 2015, Poland’s Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS) (Law and Justice Party) won an outright majority in parliamentary elections—the first time any political party had done so since the country’s transition to a democratic model in 1989 (Bartyzel and Skolimowski Reference Bartyzel and Skolimowski2015). Campaigning on conservative values and populist, anti-institutional rhetoric, the PiS enacted several reforms that intentionally mirrored the platform of Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán and the Fidesz Party—namely, institutional changes that effectively reorganized the responsibilities of the judiciary and replaced sitting judges with those perceived to be responsive to the party’s orientation. This has been referred to as Poland’s “constitutional breakdown” (Sadurski Reference Sadurski2019b; see also Scheppele Reference Scheppele2018; Tworzecki Reference Tworzecki2019).
In addition to these judicial reforms, the government also enacted significant restrictions on independent media organizations, NGOs, and certain civil and political rights (Sadurski Reference Sadurski and Sadurski2019a; Piotrowski Reference Piotrowski2020). One of the rights affected via a 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling was the right to receive an abortion (Easton Reference Easton2020). While abortions were already limited to a small number of health-related cases under Polish law, this additional limitation effectively eliminated the right (Easton Reference Easton2020). The case received prominent attention domestically and within the European region, especially following the preventable deaths of several women who were denied care under the new rules (Strzyżyńska Reference Strzyżyńska2022).
In 2023, the PiS lost their parliamentary majority and were succeeded by a “prodemocratic opposition alliance” of other parties (Bill and Stanley Reference Bill and Stanley2025, 16). Since then, the succeeding government has secured some of the rights and institutional competencies eroded by their predecessors, but it has been met with certain challenges that limit the scope of the available remedies (Bill and Stanley Reference Bill and Stanley2025).
South Africa
The legacy of apartheid in South Africa remains a significant influence on the nation’s legal system. As Heinz Klug (Reference Klug2025, 203) has written, “[t]hirty years after the end of formal apartheid, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies on earth.” While the end of apartheid in 1994 produced a progressive, liberal Constitution and renewed commitments to substantive equality and accountability, the country still struggles with corruption and associated challenges with inconsistent service delivery, limited political competition, and entrenched inequality, among other areas.Footnote 10
South Africa’s corruption cases became a focal point in the national conversation following the election of President Jacob Zuma, who was himself prosecuted on corruption charges and accused of enabling state capture (Public Protector of South Africa 2016). Throughout this controversy, Zuma’s administration challenged his prosecution and argued for an expansive view of executive authority (Ally and Klug Reference Ally and Klug2025). Institutional responses, especially judicial decisions, limited the impact of these arguments, and President Zuma’s own political faction demanded his subsequent resignation in February 2018 (BBC News 2018a). While corruption remains problematic, South Africa has recently shown improvements in its liberal democracy metrics since this political transition (see Figure 1).
Mobilization and resistance against autocracy
Politics
Poland
In advance of the 2023 elections that eliminated the PiS’s parliamentary majority, a political coalition of left-leaning parties formed a strategic alliance referred to as the Pakt Senacki (Senate Pact) (Tilles Reference Tilles2023; Bill and Stanley Reference Bill and Stanley2025). Among other measures, the agreement required the participating groups—Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform; center-right), Lewica (The Left; left leaning), Polska 2050 (Poland 2050; centrist), Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe (Polish People’s Party; agrarian focused), and Tak! Dla Polski (Yes! For Poland; pro-democracy activists)—to agree upon a single senatorial candidate for each district in the upcoming election.Footnote 11 This arrangement prevented candidates from the participating parties from standing against one another, thereby splitting votes from generally similarly oriented constituents.Footnote 12
The Pakt Senacki was largely successful, with the affiliated parties winning sixty-six out of one hundred seats and becoming the majority coalition (Politico 2023). This in turn displaced the PiS’s political influence in the Polish Senate (“Polish Parliamentary Elections 2023,” n.d.). While a political transition of this nature is not sufficient to induce substantive, pro-democratic developments on its own, the senatorial election did produce a challenge for future laws presented by the PiS that might have further affected the state’s democratic institutions. While ostensibly created to benefit liberal democracy’s preservation longevity, the Pakt Senacki in practice cuts against some of its core principles—namely, free and fair elections.Footnote 13 By restricting the political rights of other candidates and thus reducing the available choices of the constituents, this act is not dissimilar to a political (as opposed to a strictly legal) type of militant democracy.Footnote 14 In that way, it is consistent with the normative approach of the concept, wherein an otherwise undue restriction on rights or choice is enacted with the intent of preserving a liberal and tolerant society (Loewenstein Reference Loewenstein1937).
