APA Citation
Bermeo, N. (2016). On Democratic Backsliding. *Journal of Democracy*, 27(1), 5-19. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2016.0012
Summary
Nancy Bermeo's influential analysis introduced and defined the concept of "democratic backsliding"—the incremental erosion of democratic institutions and norms short of complete regime collapse. Her crucial finding is that norms violated during authoritarian rule rarely fully recover; each transgression establishes a new baseline of acceptable behavior. Even after a narcissistic or authoritarian leader leaves power, opponents may respond with their own norm erosion, justifying it as necessary response. This creates what scholars call "the death spiral of democracy"—reciprocal norm violation that continues independent of any particular leader. For understanding how narcissistic leaders damage democracies, Bermeo's research explains why the harm persists long after they're gone.
Why This Matters for Survivors
For survivors of narcissistic abuse, Bermeo's concept of "backsliding" provides a political parallel to the lasting damage narcissists cause. Just as narcissistic parents leave wounds that persist long after childhood, narcissistic leaders leave institutional damage that persists long after they leave office. Norms violated don't automatically restore; they establish new baselines. Understanding this pattern helps survivors recognize similar dynamics at personal scale: the effects of narcissistic abuse don't simply disappear when the narcissist does.
What This Research Found
Defining backsliding. Bermeo introduced “democratic backsliding” as a distinct category of democratic decline—different from coups, revolutions, or electoral authoritarianism. Backsliding occurs through incremental erosion of institutions and norms, often without any single dramatic event that clearly marks democracy’s end. The decline is gradual, making it difficult to identify when democracy has failed and when it’s merely stressed. This gradualism is both what makes backsliding possible and what makes it dangerous.
Norms don’t automatically restore. A crucial finding is that democratic norms, once violated, rarely fully recover. Each violation establishes a new baseline of acceptable behavior. If one leader attacks judicial independence, the next can do the same—pointing to precedent. If one side rejects unfavorable results, the other may follow. Norms exist in collective expectations; once those shift, restoration requires active rebuilding, not passive assumption that things will return to normal.
The reciprocal norm violation problem. Bermeo identifies a mechanism she calls reciprocal norm violation: one side breaks norms, the other responds by breaking norms in retaliation or self-defense, which justifies further violations, creating an escalating spiral. This dynamic can continue independent of any particular leader because each side feels justified by the other’s violations. The democracy dies not through one actor’s dominance but through mutual destruction of constraining norms.
Multiple forms of backsliding. Bermeo distinguishes among promissory coups (military seizures promising return to democracy), executive aggrandizement (elected leaders undermining checks on their power), and strategic manipulation of elections (rigging without blatant fraud). Each erodes democracy differently, requiring different responses. Contemporary backsliding occurs primarily through executive aggrandizement—using legal processes to concentrate power incrementally.
Why This Matters for Survivors
Political parallel to personal abuse. Survivors of narcissistic relationships recognize the pattern Bermeo describes: damage that persists after the abuser is gone. Just as childhood narcissistic abuse leaves wounds that don’t disappear when you turn 18 or move out, political narcissistic leadership leaves institutional damage that doesn’t heal when the leader leaves office. The mechanisms differ but the pattern—lasting harm from normalized violation—resonates.
Understanding why recovery is slow. If you’ve wondered why democracies (or families, or organizations) don’t simply recover once a narcissistic leader is removed, Bermeo explains: norms violated establish new baselines, damaged institutions don’t self-repair, and reciprocal violation patterns continue independent of the original violator. Recovery requires active rebuilding, not passive waiting for normal to return.
The death spiral in personal relationships. Bermeo’s death spiral concept—reciprocal norm violation independent of original cause—applies to personal relationships too. When one party in a relationship violates boundaries, the other may respond with violations, creating escalation that continues regardless of who started it. Understanding this pattern supports breaking cycles rather than continuing them.
Why “just moving on” doesn’t work. Survivors are sometimes told to simply move past narcissistic abuse without processing or addressing its effects. Bermeo’s research shows why this fails at political scale: unaddressed damage persists and compounds. The personal parallel holds: recovery requires active work, not mere passage of time since the narcissist departed.
Clinical Implications
Validate concern about democratic erosion. Clients distressed by political developments can be validated by Bermeo’s analysis: democratic backsliding is a recognized pattern with documented harmful effects. Their concern reflects accurate perception of genuine threat, not pathological worry. This validation supports both psychological wellbeing and appropriate civic engagement.
Frame political trauma appropriately. For clients experiencing political events as traumatic, Bermeo provides framework: the damage is real, lasting, and requires active response. This framing supports engagement over helplessness while maintaining realistic expectations about the difficulty of recovery.
