Why are electoral winners more willing to support democratic norm violations? Using a mediator blockage survey experiment in the United States, I find that winners endorse norm erosion due to heightened in-party favoritism following their party’s electoral victory. The experiment successfully manipulated in-party favoritism, the mediator, demonstrating that respondents exposed to a winning signal, suggesting their party is likely to secure both the presidency and control of Congress, exhibit greater in-party favoritism. This increase significantly predicts a greater tendency to perceive norm-eroding policies, such as banning protests or disqualifying candidates, as democratic and to support these policies. Additionally, winners are less likely to evaluate these policies through a lens of strategic political calculation, that is, whether these policies benefit their party directly or indirectly, challenging the prevailing view that winners tolerate norm violations for instrumental reasons.

Electoral integrity has come under increasing pressure in the United States. Evidence shows that voters rarely ‘punish’ anti-democratic behavior if doing so implies voting for opponents. However, such electoral defection sets a high bar for detecting voter alienation. Here, I complement the analysis of partisans’ willingness to forego democracy’s rules with a more pliable measure of support: partisan attachments. Three preregistered survey experiments offer a nuanced picture of partisans’ tolerance for electoral subversion. On the one hand, few partisans will defend democracy by voting against their party. On the other hand, electoral violations alienate the party base and can even reduce animosity towards the opposing party, indicating that parties cannot undermine elections with impunity. Finally, the evidence suggests that partisans mainly update partisan attachments when the information is sponsored by a co-partisan source, indicating that credible linkage institutions may play a crucial role in shaping accountability.

This paper explores diversifying legislatures within a context of ethnonationalism, populism, and democratic erosion. Although diversity and inclusion are often viewed as symbols of democratization, research increasingly challenges this. In fact, diversity and inclusion can occur in tandem with democratic erosion—how so? How do minorities navigate hostile environments? To answer this question, I analyze how women politicians with intersecting identities strategically use their gendered and racialized identities. I conduct a qualitative study of four different women politicians in the Israeli Knesset—Miri Regev of Jewish Mizrahi [Moroccan] descent, Pnina Tamano-Shata of Jewish Ethiopian descent, Merav Michaeli of Jewish Ashkenazi [European] descent, and Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Palestinian-Israeli. I find that women will highlight the aspects of their identities that they believe will benefit them the most, resulting in their promotion of ethnonational divisions and reducing opportunities for solidarity among minority populations.

A major challenge for contemporary legal constitutionalism is a crisis of public ethics that manifests in the lack of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance towards the judiciary. To showcase the importance of these norms in the relationship among co-equal branches of government, I focus on three cases, one where these norms have been present—South Africa—one where they have been absent—Mexico—and one case in between—United States. Until this crisis is addressed, the authority of apex courts will continue to be under threat. The Article suggests that a starting point to address the public ethics deficit may lie in shifting comparative constitutional law scholarly attention to the political sphere.

Comparative legal literature increasingly stresses the fundamental importance of informal norms that underpin democratic and constitutional governance. A particular species of these informal norms is the constitutional convention. Although there is wide recognition of the fact that populism constitutes a key issue of constitutional resilience in our time, the issue of constitutional resilience with regard to the relationship between populist political style and constitutional conventions has been largely overlooked. This article maps the extent to which populism threatens constitutional resilience in democratic systems which rely substantively on constitutional conventions. Bringing together political science and legal theory, we engage in a conceptual analysis of conventions and of populism as a political style. In doing so we seek to explain the perceived tension between the two phenomena. We argue that populism should be conceived as a transgressive political style, which is fundamentally hostile to the notion of unwritten constitutional law or practice. In view of the crucial connection between constitutional conventions and the resilience of the constitutional system, and the vulnerability of conventions as norms of self-restraint (lacking independent enforcement mechanisms), we conclude that the populist political style indeed constitutes a problem of constitutional resilience.