Other political approaches have been leveraged to this effect and with some success. For example, cordon sanitaire (sanitary cordon) strategies may introduce informal norms or political regulations that forbid political allyship with extremist parties in both presidential and parliamentary systems (Axelsen Reference Axelsen2024). In Portugal, a policy cordon sanitaire was observed and applied against the far-right Chega (Enough) party, which resulted in their exclusion from the 2024 Cabinet.Footnote 15 Cordon sanitaire rules may become increasingly impractical as extremist parties gain traction and political majorities in the years to come, and, indeed, many long-standing cordon sanitaire rules have recently been broken.Footnote 16 But where political representation is competitive, cordon sanitaire and other political strategies can be effective, especially when combined with other protective measures like those observed in Poland. In addition to preserving important liberal values that extremist parties threaten to undermine, these practices can limit the progressive normalization of extremist politics at the institutional level when consistently applied (Mueller Reference Mueller2025).
South Africa
South Africa’s unique constitutional structure creates six independent offices and commissions dedicated to the protection and strengthening of democracy, including that of the public protector.Footnote 17 The public protector is an agent with the authority to “investigate any conduct in state affairs, or in the public administration in any sphere of government, that is alleged or suspected to be improper or to result in any impropriety or prejudice.”Footnote 18 Public protectors are appointed by the president on the recommendation of the National Assembly for a non-renewable seven-year term.Footnote 19 Anyone can submit complaints to the public protector’s office.Footnote 20 Public Protector Thuli Madonsela (2009–2016) played an important role in the exposition of state corruption during former President Jacob Zuma’s tenure. During the final month of her appointment, Madonsela released a report titled “State of Capture,” which detailed the strong evidence uncovered from her corruption investigations and directed the then president to create a judicial commission tasked with addressing state capture (Public Protector of South Africa 2016).Footnote 21 Zuma referred to the report as “political propaganda” and challenged its recommendations unsuccessfully in court (BBC News 2019).
“State of Capture” led to the establishment of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, Corruption and Fraud in the Public Sector including Organs of State (or the Zondo Commission) (“Statement by President Jacob Zuma” 2022). It also contributed to serious discussions of succession and political pressure to resign within Zuma’s own party (BBC News 2018b). While eight votes of no confidence and impeachment proceedings were held, or scheduled to be held, during Zuma’s term, party unity followed the judiciary’s rejection of Zuma’s challenge to the public protector’s report, and the former president eventually agreed to step down in favor of the party’s then newly elected political head, Cyril Ramaphosa (Brock Reference Brock2016; BBC News 2017).
In this case, South Africa’s constitutional structure and the explicitly pro-democracy institutions that it creates supported the state’s political machinery in inducing a transition in power. The public protector is limited in its powers and can issue no formal legal commands sua sponte, but it performs an important political role in exposing threats to democracy, notifying the public of suspected impropriety or prejudice and supporting the resolution of claims through ordinary and/or special political channels.
