Q&A with Directors of the Democratic Erosion Consortium
How their work helps us understand democracy & democratic erosion in the US and globally
This post is an interview with the Directors of the Democratic Erosion Consortium, a nonpartisan research, teaching, and policy collaboration dedicated to addressing the threat of democratic erosion in the U.S. and around the world. As major democracy scholars, Jessica Gottlieb, Rob Blair, Laura Paler, and Julie Anne Weaver are engaged with critical questions regarding how to measure democracy and actions that constitute threats to democracy in the US and abroad. They also teach about these issues in university classrooms. This week, the Consortium launched a new dataset on democracy and democratic erosion both in the US and globally that will serve as an important tool for scholars and students alike who seek to evaluate or to simply learn about democracy today and in recent decades. I wanted to bring them on to share more about their work and how it can help us to make sense of the present moment in democracy in both the US and globally.
1) What motivated you to start this project and push it forward, and why is it important in the current moment?
We started the Democratic Erosion Consortium in 2017, in the wake of Trump’s first election. Like many other Americans, we were reading lots of warnings about imminent threats to democracy in the US and globally. But we didn’t feel we had the conceptual or theoretical tools to gauge how seriously we should be taking those warnings. We wanted to better understand the extent to which American democracy, and democracy around the world, was really at risk. If the risk was as severe as many commentators seemed to think, we wanted to know what we could do to help counteract it from our position as educators and academics. And we wanted to generate economies of scale that would allow us to pursue more ambitious ideas than would be possible in a standalone college course or research project.
As it turned out, lots of other academics were thinking along similar lines, and the consortium grew very quickly. The project now consists of four pillars. First, we run a collaborative undergraduate course on Democratic Erosion that has been taught at more than 90 universities worldwide. Second, we developed the Democratic Erosion Event Dataset (DEED), which tracks thousands of events related to democratic erosion and resilience in more than 170 countries around the world. Third, we publish periodic Democratic Erosion Evidence Briefs (DEE-Briefs), which synthesize evidence on topics related to democratic erosion for a broad, non-academic audience. Finally, we host a variety of online and in-person events to build bridges between the academic, donor, policymaker, and practitioner communities.
Our understanding of threats to democracy has certainly improved since 2017. But so has our understanding of the difficulties of diagnosing and neutralizing those threats. Where do we draw the line between normal (if aggressive) partisan politics and democratic erosion? How do we overcome apparently irreconcilable partisan differences in the interpretation of the same government policies and actions? How serious are the threats to democracy in America and abroad today, and what can be done about them? We think it’s extremely important to try to answer these questions, not through the lens of our own partisan attachments (tempting as that is), but rather through the lens of theory, history, and social science.
2) There has long been a debate over how to measure democracy among political scientists. Some scholars argue that a country is either a democracy or it’s not. Others speak of “levels of democracy” on a sliding scale. Still others point out that notions of what constitutes democracy have shifted across history, and that governance can also be highly varying even within a single country. How do you view these debates at the Democratic Erosion Consortium?
We generally think of democracy on a sliding scale. When we classify regime types, we usually apply some threshold below which a country is no longer considered a democracy. But the threshold is inevitably arbitrary. We also think it’s important to recognize that democratic erosion is often an indeterminate process. Some democracies collapse into authoritarianism (e.g., Venezuela). But many do not—many simply become less and less democratic over time. Parties compete on an increasingly uneven playing field. Journalists face increasingly intense pressure to self-censor. Civil society organizations endure increasingly byzantine obstacles to recruiting and mobilizing members. And so on. At no point can we unambiguously say that the country isn’t a democracy. But it’s a democracy with more and more flaws.
Definitional debates can seem like academic navel gazing. But they’re very important. For example, there’s been heated disagreement recently about the extent to which the quality of democracy is actually declining worldwide. (See, for example, this recent issue of Political Science and Politics, to which we contributed an article.) In many respects this boils down to a disagreement over definitions. If you adopt a relatively “minimalist” definition of democracy in which elections are the key indicators of democratic health, then it seems democracy worldwide isn’t faring so badly. If you adopt a more “maximalist” perspective that includes a broader range of civil and political liberties (e.g., an independent judiciary, freedom of speech and association, vibrant civil society, etc.), then the picture is bleaker. While we don’t come down strongly on one side or the other of these definitional debates, we do observe in our data that attacks on electoral freedom and fairness tend to happen relatively late in the process of democratic erosion, after other potential indicators of democratic stability have already declined pretty dramatically. That’s the risk of adopting too minimalist a perspective: we may not detect democratic erosion until a country is already quite far gone.
