The political resource curse posits that newly resource-rich states risk experiencing authoritarianism and conflict. This article examines Guyana as a most-likely case of that phenomenon. Drawing on interviews and quantitative indicators, we find that oil has not driven the recent democratic backsliding and rising geopolitical tensions. Instead, Guyana’s democratic fragility stems from winner-take-all electoral institutions in a context of deep ethnic polarisation and major parties’ limited normative commitment to democracy. Regarding conflict, Venezuela’s domestic politics, not oil, is the key driver of regional tensions. We therefore argue that the political resource curse framework may at times obscure more than it reveals, misattributing long-standing political tensions to resource wealth. Domestic and international political dynamics may be better understood as ‘politics with resources’ than politics cursed by oil. Promoting electoral reform, fostering stronger commitment to democratic norms within political parties and ensuring credible deterrence may therefore matter more than technocratic resource governance.

This article studies two civil disobedience campaigns directed at the Fidesz government that controlled Hungary from 2010 to 2026. Representing two different kinds of civil disobedience, they both failed to deliver their immediate intended effects of changing or moderating the populist government’s illiberal policies and practices. The latter was due to the control the government held over the media, the legislature, and the courts, and its ability to react decisively to the challenges of civilly disobedient citizens and reinforce its illiberal policies and practices instead of yielding to the pressure. Short term, the campaigns thus produced perverse effects compared to those intended. Long-term, they may have had positive effects. Through the collective experience of diverse social resistance spanning several decades, they contributed to the reinforcement of the self-respect of the opposition and increased its learning and its organisational capacity.

Democratic backsliding is widely recognized as a threat to gay rights, but it is far from clear why the impact of this political malaise varies from country to country. This article makes the case for two variables as the key factors shaping the fate of gay rights in backsliding democracies: democratic resilience and the grounding of gay rights. It shows how under the illiberal and homophobic administration of Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022), gay rights in Brazil not only survived but also thrived. The country’s biggest gay rights victory—the criminalization of homophobia and transphobia—came under Bolsonaro’s watch. The analysis shows that gay rights in Brazil (and in contrast to the United States) were protected by the capacity of political institutions to defend democracy and a robust civic response to democratic threats. Less apparent is the firm grounding of gay rights in Brazil, which this article argues is owed to the framing of gay rights as a human rights matter rather than as a legal issue.

The 2026 war in Iran is thus far the high-water mark of the interventionism of the second Trump administration. This essay argues that the war in Iran is profoundly unjust and even worse than the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Like the Iraq War, it fails to meet the main criteria of just war theory and lacks any plausible humanitarian justification. But it is also symptomatic of backsliding toward an autocratic way of war, rendering it wrong in ways that go beyond violations of the principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. The war in Iran is undemocratic, abdicates any sense of humanitarian or reparative responsibilities, and is highly revisionist of the prevailing international order. In these respects, it is even worse than the 2003 Iraq War.

This article reveals an additional pathway for democratic backsliding – through negotiated legal arrangements that subtly erode political norms. Using Israel as a case study, it analyses a series of legal understandings reached between the Attorney General’s Office and the Netanyahu governments during the period 2020 to 2026. The article develops the concept of ‘contracting around democratic backsliding’, focusing on situations in which legal gatekeepers avoid direct constitutional confrontation with populist executives and instead seek to contain democratic risks through consensual legal arrangements negotiated ‘in the shadow of the law’.

The article examines three case studies of contracting around democratic backsliding: (i) the conflict-of-interest arrangement imposed on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while standing criminal trial; (ii) the Memorandum of Understanding reached with Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir following allegations of politicising the police; and (iii) the agreement permitting Netanyahu’s appointment of the head of the Israeli Security Agency despite conflict-of-interest concerns arising from ongoing investigations involving his office. In each case, the Attorney General refrained from advancing a categorical constitutional objection and instead validated the appointment or tenure through contractual limitations designed to constrain executive power.

The article argues that this ‘consensual approach’ has ultimately intensified democratic backsliding. By avoiding constitutional showdowns, the arrangements weakened the likelihood that courts would articulate clear constitutional boundaries, normalise previously unacceptable political conduct, and legitimise increasingly extreme exercises of executive power. The analysis further demonstrates that repeated reliance on negotiated accommodation gradually transformed exceptional deviations from democratic norms into an accepted constitutional practice, while simultaneously limiting the ability of legal institutions to reverse the process once the agreements themselves collapsed. In the Israeli context, such negotiated arrangements inadvertently strengthen populist entrenchment, contributing to the erosion of democratic guardrails.

This article re-conceptualizes American federalism as a racialized institutional order by advancing the theory of racialized dual sovereignty. Conventional federalism scholarship treats conflicts between state and federal authority as race-neutral disputes over jurisdiction, yet American political development demonstrates that sovereignty conflicts intensify when state actions threaten Black citizenship and political participation. This reframing is necessary because traditional constitutional jurisprudence cannot fully explain the seemingly divergent outcomes in Shelby County v. Holder and Allen v. Milligan, two decisions issued by an ideologically similar Supreme Court. The article introduces the concept of the racially charged state, defined as a subnational unit in which historical legacies of racial domination and institutional design make race the central axis of political conflict, with Alabama serving as a paradigmatic case. It argues that federal intervention operates as threshold-based recalibration: when racially exclusionary state practices threaten democratic legitimacy, federal institutions intervene selectively to stabilize the system while permitting substantial subnational inequality. The findings illuminate federalism’s dual role in enabling democratic backsliding and institutional resilience.