Social Action
Brazil
Under the Bolsonaro administration, Brazil observed sustained social action—this included one of the largest pro-democracy movements in Brazil’s history, which took place on August 11, 2022, at the University of São Paulo Law School (De Mattos Pimenta et al. Reference De Mattos Pimenta, Débora Alves, Rolim and Rodriguez De Assis Machado2025) Referred to as the “August Episode,” the event was cross-sectoral in nature, though lawyers adopted a primary role in its organization (De Mattos Pimenta et al. Reference De Mattos Pimenta, Débora Alves, Rolim and Rodriguez De Assis Machado2025; Crout, Reference Croutforthcoming). The date of the event possesses a special significance to the profession and Brazil’s democratic transition from military rule:
[Brazil’s] first law schools were founded on August 11, 1827, commencing a new era for Brazilian law and politics. Later, lawyers living under Brazil’s military regime in 1977 jointly drafted a manifesto against authoritarianism, which was publicly read aloud by the authors at the University of Sao Paolo Law School on the same day. Thousands were in attendance, and the event is considered a precursor to Brazil’s “democratic revolution” and major institutional reforms. (Crout, Reference Croutforthcoming)
Drafters of the 1977 manifesto also joined in the organization of the August Episode and assisted with the drafting of another significant public address, the Letter to Brazilian Women and Men in Defense of the Democratic Rule of Law (also referred to as the Letter from the University of São Paolo Law School) (cited in De Mattos Pimenta et al. Reference De Mattos Pimenta, Débora Alves, Rolim and Rodriguez De Assis Machado2025). The authors explicitly invoked democratic values as the impetus for their collaboration:
“Groundless attacks unaccompanied by evidence question the fairness of the electoral process and the democratic rule of law so hard won by Brazilian society. Threats to other powers and sectors of civil society and the incitement to violence and the breakdown of the constitutional order are intolerable.” We have recently witnessed authoritarian rants that have jeopardized secular American democracy. There, attempts to destabilize democracy and the people’s confidence in the fairness of the elections were unsuccessful. Here, they won’t be either. Our civic conscience is much greater than the opponents of democracy imagine. We know how to put aside minor differences in favor of something much bigger, the defense of the democratic order.Footnote 22
The letter was read aloud during the August 11 gathering; it had already garnered over 850,000 signatures by August 10 (Al Jazeera 2022). On the day of the event, the letter reached over one million signatories, a significant number when also considering Brazil’s estimated population of about 220 million (Al Jazeera 2017; “Population Clock: World,” n.d.). The August 11 event took place in São Paulo, but contemporaneous nationwide demonstrations occurred elsewhere, both nationally and in many other nations (Malleret and Phillips Reference Malleret and Phillips2022; De Mattos Pimenta et al. Reference De Mattos Pimenta, Débora Alves, Rolim and Rodriguez De Assis Machado2025; Crout, forthcoming). Mass public mobilization supported institutional efforts to challenge anti-democratic laws and policies leveraged by the judiciary.
Poland
Like Brazil, Poland witnessed cross-sectoral mobilization in support of democracy and political transitions in the years preceding the 2023 elections, eventually leading to the “largest wave of national protest in Poland seen since the fall of communism (1989)” (Tronina and Kaźmierska Reference Tronina and Kaźmierska2023). One significant movement was orchestrated by women’s rights groups and their supporters. These civil society actors reacted strongly to the virtual elimination of any remaining access to abortion by the 2020 Constitutional Court ruling described above (Easton Reference Easton2020). The ruling’s publication was followed by nine days of nationwide protests—150,000 supporters reportedly appeared daily in Warsaw alone.Footnote 23 The protesters demanded the establishment of a right to an abortion and criticized the PiS’s governance as incompatible with basic rights (Magdziarz and Santora Reference Magdziarz and Santora2020).
Historically, the predominant political parties in Poland were aligned on the question of abortion rights, and, as a general matter, they “traditionally presented similar views on moral and ethical subjects” that appealed to the electorate’s Catholic majority (Tronina and Kaźmierska Reference Tronina and Kaźmierska2023). Following the 2020 protests, however, some members of the Pakt Senacki referenced in the prior section changed their stance on abortion rights and promoted improved access to the procedure (Tronina and Kaźmierska Reference Tronina and Kaźmierska2023). While voters’ alignment on this issue was not likely determinative on its own, the policy reversal may still have been influential in what was an extremely competitive election.Footnote 24
One other feature of Poland’s social action bears mention here. In 2015, the Committee for the Komitet Obrony Demokracji (KOD) (Defense of Democracy) was formed following the elections that established the PiS’s majority (Bill and Stanley Reference Bill and Stanley2025). The KOD is “independent of any political influence or party,” and its goals are to “protect the rule of law, democracy and human rights, defend European values and strengthen civil society” (“About KOD – Committee for the Defence of Democracy” 2019). In support of these objectives, the KOD called for mass social participation and organized several events, including protests against interference with the Constitutional Court that attracted over fifty thousand supporters (Le Monde 2015).
