During the era of democratic optimism that took off in the wake of the Second World War, scholars believed that democracy worked tolerably well in polities that exhibited wide institutional variation. Comparativists consequently focused on courts, rights, and constitutional values while sharply disagreeing over the extent of American exceptionalism. In his seminal contribution to this literature in A Lighter Touch: American Constitutional Principles in Comparative Perspective, Gary Jacobsohn provocatively argues that the United States is not a paradigmatic example of a nation built on constitutional values. Jacobsohn concludes that the American Constitution applies with a “lighter” touch than in many of its peer democracies which might prove problematic were the Constitution to undergo a stress test. With the advent of democratic erosion in the twenty-first century, scholars have turned pessimistic about democracy’s prospects. This paper argues that scholars will need to focus on structural issues – rather than courts, rights, and values – and the role that constitutional design may play in stemming or facilitating democratic erosion in America. The problem is not that the American Constitution applies with a lighter touch, as Jacobsohn argues, but that it applies with a heavy, almost Trumpian hand under the conditions of contemporary American democracy.

Our theory treats nominally democratic institutions as constraints that autocrats struggle to loosen and citizens’ beliefs as the central battlefield on which the struggle for political change is waged. After reviewing the book’s key findings, in this chapter we use our theoretical framework to suggest a series of important questions about autocratic politics in the early twenty-first century. We explore how the world’s autocrats are attempting to shape their citizens’ beliefs by weaponizing distinctly modern technologies, not just propaganda and censorship. We also discuss how the world’s autocrats are attempting to loosen the electoral constraints that bind them. Although this book is about propaganda in autocracies, it has important implications for politics in democracies, especially as a series of “populist-authoritarian” leaders take power across Europe and North America. We argue, in particular, that Xi Jinping’s propaganda strategy helps us understand the process of democratic erosion underway across the world. We conclude by discussing the book’s implications for public policy.

Is populism a threat to representative democracy? Is populism a reason for anxieties about democratic political systems? Or is the rise of populism a source of democratization, since it gives anxieties about the future a voice? In the self-description of leaders of contemporary populist parties, the response to the last question is positive. For instance, Alexander Gauland, co-chair of the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) at that time, argued 2018 against the dominance of a globalized elite and portrayed the AfD as the real representative of the German people competing democratically in elections (Gauland 2018). In his view, AfD supporters are democrats fighting against the impositions on national sovereignty by cosmopolitan elites.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, the erosion of democracy has become pervasive. Countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have seen the rise of executives with hegemonic aspirations. The threat of antisystemic populist outsiders has even spread to developed democracies in Europe and North America. In this chapter, I assess the theory outlined in the book in some of these cases. Doing so allows me to evaluate if, when, and how does the argument of this book work outside Colombia and Venezuela.

In this chapter, I develop a theory that focuses on the opposition’s strategic choices to fight the erosion of democracy. I define democratic erosion as a type of regime transition that happens over time, giving the opposition ample opportunity to respond, even after a leader willing to circumvent democracy has attained power. The strategies the opposition chooses and the goals it uses them for, I argue, are critical to understanding why some executives with hegemonic aspirations successfully erode democracy and others do not.

The erosion of democracy has become globally pervasive. New and old democracies around the world are now led by executives willing to undermine democratic institutions in order to achieve their policy goals. The booming literature on democratic backsliding has, for the most part, focused on the factors that drive these executives with hegemonic aspirations to power (Handlin 2017b; Norris and Inglehart 2019b) or the resources they have available to successfully undermine democratic institutions (Corrales 2018b; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018b; Ginsburg and Huq 2019b; Weyland and Madrid 2019b). The underlying assumption of these theories is that popular and economically solvent heads of government in institutionally weak countries are almost always going to erode democracy, while their less popular and economically solvent counterparts in institutionally strong countries are almost always going to fail.

This chapter focuses on the first stage of the erosion of democracy. In it, I assess the factors that increase the likelihood of having an executive with hegemonic aspirations and the extent to which these factors explain whether this head of government successfully erodes democracy or not.