We also suspect standards for what “counts” as democracy have changed over time in ways that complicate conceptualization and measurement. We haven’t seen anyone try to wrestle seriously with this problem. Neglecting to account for changing standards may lead us to some strange conclusions about the state of democracy globally, or in particular countries. For example, as Andrew Little and Anne Meng have pointed out, the US’s score on the widely used Polity index fell from 10 (full democracy) to 8 after Trump’s first election in 2016 – indicating a less democratic government than during the Jim Crow era. Whatever you think of the state of American democracy in Trump’s first term, it’s hard to argue it was worse than during Jim Crow. One possible explanation for this anomaly is a failure to account for changing standards over time.
3) Democracies today rarely collapse through coups. Rather, democracies that are eroding are often hollowed out from within or suffer from the consequences of high-stakes polarization that results in major parties flouting democratic rules or norms. That typically takes place against a partisan backdrop through which anti-democratic actions occur – sometimes in the very name of democracy itself. How do you distinguish partisan gamesmanship from concrete episodes of democratic backsliding?
This is a really important question and one we are even more attuned to as we try to parse partisan politicking from democratic backsliding in our own country where we are acutely aware of how just about everything is inflected with partisanship. To address this as we construct a new US-only dataset, we are explicitly seeking out information about what both parties are saying about a specific event, and will include those partisan disagreements in the dataset itself. Then, for a subset of really hard calls, we are convening cross-partisan expert working groups to help us think through how to adjudicate what is and isn’t erosion of a democratic norm or institution in a fair and transparent way.
In the meantime, we have some suggestions for how to be more disciplined in consuming and interpreting news in the context of potential backsliding. First, we encourage people to ask the uncomfortable “what about” question. If you see the other party doing something you are inclined to deem backsliding, ask yourself: what about my party; did it ever do something like that? And if so, consider the difference in your reaction when that happened. Asking this question helps us define more precisely the exact nature of the threat we think we’re perceiving. For example, thinking of Trump applying pressure to universities to change DEI policies, Obama also applied pressure to expand the interpretation of Title IX. Have Trump’s action been different or worse? If so, how? Second, while good comparisons can be helpful, we encourage people not to hyperbolize when they compare the US to other countries. Take Trump’s July 4th military parade being compared to North Korea, for example. If we think a little harder, there are other cases of liberal democracies – like France – where the same type of parade has been held.
This is not to say we should minimize or ignore warning signs. One of the hardest parts about recognizing democratic erosion is that, as you noted, it is often couched in pro-democracy terms. But consuming information and arguments from both viewpoints, being more rigorous in evaluating the ills of both sides and recognizing our own partisan biases can help us detect these warning signs when they are really there.
4) Troubled democracies don’t just erode. At times, they repair and heal, though not always in equal and opposite fashion to how they faltered. Do you also track that at the DEC? How would you think about how to add up or weigh a series of context-specific political events from the perspective of something like “net” democratic erosion or democratic health?
At the DEC we track not only erosion events but also resistance events, which allows us to also speak to broader trends in democratic resilience. Resistance events include things like protests and efforts by civil society actors to defend democratic norms. They also include actions by politicians and state institutions, for instance courts striking down actions deemed unconstitutional. These events can be things like increases in civic capacity, electoral integrity, media protections, or civil liberties that occur after an authoritarian leaves power, or actions occurring in the immediate period in direct response to erosion events. For instance, in the case of Brazil, we code as a resistance event the Superior Electoral Court’s decision in 2023 to bar former president Jair Bolsonaro from running for office until 2030.
While we track both erosion and resistance events, we don’t currently provide a single “net” score of democratic health. Our goal is to transparently document all relevant events so that researchers, journalists, and the public can make their own assessments. We’re cautious about reducing such a complex, context-dependent process to a single number. We believe this transparency is crucial for enabling more objective and balanced assessments of democratic erosion. Analysts make such “net” assessments—explicitly or implicitly—all the time in their research and media commentary. The challenge, however, is that in a media environment saturated with stories about democratic decline, it can be difficult to remain unbiased. DEED helps mitigate these biases by giving all relevant events equal visibility and by providing the information needed for more comprehensive and critical assessments of overall democratic health.
We should note that our event data also allows us to show the difference between a democracy that has remained relatively stable (per aggregate indices) and that has not been tested by symptoms and resistance events, versus a democracy at the same aggregate index level that has had pressure put on it accompanied by resistance. These different patterns might have implications for the future of governance or democracy in that country, and our data would allow us to investigate what those are.
5) Democracy in the United States is facing its most serious challenge in generations. Having tracked democratic erosion episodes around the world, how do you view the current moment in American democracy? What are you most worried about – or most optimistic about – in the coming 5 years?
We first want to push back a bit on the premise of the question: part of the DEC’s mission is to bring systematic data to bear on questions like this one—Is U.S. democracy facing its most serious challenge in generations? There’s no doubt that the challenges are serious. Media coverage and opinion pieces are full of comparisons to earlier moments in U.S. history—the interwar years of the 1920s, the Red Scares, the tumultuous 1960s, and the Watergate era. One of the goals of our data collection is to help us evaluate how today’s threats stack up against those historical benchmarks and determine how exceptional the current moment really is.