Connect political and personal patterns. Clinicians can help clients connect Bermeo’s political analysis to personal experience. The patterns of norm violation, damage that persists past the violator’s presence, and reciprocal escalation appear at multiple scales. Recognizing these connections supports both political literacy and personal insight.
Address hopelessness strategically. Clients despairing about political developments can be helped by Bermeo’s realism: recovery is difficult but possible, as historical cases demonstrate. The analysis neither offers false hope nor confirms hopelessness but provides calibrated assessment that supports sustained engagement.
Support breaking cycles. Bermeo’s analysis of how to stop death spirals—one side breaking the pattern, commitment to norms over retaliation—applies to personal relationships too. Clinicians can support clients in breaking reciprocal violation patterns in their own relationships while maintaining appropriate boundaries.
Broader Implications
Democratic Health Assessment
Bermeo’s framework enables systematic assessment of democratic health. Rather than asking “is this democracy or not?” the question becomes “how much backsliding has occurred?” This graduated assessment better captures the reality of contemporary democratic challenges, where most erosion falls short of complete collapse but constitutes real damage.
Policy Design for Resilience
Understanding how backsliding occurs enables designing institutions that resist it: judicial appointment procedures insulated from political manipulation; media ecosystems with multiple independent actors; electoral systems resistant to strategic manipulation; civil society organizations protected from state interference. Policy can be explicitly designed to resist the mechanisms Bermeo identifies.
International Democratic Support
Bermeo’s framework informs how established democracies might support democratic development elsewhere. Rather than focusing only on dramatic regime change, attention to incremental erosion—and the mechanisms that enable or resist it—supports more nuanced engagement. Early warning signs Bermeo identifies can trigger intervention before collapse.
Post-Authoritarian Transition Planning
Understanding that recovery from authoritarian rule is difficult and requires active institutional rebuilding shapes transition planning. Bermeo’s analysis suggests that removing authoritarian leaders without addressing institutional damage and norm erosion leaves vulnerability to recurrence. Transition planning must address the mechanisms of backsliding, not just the personalities who exploited them.
The Challenge of Democratic Reconstruction
If norms once violated don’t automatically restore, democratic reconstruction requires more than removing authoritarian leaders. It requires: institutional reform that reduces vulnerability to executive aggrandizement; civic education that rebuilds commitment to democratic procedures; broad coalitions that prioritize democratic norms over partisan advantage; and time for consistently observed norms to re-establish expectations. This is a generational project.
Historical Memory
Bermeo’s analysis implies importance of historical memory. Societies that remember how democracy eroded—the specific mechanisms, the warning signs, the consequences—are better positioned to resist recurrence. This has implications for education, commemoration, and public discourse about democratic history.
Limitations and Considerations
Measurement challenges. Precisely measuring democratic backsliding remains difficult. When does normal political conflict become erosion? When does erosion become collapse? Bermeo provides framework but not formula; application requires judgment.
Causal complexity. Bermeo identifies patterns but causation remains complex. Why do some democracies backslide while others don’t? What determines whether backsliding continues or reverses? These questions remain open even with the framework she provides.
Universal applicability. The analysis developed primarily from comparative European and Latin American cases. How well it applies to other regions with different democratic histories and cultural contexts requires additional analysis.
Normative complexity. Sometimes what appears as backsliding might be democratic correction (expanding participation, limiting elite power). Distinguishing regressive backsliding from progressive change requires normative judgment the framework itself doesn’t provide.
How This Research Is Used in the Book
This research is cited in Chapter 15: Political Narcissus to explain lasting damage from narcissistic leadership:
“‘Democratic backsliding’ often accelerates after narcissistic leaders leave office. Bermeo found that norms violated during narcissistic rule rarely fully recover; each transgression establishes a new baseline of acceptable behaviour. Opponents respond with their own norm erosion, justifying it as necessary response. Nyhan calls this ‘the death spiral of democracy’—reciprocal norm violation that continues independent of any particular leader.”
The citation supports the book’s analysis of how narcissistic political leadership creates damage that persists beyond the leader’s tenure.
Historical Context
“On Democratic Backsliding” appeared in January 2016, before events that would make its analysis urgently relevant: the Trump presidency, intensifying erosion in Hungary and Poland, Brazil’s authoritarian turn under Bolsonaro. Bermeo was diagnosing a pattern that subsequent years would dramatically illustrate.
The article responded to scholarly recognition that existing frameworks for understanding democratic decline were inadequate. Traditional models focused on dramatic events—coups, revolutions, founding elections that authoritarian parties win. What was happening in Hungary under Orbán, in Turkey under Erdoğan, didn’t fit these models. Erosion was gradual, often legal, and hard to distinguish from ordinary political conflict until damage was severe.
Bermeo’s contribution was both conceptual (defining “backsliding” as a distinct phenomenon) and analytical (identifying mechanisms through which it occurs). The concept spread rapidly through academic and public discourse, providing vocabulary for phenomena previously difficult to name. “Democratic backsliding” became standard terminology in subsequent research, journalism, and advocacy.