Can the “us versus them” dynamic in politics undermine support for democracy even in the absence of strong party identification? While much is known about affective polarization in the USA, its impact on democratic commitment in other contexts remains understudied. We examine Chile’s 2022 plebiscite, where voters decided whether to approve or reject a new constitution amid low levels of party trust and identification. Through an experiment using an unobtrusive primer, we successfully induced short-term affective polarization, heightening animosity across multiple dimensions. Our findings show that individuals primed to this polarization significantly reduced their support for democracy, mirroring patterns observed in the USA. These results emphasize the importance of studying affective polarization, especially in regions with fragile democratic histories.

De-democratization may take the form of executive-led attacks as well as incremental decrepitude, gradual emptying of underlying constitutional values, and state inertia. Contrary to general wisdom, both exogenous erosion and endogenous decay are heavily affected by informality. As courts are often the first institutions affected by de-democratization, this Article analyzes informality in erosion and decay of judicial institutions. It argues that such institutions interact with democracy in two core directions. The first one is endogenous and describes the decay of democratic judiciaries as a result of a long-term incongruence between formal and informal judicial institutions. The second direction captures the gradual erosion of informal institutions that have positive effects on judicial democratic resilience. These two processes, decay and erosion of informal judicial institutions, should not be overlooked. While they are less visible, slower, and often unintentional, they are as dangerous as frontal executive-led attacks on courts, because they significantly increase the window of opportunity for politicians who wish to downgrade the substance of democracy or even implement a regime change.

In the last year Israel has been going through its most severe constitutional crisis in its history. The newly elected right-wing government has initiated a judicial overhaul that would limit the authority of the judiciary and grant the executive almost absolute powers. In response, the country has witnessed unprecedented civil protestations and opposition from nearly all segments of civil society, academia and economic sectors. In this article we argue that the judicial overhaul must be analysed as a populist constitutional project. We also explain that compared with other systems, Israeli democracy is especially vulnerable to populism, because of its unique institutional design factors coupled with social factors. Only with understanding these factors can one grasp the risks that the judicial overhaul poses to Israeli democracy.

Why does the ability of political leaders to control the bureaucracy vary? With strong meritocratic recruitment and tenure protections, Brazil appears an ideal case for successful bureaucratic resistance against political control. However, our analysis reveals how Bolsonaro overcame initial resistance by recalibrating strategies, ultimately dominating many key sectors of the bureaucracy. Drawing on over 100 interviews with public officials, we find that strategies of political control and bureaucratic resistance unfold in a dynamic, yet often predictable, pattern based on leaders' previous experiences and their ability to learn, adjust, and tighten their grip on the instruments of the state. The Bolsonaro administration transformed the regulatory framework and targeted individual state employees, reducing arenas of contestation and inducing public sector workers to remain silent, implementing the president’s policy preferences. We examine these control strategies in environmental agencies, their replication, and potential long-term consequences.

A growing body of literature on the role of courts in democratic backsliding claims that court-packing weakens liberal democracy. However, this is not necessarily the case. The goals of the actors who produce court-packing help to explain why the co-optation of the judiciary can have a substantial negative effect on liberal democracy in some (although not all) cases. In this respect, we distinguish two types of court-packing. First, policy-driven court-packing occurs when politicians manipulate the composition of courts in order to assure a quick implementation of policies. Although this tends to negatively affect judicial independence, it is not per se a first step towards regime change. Second, regime-driven court-packing happens when politicians alter the composition of the courts with the goal of eroding democracy. In this case, court-packing’s negative effect on judicial independence has a systemic negative effect on different dimensions of liberal democracy. Relying on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, we conceptualize these two types of court-packing by comparing two cases: Carlos Menem (1989–99) in Argentina, seeking judicial support to carry out pro-market economic reforms, and Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) and Nicolás Maduro (2013–present) in Venezuela, seeking to control the judiciary in the context of democratic backsliding.