Up until the 1990s, Venezuela was one of the longest-running and most stable uninterrupted liberal democracies in Latin America. Today, it is an authoritarian regime. In nineteen years, Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, managed to destroy the system of checks and balances, end free and fair elections, and terminate political rights and civil liberties. The government has delayed and canceled elections, circumvented the authority of the elected legislature, imprisoned political opponents without trial, used lethal force against protesters, and banned opposition parties. How is it that Venezuela, historically one of the most robust democracies in the region, turned into the second most authoritarian country in Latin America?

In the previous chapter, I showed how the Venezuelan opposition’s strategic choices helped Hugo Chávez erode democracy. In this chapter, I develop the other part of my argument by highlighting the role of the Colombian opposition in preventing democratic erosion. Between 2002 and 2010, Alvaro Uribe tried to erode democracy in Colombia. Like Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) in Venezuela, he introduced several reforms that sought to reduce the checks on the executive and extend his time in office beyond a second term. He was polarizing, and willing to push as far as he could to increase the powers of the presidency and stay in office beyond a second term. His government harassed opposition members, journalists, and members of the courts and worked in tandem with illegal armed actors to systemically undermine those who criticized the president. Contrary to Chávez, however, Uribe was not able to turn Colombia’s democracy into a competitive authoritarian regime. Despite his attempts to undermine the independence of the courts and the fairness of elections, Colombia’s constitutional order remained fairly strong, and Uribe had to step down after his second term.

In the past two decades, several democracies have slipped into democratic recession. Faced with economic or security crises, democratically elected executives in Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa have used their popularity to push for legislation – particularly constitutional amendments – that, over time, destroys systems of checks and balances, hinders free and fair elections, and erodes political rights and civil liberties. Across the world, these heads of government have found ways to subvert democratic norms while simultaneously maintaining a democratic façade. Using and abusing elections and institutional reform, they are turning new and old democracies alike into competitive authoritarian regimes.

Parties have emerged as a central concern of comparative constitutional law, and for good reason. Parties should be at the forefront of descriptive analyses of how constitutions function. In practice, for instance, the separation of powers depends heavily on the shape of the party system, as do many other aspects of constitutional performance.1 Moreover, breakdowns of party systems have been a significant factor in explaining recent episodes of democratic erosion or breakdown.2 In other words, crises of liberal democratic constitutionalism are often caused by crises in party systems.

But what is more challenging is developing a normative theory linking constitutions and parties. In other words, to what extent can constitutions (or comparative constitutional law) prevent or fix breakdowns in party systems? On that question, this chapter offers some skepticism, or at least outlines a series of challenges.

Section 17.2 develops a brief map of the different ways in which party systems break down.

Chapter 18th is dedicated to a critical study of “democratic erosion”, an expression that became common among political scientists, in order to describe a political pathology of our era. The idea is that, in our time, democracies no longer “die” in one fell swoop, but rather slowly, “by a thousand cuts”: instead of succumbing from one day to the next after massive riots or a military coup, democracies nowadays are commonly dismantled piece by piece from within. I explain the importance but also the limits of this approach and the alternatives that are proposed as a remedy.

Although Peru’s political system has long been depicted as a “democracy without parties,” several recent studies have suggested that Fujimorismo might posses the assets to become the sole Peruvian political party. In this chapter, we evaluate this proposition using the conceptual framework set out by volume’s editors. We find that Fujimorismo is a loose electoral coalition that, in vertical terms, lacks the stable social links required to aggregate interests. In horizontal terms, Fujimorismo can only coordinate politicians to a limited degree. Finally, our study suggests that even when Fujimorismo performs both horizontal and vertical functions, it is a party that has shown a tendency to use its organizational assets to erode democracy and not to strengthen it.

The ongoing debate about the ills of American democracy features core disagreements about both diagnosis and cure. The title of this book alludes to what is now a multi-decade lament among scholars and pundits focused on US politics regarding the rise of “polarization.” On this account, our problem is that political elites and even ordinary citizens are so divided along partisan lines that they are unable to come together to solve important public problems. Given this diagnosis, the cure would involve institutional changes designed to empower centrists of both parties and to weaken their extremist flanks. Meanwhile, a different group of observers – including students of both democratic procedures in the United States and autocratic governments elsewhere – has diagnosed the problem as partisan degradation rather than polarization. On this account, the key defects facing American democracy are rooted not in a bipartisan refusal to compromise, but in one party’s abandonment of the rules of the game. In other words, these observers trace democratic erosion to the transformation of the Republican Party into an anti-system party.