COLL: DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS

Beginning in the mid-1970s a democratic wave swept the globe. Before it began there were more than twice as many dictatorships as democracies in existence. By the wave’s highpoint around 2008, that relationship had flipped and the number of democracies had reached an all-time high. Moreover, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90, democracy faced no ideological competitors for the first time since the modern struggle for democracy began in 1789 with the French Revolution. Francis Fukuyama’s concept of the “end of history”— the world had reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”—captured the euphoric, even triumphalist zeitgeist of the era. Today, of course, this euphoria and triumphalism has vanished, replaced by dramatic democratic backsliding and profound pessimism about democracy’s future. By 2024 the world had fewer democracies than autocracies for the first time in over 20 years and 45 countries were “autocratizing”: moving away from democracy and towards authoritarianism. This autocratic undertow has not only claimed many new democracies; older, established democracies long considered consolidated and secure have experienced significant problems as well. This colloquium will exam the literature on democratic consolidation and backsliding, providing students with an overview of the most important theories about what makes democracy work—or not. It will also focus on several crucial and illustrative cases of backsliding in the contemporary era, in order to better understand what is distinctive about the nature and causes of democratic decay in the twenty-first century.