Recent scholarship has emphasized the efficacy and impact of contemporary social action, particularly nonviolent protest. One study conducted by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan suggests that nonviolent resistance measures are twice as likely to succeed than attempted coups or other forms of forcible regime transition (Chenoweth and Stephan Reference Chenoweth and Stephan2011; Chenoweth Reference Chenoweth2021). The data the authors provide indicate the former to be true even in cases of extensive regime control over government functions and civil society (Chenoweth and Stephan Reference Chenoweth and Stephan2011). While peaceful protests did not result in a complete government transition, protests and other grassroots efforts in Brazil and Poland had the documented effects of consolidating civil society support and guiding political action.
Economic Pressure
Brazil
One prominent policy advanced by the Bolsonaro administration was that of environmental deregulation (Menezes and Barbosa Reference Menezes and Barbosa2021). When elected, the former president radically reconstructed environmental protection agencies, scaled back important legal protections, and encouraged deforestation as a means of improving Brazil’s economic development (Human Rights Watch 2022a). These practices had a serious impact on the rights of indigenous communities; Human Rights Watch and its affiliates indicated that “illegal logging, mining, poaching, and land grabbing in Indigenous lands increased by 137 percent in 2020, compared with 2018, the year before President Bolsonaro took office” and that the “total area deforested in Indigenous territories in the Amazon during President Bolsonaro’s first three years in office was 138 percent higher than in the previous three years (2016–2018)” (Human Rights Watch 2022b).
Over the course of the Bolsonaro presidency, several joint letters were issued by domestic and international companies objecting to these practices (Gonzales Reference Gonzales2020; VOA News 2020). One prominent letter sent by twenty-nine firms, including Shell, Siemens, and several other major organizations was sent to Brazil’s then vice president, Hamilton Mourao (VOA News 2020). While Mourao protested that Brazil’s government was being unfairly criticized, he acknowledged the letter and announced a formal 120-day ban on forest fires in the Amazon (VOA News 2020).
Business organizations were also instrumental in the organization of the August Episode. Companies including Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo (Fiesp) (Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo) and Federação Brasileira de Bancos (Febraban) (Brazilian Federation of Banks) and other stakeholders collectively drafted a complementary letter to the Letter to Brazilian Women and Men in Defense of the Democratic Rule of Law, titled the Manifesto in Defense of Democracy and Justice (or the Fiesp and Febraban Manifesto) (Guerra Reference Guerra2022). Fiesp’s president recognized the letter’s publication in an interview, noting that “[i]t’s natural for Fiesp to sign a manifesto in defense of democracy, since there is no liberalism … without legal certainty, whose essential pillar is democracy and the rule of law.”Footnote 25
South Africa
On December 9, 2015, then President Zuma fired Nhlanhla Nene, the well-established finance minister, and replaced him with David van Rooyen, a former mayor with limited national political experience.Footnote 26 While Zuma was legally empowered to arrange this political transition, it was later revealed by the anti-corruption Zondo Commission that the move had been linked to Zuma’s “capture” (where private interests exert control over state functions) by the Gupta family.Footnote 27 Gwede Mantashe, the then African National Council’s (ANC) secretary general, also reported that Zuma failed to explain the decision and condemned the typical procedure at the time of van Rooyen’s appointment, saying: “[Y]ou can comment if you want to comment, but this is my decision” (Burke Reference Burke2017).