Many consider the rise of populism to be a major threat to liberal democracy today. At the same time, voters have given considerable support to such parties and politicians, with their average vote-share quadrupling in the last thirty years. Thus, while research realizes the potential hostility populism poses to the polity at large, it is unclear what connotations of the ideology exist to voters. Do voters recognize they are voting for a politician considered to be averse to democracy? Do they simply not care? I field a randomized survey experiment of 2099 respondents in the United Kingdom to measure (1) the effect labeling a politician ‘populist’ may have on their level of support, and (2) voters’ perception of the link between populism and democracy. Results suggest voters’ perception of ‘populist’ labels are largely dependent on the candidate’s left-right ideology, as well as the level of populist ideology of the voter.

This review article examines the rise of democratic resilience as a central concept in the comparative study of regime stability and change. Over the past decade, resilience – understood not simply as institutional survival but as the capacity of democratic systems to adapt, regenerate and deepen democratic norms in the face of crises – has gained prominence in response to accelerating autocratisation. The article situates this shift within the diverse pathways through which democracies weaken and decline, including executive aggrandisement and growing political polarisation. While the existing literature has improved our understanding of autocratisation, much comparative research remains influenced by a relatively narrow set of Northern cases. As a result, it risks treating regional experiences as universal. Drawing on evidence from Africa, Asia and other parts of the Global South, the article argues for a comparative theory of democratic resilience that incorporates state capture, rapid authoritarian reversals and more diverse forms of aggrandisement.

Over the last years, there have been frequent claims that democracy may be endangered by polarization, which has the potential to push voters and elites to embrace undemocratic practices and hence pave the way for democratic backsliding. But what is more decisive to generate tolerance to such practices: ideological or affective proximity? This article examines the effect of ideological vis-à-vis affective polarization on support for undemocratic practices. By using a conjoint experiment fielded in Catalonia in a sample of citizens and politicians, we find that both voters and elites overall reject politicians with undemocratic attitudes in a sizable and consistent way. Among citizens, while ideological proximity does not mitigate punishment of undemocratic attitudes, affective polarization does: individuals with a more intense affection toward their candidate’s party are less prone to punishing him/her for eroding the losers’ consent. The article has important implications for our understanding of the relationship between affective and ideological polarization, and support for democratic undoing.

Feminist movements in times of democratic backsliding are primarily framed as defensive, resilient, or resistant. However, such an approach overlooks the agency underpinning the enactment of democratic practices. In this article, we introduce the concept of democratic embodiment to shift the focus from what democracy achieves to how democratic agency is materially, affectively, and relationally constituted in contexts of vulnerability. Drawing on feminist and democratic theory, we conceptualize democratic embodiment as a constitutive mode of political agency through which feminist actors defend, enact, and expand democracy by centering embodied presence, affective solidarities, and infrastructures of care. Rethinking the relationship between democratic resilience and democratic innovation, we argue, helps better highlight how feminist actors enhance democracy, simultaneously resisting the erosion of gender equality while also embodying alternative visions of democracy.

Discursive attacks towards the opposition are often a harbinger of polarisation, democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. We study the evolution of negative language about the opposition in Turkey under Erdoğan, a pioneering case of democratic backsliding. We distinguish between two types of negative language: a valid competitor – ‘rival’ – versus an enemy that needs to be destroyed – ‘villain’. We leverage machine learning to examine every opposition-related sentence in two major newspapers from 2009 to 2022. Our data allow us to compare the depictions of the main opposition party as a rival or villain between media outlets, before and after media ownership change, during election times and beyond. We also test how these depictions respond to currency shocks and military casualties, as the incumbents could try to contain the fallout from these adverse events by discursively attacking the opposition. We find that vilification of the opposition is driven by security challenges rather than economic troubles, which are associated with increases in rival discourse. Results also suggest that political competition can appear unrepresentatively civil precisely during election periods, as an already polarising incumbent may try to present himself in a more reconciliatory light during the campaign period.

Citizens do not directly observe democratic backsliding and, as a result, may hesitate to respond to subversion. We develop a model of third-party oversight bodies, such as the media or courts, that detect and assess actions that may be subversive to democracy and inform citizens. Oversight deters subversion, disciplines incumbents, and enables corrective actions by providing credible information about ambiguous incumbent behavior to citizens. However, when the oversight body is contested, citizens may doubt the intent behind its criticisms. When the oversight body is cautious in its criticisms, it elicits negative inferences about its intentions, what we term a fake news effect. The consequences are severe, undermining oversight and enabling backsliding. Democratic accountability depends on reliable sources of information and elected officials’ commitment to upholding norms of conduct.

Polarization has become the master concept for diagnosing contemporary democratic crises. The notion denotes three features: symmetry between parties, politics as an opinion space where positions diverge, and mutual repulsion between opposing camps. Yet none of these capture current realities. Across democracies, the central dynamic is not two poles drifting apart but the transformation of the political right into authoritarianism, norm breaking, and openness to political violence. Social democratic and center-right parties tend to respond in the opposite way from what “polarization” implies: by accommodating rightward. Attempts to salvage the polarization frame with modifiers (“asymmetric,” “affective,” “sectarian,” “pernicious”) concede these realities but risk hollowing out the concept’s definitional core. These limitations reveal a deeper misdiagnosis: when one party turns antidemocratic and illiberal, incivility and conflict are inevitable—but they are symptoms, not the root problem. Misdiagnosing them as the central issue leads to viewing civility and compromise as remedies, thereby risking the legitimation of authoritarian actors. This article proposes an alternative lens: the radicalization of the political right. Developed in the study of extremism, the radicalization framework better captures asymmetric change, identity-driven politics, and the mainstreaming of illiberalism. It foregrounds identity fusion, threat narratives, elite entrepreneurship, and escalation. Concepts are never politically innocent and persisting with “polarization” risks both misdiagnosing and normalizing authoritarian threats.