This Element investigates the process of executive aggrandizement to identify factors associated with democratic resilience. We focus on five democracies that showed resilience in the face of incumbent-led autocratization. To understand how these cases survived, we pair them with similar cases where incumbents successfully dismantled democracy from within. Through structured focused comparisons, our inductive exercise provides insights into how the process of executive aggrandizement unfolds. The case narratives reveal similar patterns, with incumbents often targeting the media, civil society, and judiciary and using shared tactics to weaken democratic institutions. Where democracies survived, anti-democratic incumbents made critical errors, including major policy blunders and miscalculations, which ultimately cost them their positions and allowed democracy to rebound. Where democracy broke down, incumbents were largely able to avoid or mitigate such errors, often through ethnopopulist appeals.

Politics in the United States has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. Both political elites and everyday citizens are divided into rival and mutually antagonistic partisan camps, with each camp questioning the political legitimacy and democratic commitments of the other side. Does this polarization pose threats to democracy itself? What can make some democratic institutions resilient in the face of such challenges? Democratic Resilience brings together a distinguished group of specialists to examine how polarization affects the performance of institutional checks and balances as well as the political behavior of voters, civil society actors, and political elites. The volume bridges the conventional divide between institutional and behavioral approaches to the study of American politics and incorporates historical and comparative insights to explain the nature of contemporary challenges to democracy. It also breaks new ground to identify the institutional and societal sources of democratic resilience.