The effect of Nene’s departure on South Africa’s economy was startling and immediate. One source notes that the rand “had been trading at R14.59 to the dollar and then fell to R15.27 on December 10 … [then] declined even further to R15.90 on December 15” (Chabalala Reference Chabalala2019). The business sector responded promptly, collectively lobbying ANC members to reinstate Nene or for Zuma to resign (Wild Reference Wild2015). CEO Initiative, a coalition of leading businesses in South Africa, authored a public statement expressing that the organization’s members were “gravely concerned and disappointed by the ill-timed and irrational dismissal” and that “[t]his decision, and the manner in which it was taken, is likely to cause severe damage to an economy that is in dire need of growth and jobs” (Burke Reference Burke2017). Within five days of Van Rooyen’s appointment, Zuma replaced him with Nene’s predecessor, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan.Footnote 28
There is no documented consensus among global or domestic business sectors on the virtues or protection of democracy. However, there is a broad recognition that political certainty may positively impact the success of the affected economy.Footnote 29 In preserving their own operations, the interests of businesses often coincide with pro-democracy actors in both established and struggling democracies; in both Brazil and in South Africa, stability was referenced as a rationale for the sector’s support of certain pro-democracy objectives. When these interests do converge, the examples referenced above are indicative of the business sector’s success in encouraging state action.
Media exposure
Poland
On February 10, 2021, privately owned Polish media companies launched Media Bez Wyboru (Media without Choice), a coordinated one-day protest against a PiS-driven proposed tax on advertising (France 24 2021). Online sites, newspapers, and television channels went completely dark or featured large black squares with messages like: “Find out what the world will look like without independent media,” “This is where your favorite program was supposed to be,” and the movement’s main slogan “Media without choice” (Easton Reference Easton2021).
The government described the 2–15 percent tax as a “solidarity” measure intended to raise funds for the Polish health-care system struggling to meet the challenges imposed by COVID-19 (Henley Reference Henley2021). The protesting companies rejected this explanation and argued that the proposal would result in an addition of “$270m annually to their costs and could send many companies struggling with falling revenues under” (Easton Reference Easton2021). By comparison, both state-run and publicly funded media outlets enjoyed “generous” funds and were described by rights organizations as pro-government outlets (Henley Reference Henley2021). In an open letter, the participating media organizations, journalists, and other stakeholders viewed the protest as a “drastic action [that] is necessary because without free media there is no free choice, and without free choice, there is no freedom” (Easton Reference Easton2021). Street protests and viral online campaigns accompanied the blackout, and the movement drew international interest as an “unprecedented” media mobilization in Poland’s history (France 24 2021).
In response to the protest, the government announced six days later that it would “review suggestions” (AP News 2021). Since that time, over five years have passed without movement on the tax, suggesting that the idea has been temporarily suspended or abandoned. A different proposal targeting foreign ownership of Polish media entities was put forward by the government later that year, but it was likewise met with intense public and international criticism. While it initially passed in Parliament, it was subsequently vetoed by then President Andrzej Duda.Footnote 30
South Africa
Supporting and supplementing the public protector’s investigation into state capture, three media organizations worked in collaboration to uncover extensive evidence of undue political influence exerted by the Gupta family and by President Zuma (Campbell Reference Campbell2018). The organizations—News24 (online news company), the Daily Maverick (daily online newspaper), and the amaBhungane Center for Investigative Journalism (a nonprofit organization)—created a website upon which they posted their verified information, called “#GuptaLeaks” (Gupta Leaks, n.d.). This collaboration and open sharing of information was atypical given the depth of the story and its immense impact on the South African government and society.
The three companies were awarded South Africa’s 2017 Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism.Footnote 31 On their work, the judges produced the following joint statement:
This unusual collaboration between three very different outlets pieced together disparate pieces of information buried in a massive trove of emails to definitely prove the case of state capture and find new evidence of how systemic this corruption was. It took highly skilled, meticulous and dedicated work to do this, and present it in a user-friendly way. This story, together with other work by this team and others, has had remarkable, long-term and still unfolding impact on the politics of the country. (Journalism.co.za, n.d.)
Like other businesses, media organizations might sometimes collaborate in defense of their profession—as in Poland—or even in altruistic efforts to pursue pro-democracy measures as was observed in South Africa. The media in both countries experienced a strong reception to their collaboration. In Poland, Media Bez Wyboru had a clear impact on the nation’s political trajectory. The #GuptaLeaks team made information about the alleged state capture available to the public in an accessible way and built up the public protector’s initial findings. In addition to being an essential pillar of democracies, the institution of independent media can also protect it both through its ordinary reporting and through the special measures observed here.