With that said, there is obviously cause for concern. Our data shows that, across both liberal and illiberal democracies, events that we most commonly associate with democratic erosion comprise attacks on vertical accountability, or accountability between citizens and the state: media repression, curtailed civil liberties, and repression of the opposition. But in some of the most concerning cases, we actually observe a higher prevalence of attacks on horizontal accountability, or intra-governmental checks on power, such as the decline in judicial independence. We are seeing both types of events in the United States. For instance, our US-focused dataset, which is still in development, has recorded actions targeting the media like removing certain news outlets from White House Press Briefings and defunding public broadcasting, as well as actions targeting civil liberties such as the denial of due process to migrants facing deportation. Perhaps even more worrisome is evidence of weakening checks on executive power: rhetorical attacks on the judiciary, the removal of leaders of independent agencies for non-compliance, and modifying rules about the non-partisan nature of the bureaucracy.
One of the most striking patterns we’ve observed is the extent to which attacks on institutions traditionally seen as independent—such as the media, universities, private-sector companies, and foundations—have gained traction. These institutions are more intertwined with the federal government than many realize. Their reliance on government funding, regulation, licenses, and other forms of state interaction makes them more vulnerable—and less independent—than we might have previously appreciated.
Mass, broad-based mobilization – a kind Americans have not had to sustain for a long time – becomes a key lever in resisting democratic erosion when other independent or balancing institutions are compromised. In countries like Israel and Brazil, large-scale public protests became central to defending democratic institutions. Are we optimistic that the American public is ready for this fight? Actually, yes. It’s true that we’re not seeing the same kinds of visible resistance events that characterized the early days of Trump’s first term. But the context now is very different. There are genuine constraints that make organizing feel harder and more uncertain—from unified control of all branches of government, to a newly emboldened willingness to threaten or intimidate opponents, to a divided opposition. Yet there are also encouraging signs. Public opinion polls show increasing numbers of Americans are worried about the state of our democracy, and many Americans—especially those in the political middle—are rejecting the extremes of polarization that dominate social media. The real test will be whether this shared concern and underlying commitment to democracy can be converted into sustained, broad-based public resistance to democratic erosion.
6) The DEC just released a new dataset on democratic erosion episodes, one that is far richer than what you’ve done to date. Can you tell us what’s in it and why it represents a major step forward for scholars and policymakers that seek to better understand, and support, democracy?
Our dataset is the first we know of to document democracy-related phenomena at the event level. We see it as a complement to existing democracy indicators that report yearly trends in the quality of democracy or one of its subcomponents (like V-Dem or POLITY IV) or to event data on singular event types (like protests or killings of journalists). Our data records monthly events or actions we qualify as symptoms of democratic erosion, resistance to erosion, or precursors to erosion. To allow for quantitative comparisons over time and space, we classify events into over 50 meaningful categories that reflect how each event either reduces or improves vertical or horizontal accountability. Common symptoms include media repression and reduction in judicial independence; common resistance events include nonviolent protest and checks on the executive by the judiciary or legislature. We decided to implement the category of precursor to capture events that might lay the groundwork for future erosion but do not themselves constitute institutional change – these are often threats or rhetoric rather than actions. Our codebook provides descriptions and examples of each of the over 50 event categories.
The new version of the Democratic Erosion Event Dataset (DEED v7) has much better coverage (in terms of years and countries), with an increase from about 6,000 observations to over 20,000. In response to requests from practitioners working on democracy-building, we have also added information on actors to the dataset. We code both the category of the actor who initiated the event (such as the executive or judiciary) and the target of the event (such as minority groups or journalists). That will help users make richer cross-country and over-time comparisons.
We see this dataset as especially useful in the current moment where scholars and the public are trying to make sense of what is happening to our democracy and how worried we should be. Our event data allows us to evaluate statements like: Trump is eroding democracy faster than we’ve seen in other countries. We can look, for example, at what known backsliding regimes did in their first year in office. In Poland, for example, the ruling party completely overhauled the education system and passed legislation that gave the president increased influence over court appointments. In Hungary, media became more state-controlled and restricted, 10% of judges were forced into early retirement and replaced with loyalists, and the executive was given new powers to fire or demote judges as well as reassign cases. While we have similarly witnessed reductions in judicial independence and attacks on media freedom in the US, they are not as substantial in scope or permanence as some of these actions in the first years of backsliding in Poland and Hungary.
We can also evaluate how common the types of actions we’re seeing in the US are across both more and less consolidated democracies. Purging uncooperative elites, for example, is not restricted to backsliders, but rather something we have seen in countries like Canada and Japan. By contrast, the militarization of civilian governance is more worrisome: we usually only see this in countries with far lower democracy scores than our own.