Although far-right insurrections often catch worldwide attention, little is known about whether and how these autocratization events affect other countries. This article studies the spillover of a prototype of such coup attempts – the January 6th Capitol insurrection. I argue that a far-right insurrection abroad can trigger a transnational learning process, which increases the salience of the far-right’s anti-democratic potential. Consequently, due to shaming and changes in voting calculus, citizens are less likely to support a domestic far-right party. To test this expectation, I use two panel datasets in Western Europe fielded amid the Capitol insurrection. Both analyses show that the expressed support for domestic far-right parties decreased after this autocratization event. I discuss how these findings enrich the literature on autocratization, the far-right, and transnational learning.

This article re-examines the association between democratization and the cost of borrowing abroad in the first era of globalization. Using two representative datasets the literature offers but employing an improved method for panel event study, we find that democratization's impact on the costs of foreign borrowing is uncertain. In one case, the estimated coefficients are similar to the sign and magnitude of the original study but with larger standard errors, rendering the impact statistically insignificant. In the other case, the estimated coefficients hover around zero and are not statistically different from zero.

A major focus of the democratic backsliding literature has been on “executive aggrandizement” in electoral, institutional, and civil societal arenas. An influential explanation of the strength of opposition to aggrandizers contends that the more democratic accountability remains despite illiberal stratagems, the stronger the pushback is likely to be. A single-country temporal comparison of three aggrandizing Philippine presidents—Ferdinand Marcos Sr., Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and Rodrigo Duterte—demonstrates that this view not only fails to account for stark variation in opposition, it predicts the reverse of what actually occurred. Despite election fraud, constitutional manipulation, and protest crackdowns, Marcos Sr. and Arroyo confronted stronger pushback. By contrast, opposition against Duterte gained little traction although elections remained competitive, institutions were left largely intact, and there was little repression of peaceful protests. This suggests that opposition efficacy is more dependent on how effectively it can contest democratic legitimation claims used to disguise autocratization.

The ‘waves and ebbs’ model proposed by Huntington in his 1991's The Third Wave has profoundly shaped how scholars interpret global trends of democratization and autocratization, but has also received criticisms, especially concerning its ability to explain regime change in the three decades following the end of the Cold War. I contend that, rather than an alternation between democratization waves and authoritarian ebbs, the post-Cold War period could be more fruitfully described as a phase of ‘regime convergence’ characterized by a tendency of both democracies and autocracies to shift towards hybrid forms of political regime. By showing that between 1990 and 2023 transitions to hybrid regimes significantly exceeded transitions in other directions, I demonstrate the empirical relevance of hybridization as a process affecting both democracies and autocracies, and I encourage renewed attention to this phenomenon distinct from both democratization and autocratization.

Democratic backsliding has posed significant challenges to democracies in many countries. Recent calls for a better theorization of pushback against backsliding have triggered renewed scholarly interest in the field of opposition and its role in stopping or reversing creeping authoritarian rule. This study calls for a theoretical and empirical recalibration of the concept of opposition to account for multifaceted ‘non-partisan’ actors and venues of oppositional mobilization. It proposes a new classification of resilient civic opposition. The explanatory typology is based on two factors: (1) the ability of civic opposition to bring multiple grievances together and to balance between on-street and off-street mediums, and (2) the rapport between political opposition parties and civic opposition. Four cases of civic opposition from Hungary and Turkey illustrate the proposed typology empirically.

While scholars have devoted significant attention to religious institutions’ role in democratization, less attention has been given to their role in autocratization. Moreover, religious economy approaches suggest that religious institutions are flexible to offer whatever is of interest to the marketplace, but here the role the institutions played in the third wave of democratization suggests a stable commitment. I test the impact of religious monopoly and the historical pro-democratizing role on 52 dominant religious institutions’ stances towards autocratic practices related to regime survival in the post-third wave period. Logistic regression models reveal that stronger religious monopolies decrease the probability of opposing regime survival, while the historical pro-democratizing role of the dominant religious groups in the third wave increases the probability. Furthermore, when the religious market is highly monopolized, the commitment to a democratic role in the third wave is weak, and it is strengthened when there is intense religious competition.

How does a democracy that has survived a close brush with authoritarianism start to recreate conditions of meaningful democratic political competition? What steps are to be taken, and in what order? Certain lessons can be gleaned from comparative experience with the challenges of “front-sliding”—that is, the process of rebuilding the necessary political, legal, epistemic, and sociological components of democracy. This essay maps out those challenges, examines the distinctive and difficult question of punishing individuals who have been drivers of democratic backsliding, and reflects on how to sequence different elements of front-sliding.

This introductory essay outlines the core themes of the special issue on the rise and fall of Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. In the essay, we highlight several theoretical and empirical contributions the featured papers make to our understanding of the protest–repression nexus from the onset of the movement to the imposition of the National Security Law. First, we describe the political and social contexts of the movement. Second, we present our empirical findings on Hong Kongers' political preferences. Finally, we highlight new research avenues arising from this special issue.

This introductory note to the Special Issue ‘Autocracy Strikes Back: Authoritarian Resurgence in the Early 21st Century’ situates this collection of articles in the burgeoning literature on authoritarian resurgence, and illustrates the conceptual terrain on which these articles make their contribution. In this regard, we discuss autocratization, authoritarian resilience, democratic transition failure, and autocracy-to-autocracy transition as processes of regime change representing different ways in which authoritarian resurgence may advance. Relatedly, we clarify how these processes of regime change differ from each other and provide a few basic coordinates to frame their comparative analysis.

The so-called third wave of democratization is over and scholars are increasingly alert to the apparently growing number of regime changes in the opposite direction. However, there is little agreement concerning how many distinct forms these processes can take, and even less systematic cross-regional analysis of the phenomenon, which diminishes our ability to seize its actual import. Accordingly, this article pursues a twofold goal. First, we present a framework for the analysis of the processes opposite to democratization. Specifically, we build on the notion of ‘autocratization’, identify similarities and differences between the various forms it can take, and catalogue how it can happen. Second, we provide new data on post-Cold War cases across the world and use these data to map the prevailing trends. The analysis confirms the increasing empirical relevance of the phenomenon, and reveals the existence of a few geographical and historical patterns in the forms and modes of contemporary autocratization.