Prosecution
Brazil
Lawyers filed multiple legal challenges against the Bolsonaro administration, both during and in the aftermath of his presidency. Luciana Gross Cunha, Fabiana Luci de Oliveira, and Lívia Gonçalves Buzolin found that from January 1, 2019, to August 12, 2020, 650 constitutional review cases were submitted to the nation’s Supreme Federal Tribunal, its highest court, with 247 (38 percent) naming President Bolsonaro the defendant (Gross Cunha, Luci de Oliveira, and Gonçalves Buzolin, Reference Cunha, Luciana, Gonçalves Buzolin and Vieiraforthcoming). In almost one-quarter of these cases (23 percent), an injunction was granted on constitutional considerations.Footnote 32
One of the most prominent prosecution cases in Brazil concerned Bolsonaro’s alleged involvement in an attempted coup that took place on January 8, 2023 (BBC News 2024). In an event that mirrored the January 6, 2021, capitol riots in the United States, Bolsonaro supporters occupied the National Congress, the Executive Office, and the Supreme Federal Tribunal in an effort to prevent Bolsonaro’s transition from the presidency. They had also planned to assassinate major government figures, including the incoming president (Meyer and Bustamante Reference Meyer and Bustamante2025). Factfinding in 2023 and 2024 revealed that Bolsonaro and many senior aides had knowledge and involvement in the events (Rios Reference Rios2025). Over fourteen hundred people were prosecuted for their role in the January 8 attacks, including Bolsonaro himself (BBC News 2024). After exhausting the appeals process, the former president began serving a twenty-seven-year prison sentence and, for an equally serious charge, was declared ineligible to run again for public office.Footnote 33
South Africa
In South Africa, civil prosecutions were levied both from the administration and from supporters of the public protector’s findings and recommendations regarding state capture. (Klug Reference Klug2025, 207–8). From the former, Heinz Klug describes a “series of cases challenging the authority of the Public Protector, particularly with respect to that institution’s remedial powers.” On the latter, “the opposition parties in Parliament approached the Constitutional Court in an attempt to force the ruling party in Parliament to hold [President Zuma] accountable” and provided “a wave of legal challenges to the legitimacy of executive appointments and actions taken in the appointment, suspension, and buying out of the leadership of those government institutions with the responsibility to investigate corruption and official malfeasance” (Klug Reference Klug2025, 207–8).
Given the immense impact the outcome of these suits would generate on South Africa’s democracy, the courts played an essential role in preserving South Africa’s institutions from external influence. The courts issued rulings on these challenges swiftly and with an emphasis on anti-corruption measures and the rule of law. In response to a legal challenge that would have limited the public protector’s powers, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng of the Constitutional Court read out the following portion of their decision on a live broadcast:
[O]ne of the crucial elements of our constitutional vision is to make a decisive break from the unchecked abuse of State power and resources that was virtually institutionalised during the apartheid era. To achieve this goal, we adopted accountability, the rule of law and the supremacy of the Constitution as values of our constitutional democracy. For this reason, public office-bearers ignore their constitutional obligations at their peril. This is so because constitutionalism, accountability and the rule of law constitute the sharp and mighty sword that stands ready to chop the ugly head of impunity off its stiffened neck. (Klug Reference Klug2025, 208)
An active, independent, and professionalized legal complex—including lawyers, judges, and other legally trained occupations—is shown to have an immense positive impact on the protection as well as the promotion of a healthy democracy. The states mentioned here—the United States, South Africa, Brazil, and Poland—all have poignant examples of a legal profession that has mobilized in defense of democracy and liberal constitutional principles. While it is not always the case that lawyers “unite under the flag of liberalism,” it is worth acknowledging that the health of the legal profession can have a significant impact on the health of its democracy (Halliday, Karpik, and Feeley Reference Halliday, Karpik, Feeley, Terence, Karpik and Malcolm2007; Halliday Reference Halliday, James, Robert and Cabatingan2010; Crout, Reference Croutforthcoming).