The article’s prescience—published before the events that would make democratic erosion a dominant political concern—established it as foundational for subsequent scholarship and a touchstone for public understanding of contemporary democratic challenges.
Further Reading
- Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How Democracies Die. Crown.
- Lührmann, A., & Lindberg, S.I. (2019). A third wave of autocratization is here: What is new about it? Democratization, 26(7), 1095-1113.
- Ginsburg, T., & Huq, A.Z. (2018). How to Save a Constitutional Democracy. University of Chicago Press.
- Waldner, D., & Lust, E. (2018). Unwelcome change: Coming to terms with democratic backsliding. Annual Review of Political Science, 21, 93-113.
- Diamond, L. (2015). Facing up to the democratic recession. Journal of Democracy, 26(1), 141-155.
About the Author
Nancy Bermeo, PhD is Nuffield Professor of Comparative Politics Emerita at Oxford University and one of the world's leading scholars of democratization and democratic breakdown. Her research examines how democracies form, survive, and fail across different regions and time periods.
Bermeo has written extensively on democratic transitions, authoritarian regimes, and the conditions that make democracies resilient or fragile. Her earlier work "Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times" examined mass political behavior during democratic crises.
The "democratic backsliding" concept she developed has become central to how scholars and observers understand contemporary threats to democracy, providing vocabulary for phenomena that previously lacked precise terminology.
Historical Context
Published in 2016, "On Democratic Backsliding" appeared at a crucial moment. Traditional models of democratic collapse focused on dramatic events—coups, revolutions, complete regime change. But what scholars were observing in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and elsewhere wasn't dramatic collapse but gradual erosion: incremental attacks on courts, media, and electoral systems that didn't cross clear lines but cumulatively undermined democracy. Bermeo provided the conceptual framework for understanding this new pattern of democratic decline.
Frequently Asked Questions
Democratic backsliding is the incremental erosion of democratic institutions, norms, and practices short of complete regime collapse. Unlike coups or revolutions that dramatically end democracy, backsliding occurs through gradual degradation: attacks on judicial independence, media freedom, electoral integrity, and civil liberties that each seem manageable but cumulatively undermine democratic functioning. The metaphor of 'backsliding' captures the gradual, often imperceptible nature of the decline.
Once a norm is violated—say, a president attacks the judiciary or rejects election results—the violation establishes a new baseline. Future actors can say 'they did it, so can we.' The norm exists in collective expectations; once those expectations shift, restoration is difficult. Additionally, violating norms to defend democracy (fighting fire with fire) further degrades them. The damage is to shared expectations and mutual restraint, which can't be restored by decree.
The death spiral describes how norm violations become reciprocal: one side violates norms, the other responds with their own violations justified as necessary defense, which triggers further violations. The spiral continues independent of any particular leader because each side feels justified in its violations by the other's prior violations. Democracy dies not through one side's victory but through mutual destruction of the norms that make democracy possible.
Narcissistic leaders typically violate democratic norms aggressively—attacking independent institutions, rejecting constraints on their power, treating opposition as illegitimate. These violations leave lasting damage regardless of how the leader's tenure ends. Even if the narcissistic leader is defeated, their norm violations have established new baselines that successors may exploit or opponents may match, continuing erosion the original leader began.
Several mechanisms: institutionally, captured courts, damaged media ecosystems, and eroded electoral systems don't automatically restore when a leader leaves. Politically, opponents who resisted may feel justified in using the same tactics. Culturally, norms that have been visibly violated with impunity lose their power to constrain. The leader may be gone, but the institutional damage, political polarization, and cultural norm-collapse remain.
Bermeo's research suggests reversal is possible but difficult. It requires not just removing authoritarian-minded leaders but actively rebuilding institutions, re-establishing norms, and resisting the reciprocal norm violation that creates death spirals. Success stories exist (post-World War II Germany, some post-authoritarian transitions) but require sustained commitment. Reversal is harder than prevention; once norms erode, restoration takes generations.
Stopping the spiral requires at least one side to break the pattern—to refrain from retaliatory norm violation even when feeling justified. This is politically difficult because it feels like unilateral disarmament. Successful breaks typically require: broad coalitions committed to democratic norms regardless of policy disagreements; institutional reforms that reduce stakes of political competition; civic education that values procedural over substantive outcomes; and time for violated norms to re-establish through consistent observance.
Bermeo identifies: attacks on judicial independence and rule of law; restrictions on media freedom and independent journalism; manipulation of electoral rules and voting access; delegitimization of political opposition; appointment of loyalists to independent institutions; attacks on civil society organizations; and rejection of unfavorable results or institutions. Each individually might be defensible; the pattern signals democratic erosion.