Conclusion
Abel’s account of resistance to Trump and the examples provided here indicate that, while the law provides the vocabulary and procedural tools to preserve power, its essential infrastructure also permits challenges through the realms of politics, social action, economic pressure, media exposure, and civil and criminal prosecution. The cases of Brazil, Poland, and South Africa underscore the point that, where democratic institutions like independent courts, semi-autonomous agencies, organized civil society, and elite organizations persist, resistance can protect spaces of political contestation.
At the same time, the events examined here demonstrate that resistance efforts are imperfect. These electoral democracies have not become consolidated liberal democracies; though improved on rule-of-law metrics, all continue to exhibit serious deficits in rights protection and institutional trust. Brazil’s prosecutions and the August 11 mobilization did not undo its political polarization. Poland’s Pakt Senacki and mass protests constrained the PiS and helped engineer a political transition, but they did so through devices that narrowed the electoral opportunities. South Africa’s public protector, #GuptaLeaks, and subsequent prosecutions helped expose and constrain state capture, yet they have not eliminated entrenched corruption or material inequality. Nonetheless, what the events mentioned here do highlight is that, while it is sometimes moderated or gradual, success can still be achieved despite challenging national conditions.
Three observations follow. First, the most effective resistance measures mentioned here were cross-sectoral and multimodal, and combined several of Abel’s resistance types. The Brazilian business sector’s use of economic pressure was conducted in the midst of mass social mobilization and civil and criminal prosecutions. Polish women’s rights protests may have shaped subsequent party positions because they were linked to electoral competition and to pro-democracy narratives. And South Africa’s political transition away from Zuma was supported by investigative journalism, constitutional litigation, specialized constitutional bodies, and intense intra-party bargaining. A typology that treats politics, social action, economic pressure, media exposure, and prosecution as analytically distinct is useful for mapping the terrain, as seen here; however, the events should be set and assessed within the broader resistance context within which they have taken place.
Second, as the introduction of this review essay indicates, many of the strategies catalogued here presuppose the prior existence of minimally functioning democratic institutions. Electoral pacts work only where elections remain sufficiently competitive and where opposition parties can still organize. Mass protest is more likely to generate concessions in systems that retain some responsiveness to public pressure (or are more dependent on international reputational capital). Abel’s typology, and the comparative “success stories” that elaborate it, therefore, are most valuable in the gray zone of backsliding democracies, before the state has entered the advanced stages of authoritarian closure.
Third and finally, resistance is not costless. Some of the most effective tools tested in these cases strained liberal norms and sometimes generated counter-mobilization efforts. Electoral cartels and cordon sanitaires may be justified as forms of militant democracy, but they also reduce pluralism and can deepen the sense among excluded constituencies that “the system” is rigged against them. These tensions reinforce the need to think of resistance as a continuous, dialectic practice of judgment about which tools to deploy and with what safeguards.
Returning to Abel’s central theme of how we might protect democracies, comparative analysis suggests a more modest but still compelling answer. There is no single legal or political intervention that can “solve” the problem of legalistic autocracy in the United States or elsewhere; at least not yet. Instead, there is a repertoire of strategies that can be adapted in light of existing conditions. Abel’s typology and the experiences of Brazil, Poland, and South Africa invite at least three concrete actions: invest in preserving and strengthening the institutional sites that remain relatively autonomous (courts, oversight bodies, professional regulators); support cross-sectoral coalitions capable of coordinating across the typology’s categories; and acknowledge the paradox of tolerance and the danger that extremism and polarization pose even to the healthiest democracies. If, as Abel suggests, “very little” prevents democracies from turning autocratic, the cases surveyed here show that relatively little is also required to keep open the valves through which resistance can flow. The challenge for democratic actors is understanding how to build and support strategies of resistance that are oriented toward the long work of democratic reconstruction.
Acknowledgments
I am glad to have read this series as a colleague of Professor Richard Abel. We are both members of Lawyers and Democratic Decline (LADD), a collaborative research project supported by the University of Wisconsin Law School, and have both published a chapter in an affiliated edited volume, Legal Resistance to Autocracy (Routledge, 2025). This series is independent of the LADD project. I am especially grateful for the thoughtful comments provided by Howard Erlanger, Heinz Klug, and Fabio de Sa e Silva.
